by Malcolm Murray

Just came back from a trip to China, my first in a decade and my first focused specifically on AI risk. Covering Beijing as well as Shanghai, conferences as well as university events, this was a highly illuminating trip from several perspectives. China has continued to develop extremely quickly since my last visit and has grown even more fascinatingly different from Western countries.

The most interesting takeaway, however, was how jagged China’s modernization is. In some ways, China is ahead of the West, while in others, it lags significantly behind. This can be seen in ways big and small, in different contexts. The trains are faster than in the West, but the toilets are squat-only. Everything is done on a few key apps on your phone, but wi-fi is spotty. The malls and airports are gleaming, while most restaurants are hole-in-the-wall. The conferences are full of robots, but the conference apps themselves are glitchy and frequently break down. The hotels have electronic toilets, but water still leaks in when it rains. The streets are full of electric vehicles from a plethora of local brands, but most people get around on dinky bicycles. The hotel’s cleaning robots take the elevator independently, but the coffee machine doesn’t work. Stores manned by robots are shiny and efficient, while the roads are still swept by men with brooms with a design last updated in the 18th century. The list goes on; the examples are endless.

Now, some of these are of course the result of deliberate choices. Provinces have been incentivized to set up electric car manufacturers which has pushed the cost down and created a huge supply of cheap electric cars. All countries of course prioritize spending on its airports as a key country branding exercise.

Other paradoxes, however, seem like they might be the result of ongoing friction and barriers. It is much easier to insert a cleaning robot and optimize for a small area where it can operate without hiccups, than to ensure every appliance in a hotel works well. Apps used by almost a billion people can afford to streamline the experience inside the app, but that does not mean that there are incentives for every venue to offer decent wi-fi.

It seems therefore that Beijing and Shanghai might offer a compelling vision of what extreme modernization coupled with day-to-day real world friction could look like. This could be similar to the world that we will inhabit in the rest of the world in a few years, as continued rapid AI evolution leads to unprecedented progress in some areas, while other areas remain stubbornly stuck in the 20th century, full of friction preventing progress. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

About thirty years ago my wife and I rented a car in London. The experience is seared into my memory forever. The steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car, and I was expected to drive on the wrong side of the road. It took all my concentration, but I was able to manage, more or less, until we came to a roundabout. I had never seen a roundabout before. Didn’t know what it was.

There was no GPS in those days. We were trying to follow a paper map. And we weren’t on some sleepy country road. There were several lanes involved, and we were moving at a pretty good clip. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t know what I was doing. All my driving instincts were giving me bad information. And people were honking at me. I don’t know how many times we went around that thing before we finally got off.

Over the next few days, I learned to get in the car on the correct side, but it wasn’t easy. I had to consciously override twenty-five years of experience. At first, I automatically went to the usual side. Open the door. No steering wheel. Ah yes, we’re in England. The steering wheel is on the other side. Go to the other side. In the next phase, I was able to remember before I opened the door. I was able to say to myself, “Wait, stop, you’re about to go to the wrong side. You’re in England. They get in on the other side. Go to the other side.”

Then came the moment I want to talk about. I’m walking to the car with the key in my hand. I remember that I’m not supposed to get in on the usual side. I’m supposed to get in on the wrong side. But now I don’t remember which side is the wrong one. Both sides feel wrong. That moment.

I get a similar feeling writing these columns. Sometimes I get to a who/whom decision and they both feel wrong. “Who” feels ignorant and “whom” feels pedantic. Same thing with the subjunctive case. If I were to use the subjunctive, it reads fussy. And if I was not, it sounds illiterate.

Time for one of my favorite jokes. This guy is on the Harvard campus. He stops a tweedy-looking fellow and says, “Excuse me, can you tell me where the library is at?” Tweedy says, “Here at Harvard we don’t end a sentence with a preposition. Would you like to try that again?” The guy says, “Sure. Can you tell me where the library is at, asshole?”

But what I really want to talk about here is politics. And what I want to say is that we seem to be stuck at a moment when all the possible ways forward seem wrong. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I was going to write about a recent study [1] on raccoons, where the adaptable little critters were given puzzle boxes to solve in order to access food rewards. On each box there were three small doors with their own distinct mechanisms, each requiring a different kind of manipulation to open. What made this study notable was that, unlike previous experiments where solved puzzles were locked out or removed to focus on new puzzles, the experimenters left the previously solved puzzles accessible to the raccoons in subsequent challenges. The raccoons were able to manipulate mechanisms that they had previously figured out, in addition to the new challenges, although they received no additional food rewards for their extra work. The upshot of the results is that the raccoons displayed an intrinsic motivation to mess around with latches, locks and doors, even when no obvious extrinsic reward was to be had. This will surprise nobody who has tried to prevent raccoons from getting into their property. There is a straightforward adaptationist explanation for this: if the animals find it psychologically rewarding to muck about with things for the fun of it, they are more likely to acquire new information and behaviours that could be useful later. Much like how the intrinsically rewarding experience of sex makes reproduction more likely.

That’s about all I have to say about the study itself, besides a slight expression of surprise that nobody had tried this before, but that’s quite common in experimental science. It’s all too easy for bystanders like me to claim that something should have been obvious, after the fact. Still, a promising avenue for future experiments to probe the exploratory and recreational side of animal problem-solving. As someone who watches a lot of mechanical engineering nerdery, much of which is more squarely in the category of “play” than necessity, it is intriguing to think that this drive to idly faff about with the physical environment is shared across the wider animal kingdom. The hedonic value of repeating known solutions is interesting, too. Read more »

by Paweł Skała-Piękoś

For a long time, fluent, competent form was a social marker of class. Whoever could write in the dominant language, summarise difficult texts, sound academic, edit their own thought, and move through institutional codes started higher up: not always because they understood more, but because they had a better command of the format in which understanding is recognised.

AI does not erase this difference or abolish hierarchy. It does something narrower and more unsettling: it lowers the price of one of hierarchy’s most important currencies. When fluent form becomes cheap, hierarchy does not disappear; it reprices the gate. The old title loses power, but the need for a title remains; the coat of arms stops deciding, so other things take its place: the diploma, the address, the way one speaks, reach, finally access to an AI model. Modernity likes to tell itself a myth of egalitarianism, dangerous precisely because it rests on real premises, and worth distrusting for the same reason: taken to the end, it cannibalises itself.

So the question is not whether the technological revolution already underway will abolish hierarchy. It will not. The mere possibility that AI infrastructure may concentrate around a few companies punctures the idealisation. The question is different: what will the new currency of rank be, and will it better recognise ability, responsibility, and work, or give old advantages a new language?

Let me clear the ground first, or everything that follows sounds like a cheap hymn to equality. A difference between people is not yet an injustice, and not every hierarchy is automatically an evil. If the one standing higher is a politician genuinely set on protecting the weaker, then power does not undermine what they do; it lets them shield people who would otherwise be defenceless. Rank can be an instrument of function. The trouble begins where function becomes an instrument of rank. Under its influence, the same person changes their aims: instead of protecting the weaker, they protect their own position, using those they represent as the excuse. Only when function loses out to rank does the moment arrive for a moral indictment. Read more »

This sculpture is Powodzianka—roughly, “The Flood Woman”—by the Wrocław sculptor Stanisław Wysocki. It stands on the University Bridge over the Oder and was unveiled in 1998, on the first anniversary of Wrocław’s catastrophic July 1997 flood, commonly called Poland’s “Flood of the Millennium.” The woman represents the many ordinary residents, particularly students and volunteers, who worked desperately to protect the city. During the flood, people formed human chains and carried books, manuscripts and other valuable materials from the endangered lower floors of the University Library to higher ground. The sun just happened to be hitting her nicely as I walked by.

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

Aaron, an old friend from high school, was a lurker on social media for fourteen years. He never liked or commented on anyone’s posts. He was never one to share news articles or life updates. He didn’t tag himself in vacation photos or let his friends know how his wife and children were doing. In person, though, it was clear that he always knew what everyone was up to, so we knew he was present online, quietly paying attention to those of us who find it difficult to resist posting what we had for breakfast in the morning. Some time ago, in a chance encounter with a mutual acquaintance, I learned that Aaron had died. Not recently. Four years ago. His family was about as keen on online life as Aaron had been, so when he died, they handled it privately and tastefully.

Though he had been gone for years, I felt I had just lost him. All those years I had wished him a happy birthday, I assumed he felt remembered, even if he wasn’t the type to engage. People tagged him in nostalgic posts from the past. It felt like he was still in my life. It seemed that my relationship with him extended past his relationship with me; I had four years of shallow online friendship that he didn’t have.

Our lives have more parts than they once did. We constantly leave behind digital pieces of ourselves; the virtual equivalent of shedding hair or skin cells. Somewhere out there, there is a MySpace account that proves that I was alive, kicking, and making music in 2004. I have an inbox full of Discord messages that I’ll never read after the app finished serving the singular purpose of keeping me in touch with a group of students for an activity in 2022. I’ve abandoned all of these pieces of me, and I couldn’t collect them if I tried.

Our best theories of personal identity and of the nature of the self were all crafted before the onset of digital strangeness. What it is to be who one is may have fundamentally shifted. So, too, might what it means to live and die. Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

One of the more potentially devastating psychological scars the Trump regime has foisted on all of us, I would submit, consists of its singular ability to separate effects and causes in time. This regime seems uncannily capable of postponing the seemingly clear, and nearly always disastrous, effects of its policies and interventions from inceptions often accompanied by the most crass, vulgar, tasteless, or blatantly offensive introduction to the public. There is a concept employed in philosophy (full disclosure: I was an Althusserian in my youth), history and sociology, and which originated in Freudian psychoanalysis, called overdetermination, which refers to effects which are determined by many causes operating simultaneously, each of which is sufficient to cause the phenomenon in question alone. It is almost like the Trump regime has shown itself able to invert this scheme: now occurrences which seem clearly to follow rather directly upon one or a few conditions are very delayed, or never come about at all. It results in a kind of effective resistance to what should be most obvious.

I am writing these lines on Sunday, July the 19th, 2026, after yet another week involving dire geopolitical gyrations (we have effectively gone from a state of questionable but real cease-fire in the war against Iran to a clear resumption of hostilities, and may, in fact be on the verge of invasion or occupation of Iranian territory), ominous financial and economic ructions (stock markets, led by declining technology–especially silicon chip producers–shares may be beginning another sharp downward reversal), the wild proliferation of scandals the like of which would almost certainly result in the certain downfall of any other administration, two more execution-like murders by ICE officers on the streets of American cities, the inception of a program to persecute leftist political organizations as nothing short of collections of terrorists, yet another attempt to weaken election protections, and, undoubtedly, a whole host of other politically, morally or legally dubious initiatives I simply can’t keep up with or even remember. In this piece I will focus on the Iran situation and the economic conjuncture, leaving aside relative trivialities like a possible–completely unprovoked and illegal–military assault on Cuba that is being considered by the regime now, or Trump’s ungrammatical, childish and overall insane speech to the nation on Thursday the 16th.

The war in Iran, as it stands now, has clearly been won by Iran. None of the publicized objectives given by the Trump administration for going to war–end of Iran’s nuclear program, destruction of its ballistic missile store,  support for regional allies and full opening of the Strait of Hormuz–was achieved even in the Memorandum of Understanding back in June, and all remain unachieved now. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Richard Farr

To say that bureaucracies perpetuate and expand their power without limit is not to criticise them; it is only to state an indelible fact about human institutions, and explain why vigilance about anything calling itself “official” is the price of liberty. People at all points on the political spectrum can agree, using different examples no doubt, that the state itself is the ultimate example of the problem, and that a further problem is the state’s inclination to treat our vigilance not as a virtue but as a threat to be controlled. But the UK’s new Hillsborough Law is a reason for all of us to celebrate — a case study in how determined citizens, horribly wronged by deceitful officials, can fight back. Or to put it a better way: how they can come to the state’s aid by helping it recover from its own corruption.

But let’s talk about treason for a moment. The idea of treason — that it’s an especially  heinous crime for those under the state’s command to undermine the state itself — reaches back to antiquity. For most of our history it existed in the context of Divine Right, a brilliant piece of propaganda that dominated our thinking about power from its origin in the Sumerian King List (2000 BCE) to James I’s The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598). According to Divine Right, an attack on the crown is nothing less than a proxy attack on God, because the crown is God’s legitimate representative. Once you accept that, it seems feeble at best if not treasonous in itself to express qualms about a little disemboweling. 

After the French Revolution and American Revolution, and perhaps especially after Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, it was easy to see this for the eons-long scam that it was (and in too many places still is). We are beneficiaries of a better idea: “consent of the governed” means the state can demand only our allegiance to the sovereign that is law. We accept that some forms of government are better than no government, and that government without law is impossible; this is why, for us, the special crime of treason is less interesting than a broader category that encompasses it: undermining the rule of law.  Read more »

Sughra Raza. Sunset. Vermont, July 15, 2026.

Digital photograph.

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by John Ambrosio

While it is a global phenomenon, people in the U.S., Europe, and other liberal democracies are living in the midst of a polycrisis, in a confluence of the intersecting and overlapping crises of rising authoritarianism and far-right populism, worsening climate and ecological disaster, the increasing likelihood of nuclear war, and the rapid development of unregulated generative A.I. Given this, how can people live with the unbearable knowledge of these threats, and with the overwhelming fear, uncertainty, and insecurity it necessarily produces?

Authoritarianism and neofascism are on the rise in liberal democracies around the world, propelled by mass migration, extreme wealth and income inequality, economic precarity, political polarization, and rapid cultural and demographic change.

The climate and ecological crisis is fueled by increasing global carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, the overexploitation of natural resources, and rapid biodiversity loss. The planet will likely exceed an average annual temperature of 1.5C above preindustrial times in a few years, which scientists have repeatedly warned will significantly worsen the already severe floods, droughts, wildfires, and extreme heat linked to global warming and may trigger feedback loops and breach tipping points that could lead to uncontrolled global warming.

According to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has been set at 85 seconds to midnight, the likelihood of nuclear war has never been greater than today. Some of the reasons for this include the Russia-Ukraine war; the conflict between India and Pakistan; the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran; North Korea and China increasing their nuclear arsenals; the expiration of nuclear arms control agreements between the U.S. and Russia; U.S. plans for a new missile defense system; the increase in global average temperature and deadly weather events fueled by climate change; and the increasing sophistication of generative A.I. to produce new weapons and disinformation campaigns. To this we might add the breakdown of the post-war international order. Read more »

by David Hoyt

When I set out to write this essay on the ecological aesthetic of a loose group of nineteenth-century French painters associated with the village of Barbizon, I did not anticipate that it would coincide with the largest wildfire to strike northern France in over a century. The fire, in the state forest of Fontainebleau which lies not forty miles from Paris, follows on a record-breaking heat wave. This summer’s heat is itself the latest in a succession of extreme heat events over the last few years, together with several years of severe drought. Other fires have erupted in the area, and several further to the south.

French forests are estimated to absorb ten percent of the nation’s annual CO2 emissions, but this ecological service is at risk of destabilizing in the wake of repeated drought and its attendant harms, such as arboreal diseases contracted by weakened trees. With such droughts becoming increasingly common in France as elsewhere in Europe, less water is available for tree growth, and less carbon is thus absorbed from the atmosphere. The impact of global warming can thus reduce a forest’s ability to mitigate global warming over time.

Of course, fire is a natural disturbance in temperate forests, especially oak forests such as the one at Fontainebleau. To look at Barbizon paintings of the woods from the 1830’s or 1840’s, one can discern a relative openness in the understory, together with a broad, expansive habit among the old oaks. It was the latter quality that so intrigued painterly devotees of the area, and which also indicates a long history of periodic burning. Oaks co-evolved with a regime of fire, which made them fire-resistant while the saplings of competing species were less so. Where fire is suppressed and a fast-growing understory is allowed to grow, slow-growing oaks are typically crowded out, and are unable to achieve the spectacularly wide, round form that distinguishes them. Read more »

by Swapna Liddle

What makes a city? What gives a place its distinct character? I think of the slogan ‘dilwalon ki dilli’ – the supremely banal play on words. It works in the context of Delhi only because of a happy conjunction of the word dil, or heart, with the Hindi word for the city – ‘Dilli’. It works also because it simultaneously tells us everything and nothing. Okay, people in Delhi have hearts; though this might be disputed by many who live precarious lives in this city, the marginalized, the victims of the violence the state and citizens alike often perpetrate on them. In any event, do people in other cities not have large hearts? Still, it is a catchphrase that makes those of us who live in the city feel good about ourselves. As Delhi’s most famous poet would have said, “dil ke khush rakhne ko Ghalib yeh khayal achchha hai” – it is a thought that keeps us happy.

Among such cliches about cities, Ananya Vajpeyi’s Place comes not so much as a breath of fresh air (another banality that I might myself have been tempted to use at another time!), but a rather stronger wind that carries away not just cobwebs, but also the superficial structures through which we think. An apt metaphor for the latter would be the many large, obtrusive, signs that sprouted around many Delhi neighbourhoods some time ago – ‘I ♥️ –––‘. Civic pride reduced to garish ‘selfie points’ in the absence of any real improvement in infrastructure and any transformation in the everyday lives of the people who live there. Another in a series of sarkari ‘beautification’ projects that are supremely ugly.

Clearing away the superficialities, Ananya shows us some familiar cities through a lens that is deeply personal and yet reaches into the essence of the place. Place, subtitled ‘intimate encounters with cities’ reminds us that the cities we inhabit are about the people we meet, the particular streets we walk in, the literature we read, and our own place within these large and diverse agglomerations of people and experiences. New York, Bangalore, Istanbul, Pune, Venice, Santiniketan, Chennai, Amsterdam, Mumbai, Varanasi, and Delhi, are places that figure in Ananya’s narrative. Each, inhabited and experienced at different points of times – in the author’s lifetime, but also at specific historical moments for that city and the world. Read more »

I’ve looked at Hair from Both Sides Now

I once had hair dark-brown and cumulous
Now more like cirrus-wisps, things are getting serious:
gone from dark and voluminous
it’ll soon be dissapearious

As I contemplate my pate
I’m thinking life’s mysterious
As I contemplate my fate
I’m thinking life is spurious

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by Eric Feigenbaum

In a sense, you could say Sir Stamford Raffles not only came up with the idea for Singapore, but also for Hong Kong. In the early 19^th Century, Raffles – the imperial strategist tasked with safeguarding British passage to and from China – realized the best way to fulfill his responsibilities was to eliminate the Dutch as a commercial and military rival along the passage from India to Malaysia.

During initial scouting missions, Raffles’ eye turned to Singapore as an ideal naval and commercial port, not only along the route from British India to Imperial China, but at a crossroads of international trade. In 1821, Raffles – with the persuasion of thinly veiled threats – signed a treaty with Malay leaders Sultan Hussein Shah and Temenggong Abdul Rahman giving a practically uninhabited Singapore island to the British Empire.

Taking the unprecedented step of making Singapore an Open Port – without tariffs or taxation – was the stroke of brilliance that truly launched the new colony and usurped the Dutch port of Malacca.

Raffles wasn’t personally involved in the British acquisition of Hong Kong Island following the First Opium War in 1841, but the Empire was taking the logical next step from the new playbook he introduced. A second island-based Crown Colony in the Far East secured Britain’s dominance not only over trade with China but over any other Western naval power with presence in Asia.

From that point, many observers loved to play “A Tale Of Two British Colonies” – usually drawing many parallels between Hong Kong and Singapore. At first glance, it seems obvious – two islands with predominantly if not exclusively Chinese populations, open ports, centers of both trade and naval power, free-market capitalism and most significantly, an organic synthesis of Eastern and Western cultures. Read more »