The Case of Courage
No quality has ever so much addled the brains
and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.
It means a strong desire to live taking the form of
a readiness to die.
‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’
is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes.
It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers.
It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book.
This paradox is the whole principle of courage;
even of quite earthly or brutal courage.
A man cut off by the sea may save his life
if he will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by
continually stepping within an inch of it.
A soldier surrounded by enemies,
if he is to cut his way out, needs to
combine a strong desire for living with a
strange carelessness about dying.
He must not merely cling to life, for then
he will be a coward, and will not escape.
He must not merely wait for death, for then
he will be a suicide, and will not escape.
He must seek his life in a spirit of furious
indifference to it; he must desire life
like water and yet drink death like wine.
by G.K. Chesterson
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The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to trigger a “Cambrian explosion” of new kinds of personhood. This paper proposes a pragmatic framework for navigating this diversification by treating personhood not as a metaphysical property to be discovered, but as a flexible bundle of obligations (rights and responsibilities) that societies confer upon entities for a variety of reasons, especially to solve concrete governance problems. We argue that this traditional bundle can be unbundled, creating bespoke solutions for different contexts. This will allow for the creation of practical tools—such as facilitating AI contracting by creating a target “individual” that can be sanctioned—without needing to resolve intractable debates about an AI’s consciousness or rationality. We explore how individuals fit in to social roles and discuss the use of decentralized digital identity technology, examining both ‘personhood as a problem’, where design choices can create “dark patterns” that exploit human social heuristics, and ‘personhood as a solution’, where conferring a bundle of obligations is necessary to ensure accountability or prevent conflict. By rejecting foundationalist quests for a single, essential definition of personhood, this paper offers a more pragmatic and flexible way to think about integrating AI agents into our society.
For Susan Sawyer, a physician-researcher specializing in adolescent health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, the start of the social-media ban this week meant entering the next phase of her research. Over the past two months, Sawyer and her colleagues interviewed 177 teenagers aged 13–16 about their social-media use, screen time and mental health before the ban came into effect. She and her colleagues plan to survey the teenagers again in six months, to see whether the ban has affected their use of the platforms or their mental health. The researchers will also survey the participants’ parents about problematic Internet and social-media use by their children.
I first encountered Zheng Xiaoqiong’s writing in 
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Peck focuses on what Orwell got brilliantly right – about fascism, communism, imperialism, nationalism, the abuses of new technology and the lies people tell themselves without necessarily realising. But even when Orwell was proved wrong, which was often, he was wrong in a sincere and interesting way. To quote his disclaimer in Homage to Catalonia, ‘I warn everyone against my bias, and I warn everyone against my mistakes. Still, I have done my best to be honest.’
After the long, torturous summers that bake northern India in 40-degree Celsius (104 degree Fahrenheit) heat, winter should be welcomed as a reprieve. Instead, it is our season of sadness. The annual pollution emergency faced by hundreds of millions of Indians is upon us — three months of physical and emotional suffocation. I live in Delhi, one of the 
I chose the green door ninety-three days ago. At the time, it seemed obviously correct. Not even a close call. The red door offered two billion dollars immediately—a sum so large it would solve every material problem I’d ever face, fund any project I could imagine, and still leave enough to give away amounts that would meaningfully change thousands of lives. But two billion is a number. It has a fixed relationship to the economy, to the things money can buy, to the world. The green door offered one dollar that doubles every day. I remember standing there, doing the mental math. Day 30: about a billion dollars. Day 40: over a trillion. Day 50: a quadrillion. The red door would be surpassed before the first month ended, and after that, the gap would grow incomprehensibly fast. Choosing the red door would be like choosing a ham sandwich over a genie’s lamp because you were hungry right now. So I walked through the green door. The first few weeks were unremarkable.
On today’s show, Wesley reveals his favorite film performances of the year — but his list is not an ordinary best-of list. He zeroes in on the specific details that make a performance great. Like, who did the best acting in a helmet this year? Who were the most convincing on-screen best friends? And who refused to play it safe? Find out in our first annual Cannonball Great Performers special.
“Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem … cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty.” So wrote Langston Hughes in his landmark 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Today, Paul Robeson—singer, actor, athlete, lawyer, antiracism icon—needs no introduction. But who was Rudolph Fisher?
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Thomas Manning arrived in Lhasa in 1811, having walked for months across the Himalayas from Calcutta, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim and accompanied only by a single Chinese servant, with whom he spoke in Latin. He was the first Englishman to enter the city, the only one to do so in the entire nineteenth century, and the first European to meet the Dalai Lama, then still a child.