Could the news be much more dramatic? Artificial-intelligence models keep growing more powerful, faster than almost anyone predicted. Next week Anthropic, a frontier model-maker, is expected to list its shares in what could be the biggest-ever IPO of an AI firm. Yet in some ways the AI boom is looking wobbly. A sex-and-spying scandal is rocking Nvidia, the top chipmaker. America’s Democratic Party, having won the midterms, is raring to go after data centres and Trump-adjacent tech titans. Some fear an almighty tech bust is coming. How worried should the world be?
History offers clues. Plenty of past technologies, from canals and railways to the internet, have brought market euphoria and then despair. Bets on them went wrong even though the underlying technologies proved revolutionary.
The December 3 issue opens with “The Next Generation” by Fintan O’Toole, the Review’s advising editor, who credits the American left with a historic election win achieved by tying the affordability crisis to Republican corruption. The whole Democratic Party, he argues, should learn from it. Later, Mark Danner‘s “The Tightrope Walker” asks how Trump turned a failed coup into a tale of his own martyrdom. He reviews Mary Clare Jalonick’s oral history of January 6th, Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis’s account of a Justice Department cowed by politics and fear, and Michael Wolff’s All or Nothing.
Violence leaves lasting scars.
In “Collateral Damage,” David Shulman, a Hebrew University scholar and longtime activist with the Arab–Jewish group Ta’ayush, considers NAZA. In Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary, Israeli soldiers frankly voice remorse over their part in the Gaza war. Helen Epstein and Aminu Abubakar‘s “Interview with a Bandit” hears from one of the many Nigerians driven to violence by years of corrupt government. And in “The Executioner’s Song,” Piper French reviews Pamela Colloff’s To Catch the Devil. It is the Gulf Coast story of a notorious jailhouse informant whose lies sent an innocent man to death row, and of the officials and institutions that encouraged him.
Fiction crosses borders and centuries.
Caroline Moorehead‘s “Home and Away” introduces Fausta Cialente, an Italian émigré who lived much of her life in Egypt and wrote of restless women and girls drawn to flight. Her A Very Cold Winter appears in Julia Nelsen’s translation, introduced by Claudia Durastanti. Michael Gorra‘s “Nightmares of History” reviews The Newer World, which completes Sebastian Barry’s trilogy, begun with Days Without End, about Americans swept up in nineteenth-century violence. Kristen Roupenian‘s “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Change” explores how Jane Schoenbrun’s book Public Access Afterworld and film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma blur reality and fantasy.
Art and archives take center stage.
Jed Perl‘s “Masters of Their Craft” tours shows at the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Grand Palais and the Fondation Louis Vuitton devoted to Michelangelo and Rodin, Renoir, late Matisse and Calder. For 150 years, he argues, Paris was modern art’s great workshop. Susan Tallman‘s “Seeing Through the Lightness” finds Brice Marden’s famous equanimity, in Gagosian’s survey I Am Plane Image, looking less inevitable and more like a hard-won balancing act. Darryl Pinckney‘s “Arthur Schomburg’s Legacy” marks the Schomburg Center’s centennial in Harlem, celebrating the collector whose books seeded one of the world’s foremost archives of Black history and literature.
Big ideas get a second look.
Trevor Jackson‘s “The Cost of Monetizing Everything” reviews Nick Chater and George Loewenstein’s It’s On You and The Price of Happiness by Cass R. Sunstein, co-author of Nudge. Behavioral economists promised rational policy, but Jackson finds a corporate push behind their nudges, which, as Chater and Loewenstein argue, shifted blame for systemic problems onto individuals. Clare Carlisle‘s “Reverence for All of It” takes up Steven Nadler’s Spinoza, Atheist. She asks whether a thinker branded a heretic in seventeenth-century Europe, for treating God and nature as interchangeable, should be called an atheist today.
Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel and the U.S.-Israel war with Iran have made systemic problems worse, causing the cost of living to soar and driving many Lebanese to despair.
It’s not clear whether the party’s midterm success signals a broad realignment in American politics or a temporary turn away from an unpopular president.
GPS-linked devices have been insisting that Ukrainians are in Lima, the Peruvian capital. The culprit is a jamming system built to thwart Russian airstrikes.
Governance experts question whether the board, which is investigating Mr. Huang’s conduct, has been too deferential as he has turned Nvidia into a global giant.
The A.I. company’s pricing would make it one of the biggest ever public listings. It comes at a volatile moment amid fears that the A.I. boom may not be sustainable.
President Claudia Sheinbaum drew a firm line barring U.S. forces from operating on Mexican soil. But in a northern border state, one local partner quietly helped the agency build a foothold.
The kingdom’s promised reforms don’t always match the realities of its justice system. Unmarried women, particularly foreign workers, face unique perils.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has shown a willingness to endure a high price to get what he wants in Ukraine, and he sees little reason to stop fighting now, analysts say.
If the board decides to punish Jensen Huang, who admitted to a relationship with a woman suspected of being a Chinese spy, there is no obvious successor.
Working with the Trump administration, foreign partners accept deportees, then ship them to nations where the U.S. itself would be prohibited from sending them.
Crowds have flocked to the stern, but reassuring, face of Angela Merkel in her official portrait, even as a backlash to her legacy roils German politics.
Americans face a new political reality and a gap between the time they effectively decided to be done with President Trump and the time he is actually done.
The man in line to be the first Black speaker is seen by activists as too timid to take on the president. He says he’s “strongly positioned” to get things done.
India’s top court decreed that only more environmentally friendly fireworks could be set off this weekend, citing air quality concerns. But environmental activists call it a “green wash.”
The African National Congress lost big in local elections, turning a once-dominant force credited with overturning apartheid into “any other political party.”
Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief, hopes to succeed Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister by cobbling together a coalition after an inconclusive election.
Behind the scenes, the world’s richest person spent a record amount over two years in an attempt to bend the country’s politics to his will. He failed.
The new chief of staff is responsible for some of the most provocative policies of President Trump’s second term, and an aggressive approach to executive power.
After months of secrecy, Ukrainian commanders let New York Times journalists join them in bunkers and training grounds used to reverse some Russian territorial gains.
A cyberattack on supermarket fridges, bomb threats to planes and software vulnerabilities have Europe on edge as government officials encourage resilience and stockpiling.
Bomb threats have disrupted dozens of flights in Europe over the past week. At airports in Rome, Madrid and Warsaw, travelers were more frustrated than fearful.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
