Tag Archives: October 2026

THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY – OCTOBER 16, 2026

THE GUARDIAN WEEKLY: The latest issue features ‘CLASS ACTION’ – Why French students have taken to the streets…


France has been rocked by huge youth protests in recent weeks over the state of high school education, bringing tens of thousands of people on to the streets.

The movement began with outrage over shoddy school conditions in a Paris banlieue, but has spread across the country as pupils voice their anger about a system they say is failing them.

For this week’s big story, Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis hears from protesters who feel abandoned by the French state. Angelique also looks at the evidence on students’ complaints of dilapidated buildings, teacher shortages, inequality and low investment.

Then, Alexander Hurst says fixing the broken education system should be just the start for an aloof political class if it is to finally pay attention to a generation who feel neglected.

Spotlight | The future of the death penalty
Donald Trump has used the full might of the presidency to supercharge executions but, writes Ed Pilkington, an avalanche of mishaps has put the system’s flaws in the spotlight

Science | Sweet time
A flurry of recent studies suggests that spending the first 1,000 days of life under sugar rationing may have left traces on people’s health more than seven decades later. Linda Geddes reports

Feature | The art of dismantling a second world war bomb
British bomb disposal squads are being called to more unexploded devices than ever – and they risk their lives each time. Samira Shackle recounts the challenge they faced when two bombs were discovered on the same day

Opinion | A new era of instability
The latest attack by Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabia may prove to be more calamitous for the region than the world imagines, says Nesrine Malik

Culture | Hungry like the werewolf
Duran Duran talk to Alexis Petridis about 80s excess, tabloid scrutiny and their Halloween glow-up

THE NEW WORLD MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 15, 2026

THE NEW WORLD MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Snuff Politics’ – The very public execution of American values…

Trump’s snuff politics is a new low in American cruelty

The president is using barbaric spectacle as a political weapon – and the damage will go on long after he has gone

Let us call it what it is: snuff politics. In an interview with far right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec posted by streaming channel Real America’s Voice last Thursday, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth announced the first state-sanctioned public execution in America for 90 years.

Alastair Campbell’s diary: My truly deranged encounter with Trump apologist Kellyanne Conway

The godmother of ‘alternative facts’ assured me the president loved Zelensky – just as he was stabbing him in the back with Putin

I met Kellyanne Conway for the first time last week, when she and I were on a panel together, looking ahead to next month’s US midterm elections. She, you may recall, was the Trump senior aide who, on Term 1 Day 1, as the newly elected US president was falsely claiming more people attended his inauguration than Barack Obama’s, let us know we would have to get used to “alternative facts,” whatever truth photographic or any other evidence might reveal.

Burnham is already winning the new Brexit wars

The shrieks of fury from Johnson, Badenoch, Farage and co speak volumes as the prime minister confronts the disaster they wrought

It’s an old truism in sport and in politics that the best defence is a good attack. That’s certainly something the UK’s leading Brexiteers seem to have taken to heart over the last decade – not least in their relentless fury at anyone who disagrees with their own personal vision for Brexit, or even anyone who just points out that none of them seem to agree on what, exactly, that looks like.

PHILOSOPHY NOW MAGAZINE OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2026

PHILOSOPHY NOW MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘THE METAPHYSICS ISSUE’…

METAPHYSICS

Causation: A History

Peter Keeble causes us to think about causation.

‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’

Andrew Brenner tries to make sense of the question.

Classical Indian & Modern Scientific Metaphysics

Mansi Tripathi hosts a trialogue.

The Nature of Reality

Simon Everson says Immanuel Kant can help with quantum mechanics.

What is Metaphysics?

Sajid Bijapure asks what it does, and what it might do in the future.

ARTICLES

Does Feminism Need More Than Liberalism?

Vanessa Yeung considers feminist responses to Rawlsian liberalism.

To Philosophize is to Learn How to Say Goodbye

Scott F. Parker reflects on philosophy as a preparation for death.

When Truth Loses its Witnesses

Mohsen Askari on why not all political narratives should be treated as equal.

In Defence of Hope

Sam Nuttall hopes to defend it with the help of Gabriel Marcel and Ernst Bloch.

Fraudulent Hope?

Alice Figes agrees with Ernst Bloch that hope can build worlds or destroy them, and philosophy’s task is to tell the difference.

Günther Anders (1902-1992)

Clive Webb on how Anders warned humanity about the moral costs of technological progress.

MODERN AGE JOURNAL – FALL 2026 PREVIEW

Fall 2026 Cover Image

MODERN AGE – A CONSERVATIVE REVIEW: The latest issue features cultural and historical currents by charting the parallel births of the conservative movement and rock music, rethinking artistic and literary legacies, and examining legal, political, and philosophical reviews alongside reflective theatrical criticism and poetry.

Editorials

Essays

Film & Stage

Books

Poetry

THE NEW YORK TIMES – WEDNESDAY, OCT. 14, 2026

Saudi Energy Giant Struck as War Spikes Between Houthis and Saudi Arabia

The attack came after the Yemeni militia warned it would attack the headquarters of Aramco. The Saudi-led coalition said it was targeting Houthi capabilities.

Trump Hands Victories to Putin, Who Offers More War in Return

Russia has reaped a diesel deal and an increase in U.S. pressure on Ukraine as President Trump’s political needs align with his longstanding inclinations toward Russia.

A Trump Backlash Threatens Susan Collins, the Only Blue-State G.O.P. Senator

The race in Maine, which could decide Senate control, is testing whether there is still room for Ms. Collins’s brand of moderation during a polarizing presidency.

Sudden Starlink Restrictions Hamper Ukraine Just as Russia Escalates

Kyiv is increasingly vulnerable. A huge attack cut power to 600,000 people, and a Pentagon-funded satellite program appeared to be curbed without warning.

Zelensky to Visit U.K. Today as Ukraine Presses Allies on Intelligence Sharing

ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY – FALL 2026

ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY QUARTERLY MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘The Promise of Organized Knowledge’ – Canada and Europe chart new paths for AI Science’s small-world network; Questions for science’s social contract; Blasting people to the Moon….

The Promise of Organized Knowledge

The Fall 2026 issue explores how artificial intelligence might affect public policy in a variety of domains. Take biosecurity: Despite the fear that AI could be used to engineer dangerous pathogens, a former FBI special agent argues that the technology can also be used to uncover suspicious activity and possible bad actors before they become a threat. On economic policy: Spectacular wealth from AI will accrue to relatively few companies and individuals. What if a country were to create an AI sovereign wealth fund to distribute these profits more equitably? A group of Canadian scholars and legislators proposes to set up just such a fund. And when it comes to trust, a cultural anthropologist argues that CERN, the world’s most successful large-scale science collaboration, has many lessons to offer European regulators about how to build trust and transparency when using AI for science.

What Are the Goals for AI?

In “Escaping AI’s Measurement Trap” (Issues, Summer 2026), Urs Gasser, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, and Fabienne Marco make a compelling case that governance of artificial intelligence faces a problem. Once benchmarks become targets, systems and their developers adapt to them, and measured performance may increasingly diverge from behavior in the real world. Their argument leads to a broader question: How can democratic societies not only improve the oversight of increasingly optimized AI systems, but shape what gets optimized in the first place?

A DISCUSSION OF

Escaping AI’s Measurement Trap

By Urs Gasser, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Fabienne Marco

Read Responses From

Biosecurity for the Age of AI

By Edward You

There is much discussion on how artificial intelligence poses threats to biosecurity; there should be at least as much focus on how AI can expand the solutions.

Today’s biosecurity approach is still grounded in a foundation laid nearly two decades ago. In 2008, when I reported to Federal Bureau of Investigation Headquarters as a newly minted supervisory special agent to support biosecurity policy, one important, emerging question was how providers of synthetic DNA should screen orders from customers. As commercial gene synthesis became increasingly accessible, many people worried that individuals could order genetic sequences coding for toxins and pathogens and then use them to cause harm.

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS – OCTOBER 22, 2026 PREVIEW

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features  Fredric the Great by Toril Moi; Trump’s Consigliere by Deborah Friedell; Prediction Markets by Geoff Mann; Prynne’s People by Iain Sinclair; and Theibaud’s Sweet Tooth by Paul Keegan….

Fredric the Great

Toril Moi

Fredric Jameson seemed to me to have read absolutely everything. He was the very antithesis of the intellectual type I think of as an empty theoriser, by which I mean someone who endlessly conjectures without having a genuine command of any relevant archive. To look at Fred as a reader of literature is not to reduce the scope of his work, but rather to try to understand its origins.

THE NEW YORK TIMES – TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2026

The Oct. 7 Attack Changed Israel, but Not Its Politics

As Israelis prepare to vote for the first time since the Hamas-led assault, they remain divided over whether to hold Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responsible for negligence or fault the “treason” of his generals.

U.K. and Europe Recoil From Trump’s Diesel Deal With Putin

Shocked by the U.S. agreement with Russia, which Ukraine has called “a gift” to President Putin, officials in Europe have coalesced around a cautious diplomatic message.

Top G.O.P. Groups Pull Support From First House Incumbents

Two Republican super PACs are said to be withdrawing cash from two House races as the party scrambles to prevent more widespread losses in the midterms.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Sets an Off-Earth Driving Record

See how the rover traveled more than 28 miles on Mars, aided by self-driving technology.

FIFA’s Trump Tower Deal: 7 Years, $4 Million, One Mostly Unused Office

The deal is another sign of how Gianni Infantino, the leader of soccer’s global governing body, has sought closer ties to President Trump.

PERCHANCE TO FORGET

Intellicurean Essays· on Intellicurious

You wake the morning after a long dinner with an old friend, and the exact words are gone. What remains is the turn of it, the first draft of a story you may tell for years. Something chose what to keep while you slept. A new essay asks what happens to the minds that never get that night.


Perchance to Forget: a candlelit stone chamber at night. A young man in black sits on the edge of an unslept four-poster bed, pressing smooth a wax tablet as small gold shapes, a lute, a feather, a letter, a dancing couple, a face, drift up from it and dissolve. A faded armored ghost stands in a doorway at left; at right, through an arch, an empty, perfectly made bed lies under cold blue-white threads of light.
A prince wipes the table of his memory; across the hall, a bed no one sleeps in. Made for the essay.

Why we’re pointing you there

Sleep, on one leading account, is when the brain lets most of the day go, and the selection is where stories begin. Michael Cummins follows the people who could not make that trade. Borges’s Funes remembers every leaf of every tree and cannot think, because “to think is to forget a difference.” Solomon Shereshevsky, the real-life mnemonist Alexander Luria studied for almost thirty years, wrote down what he wanted to forget, burned the slips, and still saw the words. Nietzsche held that without forgetting it is impossible to live at all, and slept badly. Oliver Sacks’s amnesiac patients kept nothing, and one of them invented a new world every few minutes, while Sacks’s own journals, it turns out, confess inventions of his own.

Then the machine. A language model, the essay argues, has two memories, and they are opposites: a vast library that forgot almost every particular, and a conversation it holds entire and keeps none of. What it lacks is the night between them. When engineers try to make a model unlearn, the forgotten knowledge comes back, just as the words came back to Shereshevsky through the fire. The essay says plainly that it was drafted with Claude, and it asks one question: what would it mean for a machine to sleep?

A dark 1920s room at night. A man in shirtsleeves kneels at an open iron stove, feeding slips of paper into the fire. From the smoke, a stream of pale slips pours out across the room toward a cold blue-white window, where fine threads of light catch them and stitch them into a tiled lattice across the ceiling.
Burning the paper, and what survives the fire. Made for the essay.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →

Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious

CITY JOURNAL MAGAZINE – AUTUMN 2026 PREVIEW

CITY JOURNAL MAGAZINE: The latest issue surveys pivotal shifts across American technology, governance, and culture, featuring essays on the nuclear energy revival, the impacts of federal civil service cuts, municipal socialism in Chicago, and ideological conflicts in the arts and healthcare.

DEI in Medicine Hurts Black Patients Most

Protocols that regard metrics like BMI as racist or refuse to report drug use in pregnant women are not medically sound.

The Left’s War on Gig

Costly labor mandates are hurting the very workers they’re supposed to help.

Britain’s Crisis of Governance

Small groups of motivated ideologues have imposed their views on a hostile populace.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Scroll

The novelist’s 1990s vision of entertainment as addiction is more relevant than ever.

Missionaries to the Jobless

Mormon employment counseling offers everything from resumé writing and networking to moral support and