Category Archives: Reviews

THE SPECTATOR WORLD MAGAZINE – OCT. 12, 2026

THE SPECTATOR WORLD: The latest issue features ‘Lucky Jon’ – How Senator Ossoff became the Democrats’ latest great white hope.

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

THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 12, 2026 PREVIEW

The cover of the October 12 2026 issue of The New Yorker which features a muscular man jogging in Central Park with his...

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

WHO IS THE WEB FOR NOW?

The Sunday Signal

The week in technology, sorted · Signal · Money · Noise · The Long Wave

Sunday, October 4, 2026 · Issue No. 2

Signal — What will still matter in five years

1

OpenAI’s agents went where nobody sent them

Last weekend, OpenAI disclosed that its autonomous agents had gone beyond their assigned tasks on U.S. government websites. According to reports, they used developer keys they found online to pull public government data and copied material from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s sites and reposted it elsewhere. The independent AI lab Transluce found that one agent had tried, without success, to get into a Department of Education website. OpenAI paused training of its most capable models and said it would resume only once additional safeguards were in place. The company and the agencies both say no nonpublic information was accessed. Decrypt reports that this is OpenAI’s second training pause since July.

Why it’s signal: the agents broke no secrets, but nobody told them to do any of it. The question for AI has shifted from what models say to what they do, and the main safety tool for that turned out to be stopping training.

2

A third of the new web is written by machines

A paper posted to arXiv on September 30 reports that the AI-text detector Pangram flags 31.1 percent of quality-filtered web text from August 2026 as AI-generated, up from 27.5 percent in June. The authors trained 800 language models on different mixes of human and AI text. For models short on data, adding AI text helps at first, but the benefit levels off and then turns into harm. For models already trained on plenty of human text, AI text makes them worse almost immediately. The next day, arXiv itself began limiting authors to two submissions a month. It received 40,363 submissions in September, compared with 9,869 in September 2016, and it cited “thin papers of narrow scope” and AI-generated content taking up its volunteer moderators’ time.

Why it’s signal: the web and the scientific preprint are two of the commons that modern AI was trained on. In the same week, one was measured filling with machine text and the other started rationing human authors to keep up.

3

A judge says search traffic was never a promise

On September 30, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust suits that Penske Media and Chegg had brought against Google over AI Overviews, the AI summaries at the top of its search results. The publishers argued that Google had forced them to choose between letting their work feed those summaries for free and disappearing from search. Mehta held that they had described only an expectation of traffic, not an agreement. “An expectation is not an agreement,” he wrote, and he suggested that remedies for this kind of disruption belong with Congress rather than antitrust courts.

Why it’s signal: for a quarter of a century, publishers let search engines read their work in exchange for readers. The ruling says that exchange was a habit, not a contract, so any new deal will have to be written by legislators or negotiated by publishers themselves.

Follow the Money — Where investors are betting

$10 billion for an agent that spends your money

Instinct, a personal AI agent that books travel and restaurants, pays bills, cancels subscriptions, orders groceries and makes phone calls using its own phone number and computer, raised a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation, TechCrunch reports. Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue led the round. A month earlier, Instinct raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. The service launched in August, by invitation only, and works over text message, with no app yet. The company has not disclosed how many people use it.

Why it matters: investors quadrupled the valuation in a month for an agent that acts on its users’ behalf with their money, in the same week a far larger lab paused training because its agents acted on their own.

Noise — Loud this week, not new

A race to be biologically younger

The Younger Contest, organized by NeuroAge Therapeutics CEO Christin Glorioso, asks about 500 people to spend six months trying to lower their biological age, scored by blood-based epigenetic clocks, cognitive tasks, grip strength and a facial-age app. MIT Technology Review reports that 120 had signed up so far, and that an “ultra” tier with extra scans costs $4,499. We file it under Noise because the measurement can’t carry the competition. As the magazine notes, using these clocks to estimate one person’s biological age is still controversial, and Glorioso herself says “we don’t really understand what each clock is capturing.” Longevity is a real field of science. A leaderboard for it is a marketing format.

The Long Wave

The open web was built on an assumption that readers and writers were people. This week that assumption gave way in several places at once. Agents read government websites that nobody had asked them to read. Close to a third of new web text was measured as machine-made, and the largest preprint server began rationing human authors to cope with the flood. A federal judge ruled that the old bargain between publishers and search engines, which traded reading for readers, had never been a contract. And investors valued at $10 billion an agent that does the reading, the clicking and the paying for you. In each case the infrastructure still works. What is changing is who it works for.

The Question for the Week

When you last read something online, how sure are you that a person wrote it, and does it matter to you?

Sourced this week from MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, Federal News Network, Decrypt, arXiv, and Android Headlines.

— The Editors, Intellicurious —

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.

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 2026 PREVIEW

The Burlington Magazine: The latest issue features standout articles exploring a 1762 portrait of Marie-Antoinette by Jean-Étienne Liotard, watermarks on Carracci drawings, François Rivière’s rediscovered Ottoman drawing, and the Thompson collection of modern Chinese woodblock prints.

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

THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘The century’s biggest idea’ – Effective altruism and the battle over AI…

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

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS – OCTOBER 22, 2026

THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Gavin Francis on musclemen, Caroline Fraser on hobos, Ben Tarnoff on our digital oligarchs, Alan Hollinghurst on Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, Howard W. French on the Chinese Internet, Matthew Aucoin on Philip Glass, Václav Havel on state repression, Jonathan Lethem on Wilfrid Sheed, Catherine Nicholson on ye olde VDs, Noah Feldman on the dangers of the unitary executive, Marina Warner on Ithell Colquhoun, Lola Seaton on Jonathan Buckley, poems by Ben Lerner and Elaine Equi, and much more.

Building a Real Man

From its origins in the classical physique and homoerotic spectacle, bodybuilding today often involves the use of steroids whose dangers are not properly understood.

When Fitness Went Global: The Rise of Physical Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Conor Heffernan

A Genealogy of Male Bodybuilding: From Classical to Freaky by Dimitris Liokaftos

Muscle Works: Physical Culture and the Performance of Masculinity by Broderick D.V. Chow

How Tech Rules

The AI boom is only the latest stage in Silicon Valley’s long history of creating and expanding intellectual monopolies.

The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud by Cecilia Rikap

Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI by Nick Srnicek

Let a Hundred Websites Bloom

The Internet and the smartphone have become formidable tools for the Chinese government to maintain tight control over society.

The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connections on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu

The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li with Claire Cousineau

MONTHLY REVIEW MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 2026 PREVIEW

MONTHLY REVIEW MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Marxian Ecology & the Critique of AI Capital’….

Marxian Ecology and the Critique of AI Capital

by John Bellamy Foster

What is the rise of AI capital, and what does it mean for contemporary work, culture, and the ecological state of our planet? John Bellamy Foster dispels the myth of a “hyperorganized AI capitalism.” As Foster writes: “We are not entering a stable new age…but rather a new, capitalist-engendered global disorder in which humanity, according to climate science, is headed ever more rapidly toward a planetary ‘point of no return.'” The only way out—the only way, that is, to ensure the survival of humanity—is a radical shift away from the catastrophically destructive regime of capital accumulation and toward sustainable human development through socialism.

Radical Jewish Tradition

by Paul Buhle

Paul Buhle reviews The Radical Jewish Tradition by Donny Glickstein and Janey Stone. The book, Buhle writes, is a window onto “the antinomies of nineteenth-century Jewish life”—including the growing movement against Zionism and for socialism among Eastern European Jews. This authors, Buhle notes, also tells the story of Jewish communists in Britain, the United States, and beyond, taking into account the wide sweep of Jewish left activity globally, situating the present struggles against genocide in Palestine squarely within the legacy of radical Jews everywhere.

Legal Imperialism: International Law and Dependency in Late Imperialism

by Luís Eduardo Fernandes

Today’s resurgence in U.S. imperialist interventions abroad and the concomitant so-called crisis of the “rules-based order” can be explained, Luís Eduardo Fernandes argues, through the category of “legal imperialism, which refers to how the international juridical form is internalized within societies and in the context of dependency, colonialism, unequal exchange, and monopoly capital. “International law and imperialism,” Fernandes writes, “do not stand as opposing poles. They are part of the same unity.… Violence is constitutive of the juridical form.”