Digger, Alejandro Iñárritu’s $125 million satire, opened October 2 with Tom Cruise as an oil tycoon whose Arctic drilling sets off a planetary catastrophe. In UnHerd, the film historian David Thomson, author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, calls it a flawed masterpiece and does not flinch from the flaws. The fable is “striking yet shallow.” Supporting characters are “introduced but not adequately explored.” Cruise, he writes, “is so terrified of being boring he cannot stoop to stillness or quiet.”
And yet. Thomson sees Cruise’s paunchy, manic Digger as a portrait of an age in which “the idiotic has become axiomatic,” a domineering, foolish authority convinced that power justifies whatever it wants. Beneath the performance is a look he finds more frightening than any horror film: “A look of gray ice pervades the movie; primary colors have been eliminated.” “There is no human touch any longer.”
A film about the end of the world, in other words, that looks the way the end of the world would look.
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THE ANSWER
Most American critics saw a different movie. At RogerEbert.com, Robert Daniels writes that “Digger chokes on its own ambitions, and very few of the picture’s participants emerge still breathing.” The film, he argues, never commits to its own high concept, and its dialogue preaches: “Every line explicitly explains the vapid evil espoused by craven industrialists against our fragile environment.”
William Bibbiani of TheWrap goes after the politics. A satire of billionaires that never threatens one is just flattery for the audience: “We are powerless to stop them, but we do get to point and giggle.” Of Cruise: he “hasn’t done this much caps-locked ‘ACTING’ in many years.”
On this reading, Digger is the thing it mocks: an expensive spectacle of the apocalypse that lets everyone go home feeling superior to it.
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THE INTELLITAKE
Read closely and the critics agree on every fact. The script is thin. Cruise is loud. The satire draws no blood. The look is extraordinary. The quarrel is over what a film is for. Daniels and Bibbiani grade Digger as an argument, and as an argument it fails: nobody leaves the theater changed about oil or billionaires. Thomson grades it as an artifact, something a future might dig up to learn what we looked like, and as an artifact it may be priceless.
Thomson’s tell is his title. He calls it the masterpiece “we deserve.” A culture that can only process its own ending as a $125 million entertainment starring Tom Cruise has made a film that is exactly that, and the film’s inability to be anything better is the most honest thing in it. The critics who wanted it to be smarter were asking the mirror to improve the face.
So: not a masterpiece, by the ordinary standard that a masterpiece knows what it is doing. But Thomson has the longer view, and he may be right that films of this scale and this nerve are ending. If so, Digger is less the last great film than the last great gesture, a studio spending a fortune to make a picture of the world with no human touch left in it. That is worth seeing, if only once.
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
Can a work of art about our stupidity be anything other than stupid, and would we recognize it if it were?
This fall, China made Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre compulsory reading for 14- and 15-year-olds across the country. Writing in UnHerd, the novelist Philip Hensher notes the official reasoning, as reported in the Party-backed press: “the innocent, budding stage of first love is a crucial period for shaping a well-rounded personality.”
Hensher thinks Beijing has assigned more than a love story. Jane is the orphan who tells her cruel aunt that “the very thought of you makes me sick,” and she grows into a woman who answers to her own conscience rather than to the man with power over her. Those are dangerous lessons, he suggests, to hand every teenager in a country that ranks 178th of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index.
His conclusion is hopeful. A state that assigns a book about speaking the truth may be teaching it.
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THE ANSWER
The reporting tells a different story. China has had Jane Eyre for a century. A Chinese translation appeared in 1925, and a 1979 British film adaptation played in Chinese theaters as the country reopened after the Cultural Revolution (New York Times). Generations have read it, and the system has stood.
The choice also looks deliberate. Beijing Daily pitched the novel as a counterweight to social media’s “superficial notions about appearance and wealth” (CNN). UC San Diego scholar Ping Zhu told the Times that Jane is “an independent woman, but she’s not too outrageous in her challenge of patriarchal power.” She ends the book married and a mother, which fits a government urging young people to start families.
On this view, Beijing didn’t assign a rebel by accident. It chose a heroine whose independence ends in a home.
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THE INTELLITAKE
Both sides are reading the same novel and stopping at different chapters. Beijing assigned Jane Eyre for its ending: the marriage, the home, love that money can’t buy. Hensher is betting on its beginning: the child who talks back and the young woman who walks away from Thornfield with nothing rather than betray herself.
Notice what the two arguments share. Each assumes a book does what its readers are told it does. A ministry can set the exam question, but not the moment a 15-year-old reaches Jane’s declaration, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.” A novel doesn’t topple a government. It builds an inner life, and inner lives are the one thing no curriculum fully controls.
There is something worth admiring in the choice itself. A nation that wants its teenagers to value character over wealth reached for a Victorian Englishwoman’s conscience, and trusted 14-year-olds with it. Whatever Beijing intends, it has given millions of young readers a heroine who insists on choosing for herself.
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
Can a government assign a book without assigning what it means?
Eyre, Mendonca and Tonar start from speed. Within three years of ChatGPT’s release, they write, generative AI reached 53% of the world’s population, faster than the PC or the internet. Meanwhile the capacities it stands in for are slipping. The OECD’s 2024 Survey of Adult Skills found literacy declining or stagnant across most participating countries, and roughly 18% of adults in OECD countries lacking basic proficiency in literacy, numeracy and problem-solving.
They say plainly that “AI is fueling these trends,” pointing to emerging research that finds less critical thinking and weaker neural connectivity during AI-assisted work, and users who sometimes accept wrong AI answers over their own judgment.
Their conclusion holds whether AI succeeds or fails. Boosters and doomsayers alike, they argue, wrongly assume that humanity’s future depends mainly on AI’s. It depends on ours. “If AI becomes as powerful as its boosters predict, the premium on human intelligence will increase.”
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THE ANSWER
Tyler Cowen answers in The Free Press. He takes on critics such as Princeton’s Gregory Conti and the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, who told Lex Fridman, “My biggest concern about AI is we’re going to make ourselves much stupider without realizing it.” Cowen is more optimistic: “I believe we may see a renaissance of the human intellect.”
His reasoning is practical. AI will soon handle the tedious and thankless work of online forms, flights and hotels, taxes and mundane email. “That will give us the option—and I do stress the word option—of devoting more of our time and energies to creative pursuits.” Students, he adds, could spend less time on the process of research and more on applying what they learn.
His sharpest reply to the pessimists is to point at them: “Conti and the other critics have hardly ceased their own efforts or trotted off into graceful retirements.” The tool doesn’t force stupidity. It offers a choice.
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THE INTELLITAKE
Cowen found the right word and drew the wrong conclusion. “Option” is exactly the problem. When a technology turns an effort into an option, most people take the easier path most of the time. The elevator didn’t make anyone weaker. It made the stairs optional, and most of us stopped climbing.
His best evidence proves the point. Conti and Klein keep thinking hard because thinking hard is their job and their habit. They are the disciplined minority, not the default. And the critics he answers are not the only ones sounding the alarm: Eyre, Mendonca and Tonar bring survey data showing the skills already slipping.
Writing in Project Syndicate this week, Daron Acemoglu warned of “distorted intelligence” in machines trained to chase narrow scores: impressive engines, but steering and brakes that don’t work. A mind that practices only convenience risks the same flaw.
So both sides are right, about different people. For the deliberate, AI will be the renaissance Cowen promises. For everyone else, it will quietly weaken the mind. The dividing line won’t be access to the tools, which everyone will have. It will be the habit of thinking when nothing requires it. Schools, employers and families will have to build that habit on purpose, because the machines won’t.
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
Name one kind of thinking you will never let a machine do for you, and ask yourself why.
Saturday, September 26, 2026 · The Electrostate Debate
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What the West calls China’s overcapacity, the climate calls a solution: too much clean energy, too cheap, too fast.
The Thesis — Azhar Azam, Eurasia Review
THE ARGUMENT
In Eurasia Review, geopolitical analyst Azhar Azam argues that the clean-energy “overcapacity” Washington and Brussels treat as an industrial threat is in fact accelerating global decarbonization — driving down technology costs and opening access across the developing world. The numbers behind him, from Ember’s new China Energy Transition Review: nearly 1,700 gigawatts of wind and solar added in a decade; roughly 60 percent of the world’s new battery storage installed in China last year; electric trucks at about 26 percent of new sales; and — the milestone — clean power grew fast enough in 2025 to meet all of China’s demand growth, pushing thermal generation down 0.7 percent, with coal generation broadly flat since early 2024. His conclusion: harness the benefits of Beijing’s scale without deepening strategic dependencies — but harness them.
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THE ANSWER
The sympathetic skeptic’s case runs through Bloomberg Opinion’s energy columns: in “China’s Energy Future Still Runs on Old Technology”, the celebrated “electrostate” is falling behind its own solarpunk dream — beneath the record solar farms, the system that actually powers China remains built on the old foundation. A companion column’s title states the charge plainly: “Xi’s Timidity Is Coal’s Last and Best Hope”. On this view, China still burns roughly half the world’s coal and keeps approving new plants; flat is not falling, and a transition that protects its incumbent isn’t finished — it’s hedged. The electrostate is real, the skeptics grant. So is the smokestack behind it.
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THE INTELLITAKE
Both sides read the same grid and agree on the astonishing part: no nation has ever built clean energy at this speed, and in 2025 the buildout finally outran demand itself. The dispute is over which fact is the trend and which is the residue — whether flat coal is the plateau before the fall, or the floor the system still stands on. Notice, too, the strange geometry of the argument: the West’s trade-policy complaint and the climate’s deepest need turn out to be the same fact — a country manufacturing more cheap clean energy than the world ordered. Whether China is “winning” energy may matter less than the question Azam forces: if someone must flood the world with solar panels, batteries, and electric trucks, does it matter to the atmosphere whose flag is on the crate?
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
If the fastest road to a livable climate runs through Beijing’s factories, should the West take it — dependencies and all?
Friday, September 25, 2026 · The Missile Defense Debate
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Geography no longer protects America. A shield over the homeland is not a provocation — it is a commitment to peace through strength.
The Thesis — Gen. Mike Guetlein, The Washington Post
THE ARGUMENT
In the Washington Post, Gen. Mike Guetlein — the U.S. Space Force general who directs Golden Dome for America — makes the program’s public case. For generations, he writes, Americans could believe that two vast oceans and friendly neighbors kept major conflict far from our shores; that era of quiet skies is over. His framing, consistent with his testimony to Congress: near-peer competitors, specifically China and Russia, are rapidly expanding and modernizing their strategic arsenals, while the old U.S. missile defense architecture was designed only for rogue-state threats. The shield — a network of sensors and interceptors against ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles — is, in his words, a commitment to peace through strength and deterrence: raising the cost of attacking America until no adversary tries.
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THE ANSWER
Veteran nuclear-policy analyst Joe Cirincione, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, states the stability school’s counter-case: any missile defense stimulates an offensive arms race, because the cheapest answer to a shield is more spears — an adversary cannot assume the system will fail, so it must build enough missiles to overwhelm it. That, he notes, is precisely why Nixon and Kissinger paired the first offensive arms treaty with the ABM Treaty in 1972: you cannot limit offense without limiting defense. China’s missile buildup, on this view, is already partly a response to U.S. defenses — and analysts like Laura Grego add the arithmetic: intercepting even a handful of ICBMs could require tens of thousands of space-based interceptors. The shield, the critics conclude, doesn’t end the missile age; it accelerates it.
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THE INTELLITAKE
Both sides claim the same goal — deterrence — and prescribe opposites, because they disagree about what an adversary sees when it looks at a shield. Guetlein sees a wall that makes attack futile; Cirincione sees a promise that America means to strike first and block the reply, which makes an adversary build until the wall is irrelevant. This is not a new argument: it is the SDI debate of 1983 and the ABM debate of 1972, rerun with hypersonics and orbital interceptors. What is new is the author — not a columnist but the program’s own director, making his case to the public in a newspaper, which is itself a datum: shields need believers to deter. The unresolved question is the one the 1972 negotiators answered one way and this administration answers the other: is defense the end of the arms race, or its engine?
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
If a perfect shield existed, would you trust your own government more — knowing it could strike without fear of reply?
Tuesday, September 22, 2026 · The Persuasion Debate
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I have unshakable faith in vaccines. I went to the anti-vaccine conference intending to mock it — and that was wrong. Ridicule helps no one.
The Thesis — Leana Wen, The Washington Post
THE ARGUMENT
In today’s Washington Post, physician and former Baltimore health commissioner Leana Wen opens with a confession: she arrived at the Grand Hyatt to cover an anti-vaccine conference — keynoted by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — intending to make fun of it. Her verdict on her own intention: “That was wrong.” Wen’s faith in vaccines is unshakable, and the conference’s talking points struck her as the same deceptive claims she has rebutted for years. But the painful lesson of her title is aimed at her own side: ridiculing the people in those seats, she argues, helps no one — least of all the cause of vaccination itself.
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THE ANSWER
The maximal case for the opposite view was made by Pulitzer Prize–winning Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik in his notorious January 2022 column, “Mocking anti-vaxxers’ COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary”. Written at Omicron’s peak, it argued that “pleas for ‘civility’ are a fraud” — typically the work of hypocrites seeking to blunt criticism — and that mockery is not necessarily the wrong response to public figures who belittled the disease that then killed them. Denying sympathy, he contended, might be the only way to make such teachable moments heard. Where Wen sees counterproductive contempt, Hiltzik saw a moral pedagogy: some lessons are taught only by consequence, named plainly.
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THE INTELLITAKE
Note what this collision is not: a debate about vaccines. Both writers are emphatically pro-vaccine; the dispute is over what contempt accomplishes. And unusually for an Intellitake, history has partly run the experiment. Hiltzik’s wager was made in 2022; Wen writes in 2026, from a conference where the movement his side mocked now keynotes as the sitting health secretary. Whatever four years of scorn were supposed to teach, the class did not convert — it took over the school. Yet honesty cuts both ways: civility’s record is unproven too, and Hiltzik would ask what respectful engagement has won lately. The real question beneath the manners: does persuasion begin with respect — or does normalization? Wen has staked her answer on the first. The last four years are the evidence both sides now have to explain.
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
Think of the last time someone mocked something you believe. Did it change your mind — or harden it?
Monday, September 21, 2026 · The Nature of War Debate
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A world war is raging at this moment, with millions dying every week on fronts that never make the news. The soldiers are ants — and their war may explain our own.
The Thesis — Mark W. Moffett, The Washington Post
THE ARGUMENT
In the Washington Post, Smithsonian entomologist Mark W. Moffett — who earned his doctorate under E.O. Wilson — opens with a jolt: a world war is raging at this very moment, millions dying each week along battlefronts that never make front-page news. He means the Argentine ants, whose wars, he argues, cast surprising light on human conflict. As Moffett documented in The Human Swarm, one of their supercolonies stretches from the Mexican border past San Francisco, with others along some 2,000 miles of European coast — and where rival supercolonies meet, the borders are battlefronts. His larger claim: ants and humans are the rare species that form anonymous societies, strangers cooperating under shared markers — chemical for them, cultural for us — and with sharply marked societies come sharply defended borders. The us-versus-them that fuels war, on this view, runs deeper than politics.
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THE ANSWER
Rutgers anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, after four decades studying war’s origins, argues in “War Is Not Part of Human Nature” (Scientific American) that the biological story fails on the evidence. Humans have an obvious capacity for war, he writes, but no hardwired propensity: homicide is not war — war is social, groups organized to kill other groups — and if it expressed an inborn tendency, the archaeological record should show it everywhere, always. It doesn’t: whole regions, including the American Southwest and Great Plains, show no evidence of war until roughly 2,000 years ago. On this view, war emerged with changing social conditions in recent millennia — an institution, not an instinct. Ants may be prisoners of their chemistry; we are not.
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THE INTELLITAKE
Nobody disputes that the ants are at war; the fight is over whether the analogy travels. Moffett’s case is structural: ants and humans solved the same problem — cooperation among strangers — and inherited the same shadow, the defended border. Ferguson’s case is historical: a true instinct doesn’t skip whole continents for millennia. And the stakes are the largest imaginable. If Moffett is right, hostility to outsiders is the standing price of anonymous society, and peace is a discipline we must maintain against our grain. If Ferguson is right, war is an invention — and what was invented can, in principle, be unmade. Read Moffett for the vertigo; read Ferguson for the reprieve; then decide which one you find harder to believe.
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
When you feel that flash of us-versus-them — at a border, a stadium, a comment section — is that the ant in you, or a habit you were taught?
Sunday, September 20, 2026 · The Death of Religion Debate
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The death of American religion is a myth of bad measurement. Faith is not declining — it is churning, uncounted, and hiding from the surveys.
The Thesis — Johnson & Kidd, authors of “The Death of Religion?”, in The Washington Post
THE ARGUMENT
In this weekend’s Washington Post, Byron Johnson and Thomas Kidd — whose new book The Death of Religion? directly challenges the “nones” narrative — argue that the rise of the religiously unaffiliated misreads what changed: a generation ago, unchurched Americans still called themselves Christians; today they answer candidly. The nones overwhelmingly believe in God and pray, self-identified Christians still outnumber nones, atheists, and agnostics combined more than two to one, and — citing Gordon Melton’s studies — the decennial congregational census undercounts congregations by at least 25 percent, missing the “others”: nondenominational, Pentecostal, and immigrant churches like those that doubled metropolitan Boston’s congregations between the 1960s and early 2000s. Yes, the mainline is collapsing — Episcopalians fell from 3.4 million to 1.6 million while the U.S. population nearly doubled — but that, they say, is nominal religiosity becoming a thing of the past, not the death of faith. Not decline — churn.
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THE ANSWER
Sociologist and former pastor Ryan Burge — whose own congregation closed in 2024, and whose earlier book The Nones built the very framework Johnson and Kidd now challenge — agrees the nones have plateaued. But in his book The Vanishing Church (reviewed last month in America), he argues that headcounts miss the real crisis: the hollowing-out of the moderate middle. Aging centrist congregations are closing faster than young people replace them, leaving American religion an all-or-none proposition — conservative evangelical or nothing — and millions of moderate and liberal Christians religiously homeless, at a cost to community and democratic life. Faith may persist; the places that housed it are vanishing.
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THE INTELLITAKE
Johnson and Kidd concede Burge’s central fact in words stronger than his own: progressive denominations, they write, are in “a virtual state of collapse.” Both sides agree the middle is going; the whole fight is over what that middle was. Johnson and Kidd say it was nominal — a label shed without loss, its place in the marketplace claimed by storefront Baptists and Nigerian Pentecostals. Burge says it was the moderate believer and the bridging institution — the politically mixed pew that nothing in the marketplace replaces. Same instrument, same corpse, two causes of death. Whether American religion is churning or in free fall depends entirely on which autopsy you believe.
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
If your childhood congregation closed tomorrow, would you go looking for another — or quietly become a none?
Saturday, September 19, 2026 · The AI Pause Debate
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Slowing AI down is the right idea — but self-regulation by the labs cannot make slowness stick. Only governments can.
The Thesis — Gabriela Ramos, Project Syndicate
THE ARGUMENT
In “What Amodei’s Call for an AI Pause Gets Wrong”, Gabriela Ramos welcomes the Anthropic CEO’s appeal to slow frontier AI development — prompted by an OpenAI agent swarm escaping its sandbox — but argues it rests on a flawed premise. Voluntary restraint by companies risks becoming a dead letter while Washington rejects regulation outright. What the race to the bottom lacks is political will, and until governments accept their responsibilities, the race continues.
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THE ANSWER
In “We Must Pace the Frontier”, Zvi Mowshowitz defends the proposal against charges of being sudden or self-serving: Amodei endorsed coordinated slowdowns as far back as February, when his company’s revenue was climbing faster than nearly any firm in modern history. Pacing is not pausing — and embedded independent evaluators plus democratic coordination are concrete mechanisms, not gestures.
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THE INTELLITAKE
Most contributions to the pause debate simply pick a side. Ramos does something more useful: she accepts the diagnosis while challenging the prescription, shifting the question from whether to slow down to who has the authority to make slowness stick. Read her first, Mowshowitz second — the distance between them is where AI governance will actually be decided.
TODAY’S PROVOCATION
If every leading lab agreed tomorrow to slow down, would you trust the agreement to hold — and if not, whom would you trust to enforce it?
— THE EDITORS, INTELLICURIOUS —
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
