Jeremy Shapiro at The Ideas Letter:
Artificial intelligence has rapidly become a central arena of geopolitical competition. The United States government frames AI as a strategic asset on par with energy or defense and seeks to press its apparent lead in developing the technology. The European Union lags in platform power but seeks influence over AI through regulation, labor protections, and rule-setting. China is racing to catch up and to deploy AI at scale, combining heavy state investment with administrative control and surveillance.
Each of these rivals fears falling behind. Losing the AI race is widely understood to mean slower growth, military disadvantage, technological dependence, and diminished global influence. As a result, governments are pouring money into chips, data centers, and national AI champions, while tightening export controls and treating compute capacity as a strategic resource. But this familiar race narrative obscures a deeper danger. AI is not just another general-purpose technology. It is a force capable of reshaping the very meaning of work, income, and social status. The states that lose control of these social effects may find that technological leadership offers little geopolitical advantage.
History suggests that societies unable to absorb disruptive economic change become politically volatile, strategically erratic, and ultimately weaker competitors. The central question, then, is not only who builds the most powerful AI systems, but who can integrate them into society without triggering a societal backlash or an institutional breakdown.
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Hidden inside every swipe, search, and AI prompt is a fingernail-sized slab of silicon — etched with billions of switches — built in $20 billion factories using machines so precise they border on science fiction. And because only a handful of companies (and a few chokepoint countries) can make the most advanced chips, the semiconductor supply chain has become the real front line of the AI race and U.S.–China competition.
Johns Hopkins is launching its 150th anniversary celebration. When it was founded in 1876, American universities were still mostly finishing schools for children of the nation’s elite. Hopkins introduced the modern research university to the US, importing the model from Germany, helping reshape American higher education in its image.
The rules of Japan’s national sport are relatively straightforward: two rikishi—literally, “strong men”—face each other near the center of the ring, crouched on their haunches, like plus-size sprinters waiting to explode out of the starting block. They will often squat and then rise to stamp their feet or throw salt on the ground. When the referee signals the start of the match, they rush toward each other and collide with the same force that a person might absorb after falling from a height of two or three stories. From their fleshy collision, one man tends to emerge with the advantage of surer footing or a firmer grip on his opponent’s loincloth, known as a mawashi, which wrestlers can use to lift and toss each other around the ring. Whoever can force his adversary from the ring or get any part of his body other than the soles of his feet to touch the ground is the winner.
How does one start Infinite Jest? In the year 2026, thirty years after its initial release, the book is a distinctive cultural object. It has been memed to oblivion, its author eulogized and criticized and transformed into an enormous posthumous celebrity. Infinite Jest has a reputation for being brilliant, transcendent, transformative, genius. But it’s also thought to be tricky, long, confusing, pretentious, unfashionably male, and embarrassing to read on the subway. “There’s that horrible joke: ‘If you go to a guy’s house and he has a copy of Infinite Jest, don’t fuck him,’ ” Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson, told me. “I profoundly disagree with that,” she added, laughing. To the contrary, she said, she finds the book quite “seductive.”
Most people recognise the experience. A solemn setting. Absolute 
Researchers at Microsoft have created a data-storage system that can remain readable for at least 10,000 years — and probably much longer.
It is five years since I was exiled. My own erasure must be underway. Though for a long time I resisted settling in the US, I now live in New York. If I’m ever able to return to Cárdenas, it will surely be as an intruder in my own town; another ambassador from a foreign society. While the government or the military banish you deliberately, ordinary people can do the same through indifference – a form of cruelty that can’t be blamed on anyone in particular because, in truth, nobody wills it.
You don’t need a degree in biology to see that invasive species occupy a peculiar moral position: they are the one part of nature we are told not to love. As a philosopher of science, my ears prick up whenever I notice moral complexities emerging among scientists. It makes me wonder: when it comes to invasive species, is the science shaping our moral attitudes or are those attitudes shaping the work of ecologists and conservationists?
Many filmmakers, going back to some of the earliest experiments with the moving picture, have depicted the intensity of the gazes fixed on their own medium. One thinks of Dziga Vertov’s interwar metacinema, or even a vaudeville-steeped silent classic like D. W. Griffith’s Those Awful Hats (1909). It was something they thought about a lot, early cinematographers—the mesmeric power of their own images. And so it was a very alluring topic to explore.