NATIONAL REVIEW: The latest issue features ‘The Fire Next Time’ – Noah Rothman on Woke, the Sequel
Are we ready for the sequel? Noah Rothman
How the newly contentious facilities make the things we do possible. Charles C. W. Cooke
What America needs to do to keep its defenses strong. Rebeccah Heinrichs
A federal rule change could bring upward mobility. Howard Husock
A new sanctions bill is meant to pressure President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine. But President Trump is taking another approach: offering enticements to Russia.
Russia is staging parliamentary elections that matter to almost no one — except Vladimir Putin and his inner circle.
As the Alternative for Germany party seeks to control a state government for the first time, its push for “patriotic” art has drawn comparisons with Nazi policies.
The cost of heating oil, which is similar to diesel and used extensively in Northeastern states, has climbed sharply because of the conflict.
Nancy Lemann sets her sad screwball novels of manners in the closed-off world of upper-crust white New Orleans that she grew up in.
The lessons that Donald Trump learned from Roy Cohn—lie, cheat, engage in unlimited corruption—now shape official government policy in the US.
Willem de Kooning’s works on paper document his efforts to find ways of retaining both image and abstraction, depth and flatness.
Charles Lamb’s camp, mischievous, melancholic alter ego, Elia, owes much to his sister, Mary, with whom he lived for forty years, absorbing her “rambling chat.”
THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Can the AI arms race be stopped?‘
America will struggle to make the technology safe while staying ahead of China
Governments are still, alas, asleep
Republicans show that party unity is overrated
The apocalypse is postponed. A mini boom is at hand
Machines are getting brighter; teenagers are not
The transmission of ideas is moving away from text and back to the spoken word
Hard questions about AI in the classroom by Nathalia Alcantara
Mark Brilliant misses plagiarism.
The old kind, that is. Back when his students copied from Wikipedia, and when Turnitin, a text-matching software developed at Berkeley, could match plagiarized paragraphs to their original sources.
Brilliant has taught American history at Berkeley for more than two decades—before that, he taught high school—and for most of that time, catching a cheater was just a routine, though unpleasant, part of the job. What’s different now is not that students cheat. It’s what happens when he catches them.
UC faculty split over standardized test requirement by Margie Cullen
In the spring of 2023, UC Berkeley math professor Zvezdelina Stankova began to notice that about a third of her students were “in freefall.” They weren’t showing up to lectures or doing their homework, and, on tests, they scored far below the average. At first, she thought it was an anomaly, but her observations were reinforced by a 2025 UC San Diego report that found that 1 in 12 of the campus’s incoming students tested below middle school math standards.
The development comes after the UC Board of Regents dispensed with standardized testing as a requirement of admission in 2020. That decision has since caused a rupture between faculty who feel the tests are an important measure of college preparedness and those who feel they discriminate against underrepresented students.
IGI-affiliated researchers have spawned more than 30 startups. Here are just six of them. By James Pagett Tollen
Berkeley Professor Jennifer Doudna, who shared the Nobel Prize for developing the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, founded the Innovative Genomics Institute in 2015 to advance new applications of the revolutionary technology. Since then, IGI-affiliated researchers have spawned more than 30 startups. Here are just six of them.
Basem Al-Shayeb, Ph.D. ’22, a graduate of the Banfield and Doudna Labs, cofounded Amber Bio in 2021 to address a limit of the gene-editing field: The current paradigm of genetic medicine relies on developing independent therapies for each separate mutation, the company says. Amber Bio’s RNA-writing platform will enable thousands of mutations to be edited simultaneously. Importantly, the company adds, these RNA-based edits will be reversible.
The goal of Editpep, per the company’s website, is straightforward: “To bring life-changing genome-editing therapies to patients with devastating neurological diseases.” They will do so by safely delivering CRISPR straight into the brain. Ross Wilson, IGI’s director of therapeutic delivery and an assistant adjunct professor at Berkeley, cofounded the company in 2023.
COMMENTARY MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘The Democratic Socialist Congregation’ – How The DSA Serves As A Religion Substitute For Downwardly Mobile Elites….
How the DSA serves as a religion substitute for downwardly mobile elites by Jesse Arm
What our history and Ukraine’s strategies can teach us about the future of war by Arthur Herman
A five-point plan to fight anti-Semitism in court—and win by Jeffrey Lax
Russia’s real enemy isn’t Ukraine. It’s helplessness by Irina Velitskaya
Friedrich Merz is a man with few choices and little popular support as he faces the end of Germany’s postwar settlement and the collapse of all the checks and balances to maintain democratic norms after the second world war and reunification. While Alternative für Deutschland’s success in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt saw the party win 44% of the vote, they are three seats short of a governing majority and, so far, no other party has said they are prepared to work with them, which means that for the moment, at least, the threat of Germany’s first rightwing extremist state government since the Nazi period has not yet come to pass.
As Berlin correspondent Deborah Cole explains, Merz is seen as the wrong man to present and sell a political counterpoint to the AfD’s populist policies. Seen as lacking in empathy and political dexterity, his demeanour is in sharp contrast to Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate in Saxony-Anhalt. But as Deborah’s Berlin colleague, Kate Connolly, reports, some of Siegmund’s prospective new MPs have questionable backgrounds, including criminal records, Stasi pasts and connections to far-right networks.
Spotlight | Stop, slow down and swerve the apocalypse
Can the world heave a collective sigh of relief after fellow tech bosses heeded a proposal by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s to put the brakes on AI’s headlong rush to over take human intelligence? Nick Robins-Early weighs up our chances
Science | Can I borrow your coyote?
Guardian US reporter Lois Beckett visits a one-of-a-kind California lending library where you can check out taxidermied animals and fossilised dinosaur bones.
Feature | Slime is not as simple as it seems
Scientists are battling to determine whether supposedly simple organisms demonstrate a form of intelligence. If they do, what does it mean for our understanding of brain power, asks Samanth Subramanian
Opinion | Ethics make a return to UK foreign policy
The evidence is Ed Miliband’s bold decision to label settler violence in the West Bank as “ethnic cleansing” and institute a boycott, argues Steve Bloomfield
Culture | Shear fun
Catherine Shoard is rounded up for a trip down to Mossy Bottom farm to get a behind-the-scenes preview of the latest Shaun the Sheep film
Republicans are putting up a costly defense of districts that President Trump won easily in 2024. In places like Georgia, strategists wonder if it’s too late.
Prime Minister Mark Carney told European lawmakers that an alliance would help to secure sovereignty and independence for his country. The moves come amid a historic low for U.S. ties with Canada.
The collected essays of Dario Amodei help explain why some people are so worried about artificial intelligence.
The Trump administration plans to deliver 60,000 of the powerful munitions at a time when opposition is growing in Washington to arms sales to Israel.
THE NEW WORLD MAGAZINE: The latest issue features…
The AfD is on the path to power. It doesn’t just want to take Germany in a different political direction – it wants to build a new country
Controversial, dizzyingly erudite and defiantly European, is the world finally catching up with the Slovenian thinker?
Four hours is a long time to spend inside the mind of the world’s richest man – and that’s because his mind turns out to be a twisted, miserable nightmare
When a real scandal comes along, some parts of the press just can’t bring themselves to acknowledge it
Tech companies are turning apocalypse into profit By New Statesman
Ahead of the midterms, the US president led an unorthodox convention for his true fans By Freddie Hayward
My wife’s pregnancy terrified me, so I plunged into the morbid world of British taxidermy By Yoel Noorali
By Ailbhe Rea
By Kate Mossman
By John Mullan
Intellicurious 