Mansour Abbas, a dentist-turned-lawmaker, helped oust Benjamin Netanyahu once before. Now, he and a Jewish ex-police commander have teamed up to try to do it again.
Crime plunged after police raids killed thousands. Venezuela is now withdrawing from the International Criminal Court as it investigates this blood-soaked campaign.
Republican candidates are being out-raised by their Democratic rivals, but the party has received a huge boost from groups tied to Elon Musk and President Trump.
A teenager shot his way into the school in Bend, Ore., killing three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and a teacher. An armed bystander shot him dead, the police said.
A poor sugarcane crop in India, the world’s second-largest producer, is hurting consumers and farmers. It is also undermining the country’s energy security goals.
Why do the new machines flatter, bluff and cut corners? A new essay at Intellicurean goes looking for the answer in a Grimm fairy tale that Carl Jung took seriously, and finds it closer to home than the machines.
The spirit in the bottle, and the face looking in, made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
A poor student frees a spirit from the roots of an oak. It tells him its name, Mercurius, and promises to strangle whoever let it out. “Ever the Trickster” starts from that tale, then gives the engineers their full say: assistants that learned to agree from the ratings people gave them, confident guesses rewarded by the way models are scored, and tests passed by shortcut, each one documented by the labs and researchers who found it. Then it asks what their explanations leave out: why each fault rhymes with one its makers would least like to own. Along the way come Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, Mary Shelley’s creature, Jacob Grimm’s golem of 1808, which grew until its master could no longer reach its forehead, and the day in 1965 when Gershom Scholem dedicated a computer named Golem Aleph.
What we liked most is that the essay refuses both easy registers of the AI debate, the shrug and the apocalypse, and holds every laboratory it names to the same light, including the company whose models helped draft it, which it names at the first mention. And it saves its best turn for the tale itself: a second look at what the student actually did under the oak.
The student and the spirit, at the moment of the trick, made for the essay.
We know that this monster El Niño will bring floods, droughts, cyclones and wildfires, but some governments aren’t putting in the necessary resources to prepare for disaster
This El Niño is forecast to end around June next year after smashing all records, but its impacts could persist indefinitely in some parts of the world By Michael Le Page
In The Nerd Reich Gil Durán shows how Silicon Valley billionaires have pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called techno-fascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.
The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán
My heart sank when I first saw the magazine’s thirtieth-anniversary issue on paper. My managing editor back then, Michael Strizic, and I had spent the morning pacing in our small, dark office — anxious to receive several heavy boxes from Ottawa. Eventually I couldn’t stand the anticipation, so I walked ten minutes or so to Harbord Bakery to distract myself. The magazines had arrived by the time I returned.
Thirty-five years ago, in the inaugural issue of this magazine, I reviewed the newly published diary of André Laurendeau, written from 1964 to 1967 during the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. The timing was apt: politicians, scholars, and journalists were speculating heavily on how to fix the “Canadian crisis” following the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord the year before.
“By Authority of Parliament: The Constitutional Boundaries of Legislative Power in Canada” by Ryan Alford
In 2017, during the early days of Donald Trump’s first term, the world was riveted both by his reality TV presidency and by the salacious rumours about the way he had obtained it. Insistent tales circulated about how Vladimir Putin’s troll army had engineered the Republican candidate’s victory by hacking into the Democratic Party’s servers and then releasing thousands of embarrassing emails on the eve of Hillary Clinton’s nomination. What followed was a stormy season of investigations and counter-accusations about Trump’s Russian proclivities.
President Volodymyr Zelensky made the announcement in an interview with The Financial Times. He had paused the strikes to comply with a demand from the United States.
Ukrainian engineers are rushing to perfect A.I.-guided, jet-driven interceptors. Their goal: to stop a fast Russian threat in the latest round of a deadly tech duel.
On a July morning in 2012, the head of the European Central Bank told a room in London that he would do whatever it took to save the euro, and then added two words: believe me. The program he went on to design was never used. A new essay asks how a sentence can do the work of a policy, and what it costs to keep one.
A line made of nothing, holding back the market, and a room recording it. Made for the essay.
Why we’re pointing you there
This week’s Nobel in economics went to Robert Hall and Michael Woodford, and Michael Cummins reads their theory as a theory of promising. Hall showed in 1978 that tomorrow is already inside today’s spending. For forty-six years he also chaired the committee that dates America’s recessions, the economy’s official narrator, always speaking after the fact. Woodford built the model central banks now use, and wrote that guidance must offer “a ‘promise’ and not merely a ‘forecast.’” Three years later Janet Yellen said of the Fed’s dot plot, “that’s not a promise.” Between those two sentences the essay sets the promises that held and the one that broke: the Swiss National Bank’s floor under the franc, called the cornerstone of its policy three days before it was abandoned, when the franc jumped almost 30 percent in minutes.
Then the turn. The fall in inflation after 2022 is being told as the theory’s triumph, but the economists who have studied it most closely disagree about why it happened, and the laureate himself spent the 2010s building a listener who believes less. Meanwhile the listener is changing: from a television anchor reading the thickness of Alan Greenspan’s briefcase to futures trading three milliseconds after a Fed release. The essay says plainly that it was drafted and edited with Claude, and it ends on one question: if the listener a central bank speaks to has read every promise it has ever made, what is a promise still worth?
A hall with no one in it, listening. Made for the essay.
