We’re all going to die, but not from AI
We must challenge Silicon Valley’s self-serving warnings of apocalypse
PROSPECT MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 2026
Category Archives: Magazines
THE SPECTATOR WORLD MAGAZINE – OCT. 12, 2026
Will Jon Ossoff’s luck last long enough for a run at the presidency?
Once upon a time, the export crop of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket was whale oil. Nowadays it is money, harpooned by visiting campaigns from deep-pocketed donors at anchor in their summer seaside retreats. In the peak season of July and August, the islands’ social rhythms are dictated by money-harvesting events, wrangled by local hosts jostling for the social éclat that comes from securing a high-profile honoree. By late August this year, the territory had already been worked over by a series of hopeful visitors with hands outstretched, such as the rising Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico, Hakeem Jeffries in eager pursuit of the House Speakership that is almost in his grasp, Maryland Governor Wes Moore and others questing the donor dollar.
How Trump can confront the new age of terror
The world has become strangely numb to terror. Sometimes an atrocity will be sufficiently horrifying – the murder of Charlie Kirk, say – to cause mass shock and anguish. Yet now reports of car rammings or knife rampages or foiled Islamist plots feel almost routine. We have become inured to ideological violence. In the quarter-century since 9/11, the specter of terrorism has almost become a fact of modern life. Last year, America was one of the few western countries to see a rise in terrorism, with 13 recorded attacks and 28 deaths. Today even the most appalling acts generate only a brief sense of widespread outrage. And then the news cycle moves on. No mass killing has come close to the scale of the Twin Towers attacks.
America must shore up its missile-building capabilities
America’s war with Iran is in its eighth month and stuck. On September 26, Donald Trump confirmed that he had rejected Tehran’s offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in return for lifting the American naval blockade and easing sanctions. He has reportedly told his staff that renewed bombing is likely after the midterm elections on November 3. He is reluctant to
ORION MAGAZINE FALL 2026
ORION MAGAZINE: The Autumn 2026 issue, ‘Tongues: Adventures in the Science of Taste’, ventures into the outer reaches of flavor. Each story is keyed to a different feature of taste in the human and more-than-human worlds, a palette that includes carnivory, sourness, sweetness, bitterness, and fermentation. Contributors parse the flavors of breast milk, spiderwebs, and stinky cheeses. They explore the cultural history of foods forged in adverse conditions like famine and oppression. Taken together, In Tongues offers a vivid, sensory buffet of how we experience the world through our tongues.
A Taste for Meat
How carnivorous plants trouble the order of things. By Lacy M. Johnson
Sour Fruit
The marginalization of a flavor mirrors the logic of extraction. By Sharanya Deepak
Heart of Bitterness
A journey to the center of the flavor—and the feeling. By Maria Pinto
Yeast Mode
For food scientist and fermenter David Zilber, taste is the fundamental question of organismic existence. By Jaya Saxena and David Zilber
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 12, 2026 PREVIEW
THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: The latest issue cover features “Peter de Sève’s “Lapdog” – Trying to keep up. By Françoise MoulyArt by Peter de Sève
The Battle for the Post-Trump Right
For decades, the Heritage Foundation was a conservative powerhouse. Can it stay relevant in the influencer age? By Emma Green
ICE Is Everywhere and Acting with Impunity
Arrests have reached a record high—nearly fifty-one thousand in August alone—with agents conducting operations nationwide at hospitals, at airports, and outside schools. By Jonathan Blitzer
The Battle to Pass a Billionaire Tax
Most Democratic voters say that they favor a wealth tax, but a California ballot initiative has plenty of liberal opponents. By Nicholas Lemann
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE- OCTOBER 4, 2026
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: The latest issue features Trisha Thadani’s cover essay on alternative medical clinics targeting cancer patients with misinformation, alongside Max Read’s examination of Silicon Valley products adopting the logic of gambling, and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Ethicist column on sponsoring a caregiver’s career.
Min Jin Lee Was Underestimated for Half Her Life. Then She Started to Write.
A torch bearer for the great 19th-century tradition of social realism, she’s become one of the most important novelists of her generation.
When Did Everyone Start Talking Like a Hollywood Windbag?
The phrase “the X of it all” started as a joke to mock the vague lingo of studio bosses. But there’s something widely appealing about speaking “casually, broadly and vaguely in order to reduce friction.” By Nitsuh Abebe
They Kept Outsiders Away for 500 Years. Their World Is About to Change.
My father dedicated his life to studying the Guna people of Panama, and they may soon allow unprecedented development through their land. I went on a trek through the jungle to find out why. By Ben Ryder Howe and Federico Rios
How Everything Became Gambling
It’s not just DraftKings and Polymarket — the logic of gambling undergirds everything coming out of Silicon Valley.
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 5, 2026
BARRON’S MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘A MARKET DIVIDED’ – Even with the S&P 500 near record highs, many stocks are struggling. We see opportunities.
A Divided Stock Market Looks Scary. It Could Be the Setup for a Serious Rally.
A yawning gap has opened up inside the stock market that to some looks like an abyss. We see an opportunity.
AI Agents Got Cash to Trade Stocks. Here’s What They Bought and Sold—Repeatedly.
An investor gave AI agents $500 each and provided the same daily prompt: Make as much money as you can. Stockbrokers don’t need to worry…yet.
Quantum Computing Is Having a Moment. What to Know About the Hottest Sector After AI.
Just a decade ago, it was nothing more than the dream of scientists in the lab. Recent advances by IBM, IonQ, Nvidia, and others illustrate the new promise of the complex technology. Investors are taking notice.
AI Will Revolutionize Medicine. This Company Provides the Plumbing.
Veeva Systems stock can rally by 30% over the next year.
The Stock Market Is Looking Ahead to Earnings Season—and It Likes What It Sees
Get out your trust rope and harness. Investors are once again climbing the proverbial wall of worry—and earnings season could provide the piton that supports the stock market’s next move higher.
THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 2026 PREVIEW
The RKD as a ‘knowledge centre’
What is the largest art-history library in the world? The answer to this question depends of course on how you measure size, but an institution that might reasonably claim such a status is the RKD in The Hague. The RKD has for decades been a vast and invaluable library and archive, carefully nurtured by expert librarians and archivists (or ‘curators’ as they have long been described).
A new drawing by Édouard Manet
A newly identified drawing in a private collection of a crouching girl is a characteristic example of the red-chalk life studies that Édouard Manet made in the 1860s, influenced by his close study of Renaissance draughtsmanship in Florence. Although squared for transfer, the drawing has not yet been linked to any known composition by the artist.
Mistaken identities: Liotard’s 1762 portrait of Marie-Antoinette
A refined portrait by Jean-Étienne Liotard in the Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, has long been identified as depicting Marie-Antoinette as a child. New research establishes, however, that it is a drawing of another member of the imperial Habsburg family and also reveals a hitherto unidentified likeness of Marie-Antoinette.
SCIENCE MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 1, 2026
SCIENCE MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘WOMEN’S HEALTH’….
A Lifelong Focus on Women’s Health
Historically, most human studies have involved male participants, and their findings were assumed to apply to women and children as well. Meanwhile, women’s health typically came up in the context of reproduction and childbearing, if at all. However, biomedical science has come a long way over the years, and it has become increasingly clear that there are sex-dependent differences in many diseases that do not involve reproduction and that occur at all ages. Across all areas of women’s health, including both reproductive and nonreproductive conditions, much remains to be learned about the underlying biology, effects of hormones and genetics, and potential therapeutic interventions.
X and Y chromosomes as determinants of aging and disease
Sex differences have traditionally been attributed to gonadal hormones, but accumulating evidence shows that sex chromosomes exert distinct, cell-autonomous effects on health, aging, and disease. XX and XY complements alter gene dosage, epigenetic programming, immune signaling, metabolism, and cellular stress responses, which shape aging and disease trajectories in women and men. This Review integrates mechanistic advances in sex chromosome biology—including escape from X chromosome inactivation, X reactivation, parent-of-X-origin, X-skew, X- and Y-linked gene functions, and Y loss—with aging, neurologic disease, immunity, cancer, and cardiometabolic disease. We highlight insights from mouse models, human studies, and emerging technologies that disentangle hormone-driven effects from chromosome-mediated effects and discuss translational implications for diagnostics, biomarkers, therapeutics, and clinical trial design, emphasizing the integration of sex chromosome biology into precision medicine.
Reframing menopause and menopause hormone therapy as opportunities for healthy aging
Menopause is an important biological transition with up to 72 symptoms that shapes aging trajectories across organs and encompasses ~40% of the female lifespan. Although menopause awareness is increasing, research on strategies for menopause symptom management and optimizing health in the postmenopausal period is lacking. This Review highlights that menopause characteristics, such as type, timing, and symptom burden, influence health outcomes and later-life disease risk. Similarly, menopause hormone therapy comes in >200 varieties that differ by dose, formulation of estrogens and progestogens, and timing, each with their own distinct risk-benefit profiles. These distinctions are often missed in the literature but have considerable repercussions for outcomes. Optimized menopause care necessitates a precision medicine approach that considers menopause symptoms, genetics, and previous hormone exposures.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT – OCTOBER 2, 2026
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: The latest issue features ‘Albert Camus – The Notebooks’…
Camus contre Camus
The trials of a public intellectual By Patrick McGuinness
“Sadness of success”, writes Albert Camus in a notebook entry for June 25, 1947: “If everything were more difficult for me, as before, I’d have much more right to say what I say”. The success in question was winning the Prix des Critiques for La Peste (The Plague), published a fortnight earlier. It could be worse, the reader wants to tell him by way of consolation: you could have won the Nobel. Fast-forward ten years and the entry for October 17, 1957, reads: “Nobel. Strange feeling of overwhelming weight and melancholy. At 20 years old, poor and naked, I knew true glory. My mother”.
Infernal time machine
China Miéville’s anti-colonialist vision By Anna Aslanyan
Open season on Barbara
A romantic novelist who became a figure of fun By Nicola Shulman
One of the happy few?
How writing freed Anita Brookner from despair By Elizabeth Lowry
THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 3, 2026
Effective altruism is this century’s biggest idea
The movement is admirable, but dangerous
A hurricane is coming to tax systems
Governments should be preparing, but most aren’t
Don’t put Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in a room together
A summit between the two “friends” could go horribly wrong
China’s new infrastructure push will help itself and the world
But it must still do more to lift consumption
