Posts:
By Tiffany Hsu In a world where trust in truth is crumbling, the grande dame of collective online fact-gathering is under threat on every front. The MAGA right, with Elon Musk at the fore, is slinging accusations of political bias and antisemitism and has even...
By Mark Hertsgaard The publisher of The New York Times recently made an extraordinary speech about AI, journalism, and the public square that’s received surprisingly little public reaction. What makes A.G. Sulzberger’s speech extraordinary is that it was unabashedly...
How to Age a Painting a Hundred Years in One Afternoon Last time we met Han van Meegeren, the Dutch artist who forged a series of Vermeers so convincing that the Rijksmuseum paid a world record price for one of them, and Hermann Göring acquired another under the...
If you have not yet discovered Fake or Fortune? on YouTube, you have a pleasurable few evenings ahead of you. The program is a BBC production hosted by art journalist Fiona Bruce and art dealer Philip Mould, and the premise is simple enough: someone owns a painting...
By John Prideaux Fans of soccerball love to complain about America. With its unbridled capitalism, it has the gall to treat football as a business. “Hydration breaks” have been introduced in this year’s World Cup. Fans suspect these are the first step to more frequent...
By John O’Farrell I first came to America from Ireland in 1984, as a young engineer about to attend business school. I chose Stanford University — partly for the weather and natural beauty, but more for the electrifying entrepreneurial spirit coursing through Silicon...
By Lucy Gill-Simmen Deep in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes prisoners chained inside a cave, mistaking shadows cast on a wall by firelight for reality itself. They name the shadows, debate them and develop expertise about them. The prisoners are...
No discussion of Ecuador's proposed 15,000-person prison can continue for more than seven minutes before somebody invokes El Salvador. The process is now almost automatic. Mention organized crime, prison gangs, or extortion in Latin America and, within moments, the...
Within minutes of Ecuador announcing plans for a 15,000-person prison complex, the BTL Expat Think Tank had already produced a complete reform strategy involving desert fortresses, retired military consultants, signal jammers, biometric scanners, and at least three...
By Maria Zuppello Ecuador’s criminal landscape continues to rapidly evolve, as a response to the Daniel Noboa administration’s military pressure campaign. This evolution is marked by an ongoing diversification and fragmentation of major criminal organizations and the...
By la Fundación Periodistas Sin Cadenas President Daniel Noboa's government has developed a communication strategy designed to minimize the president's exposure to the public, protect the government’s narrative, and limit the chances for journalists to question public...
By James O'Donnell A few months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper that earned him few fans in Silicon Valley. Contrary to what Big Tech CEOs had been promising — an overhaul of all white-collar work — Acemoglu...
By Kris Fischer I look to my left. A bus careening on two wheels and belching diesel fumes bears down on me. I leap backwards just in time. My fellow pedestrians who have stayed safely curbside look at me with raised eyebrows as if to say, "Silly gringa! She really...
By Alec Ryrie If you're a Protestant, the anniversary of the revolution Martin Luther set in motion 500 years ago is a big deal. But even if you're not, it should be. The Reformation was one of the decisive events that made the world we live in, for better or worse....
By R.S. Gompertz When the English language gives you lemons, you can make lemonade. Deciphering mixed metaphors in English is like comparing apples and oranges except that the apple never falls far from the tree, even when a bad one ruins the barrel. You may have...
By Rich Lowry We’ve been having a debate about “book bans” in recent years, but given the steep decline in student literacy, the deeper question is how anyone would notice whether a book is available in a school library or not. The New York Times published an...
By Carlos Calderón A couple of years ago, a recently arrived expat who I had only met a few days earlier asked if I could arrange a meeting for him with then-President Guillermo Lasso. He knew that I had been a consultant to the government on an archaeological project...
By Callum Williams Silicon Valley, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, is relentlessly focused on the future. This attitude has many benefits. It helps people devote themselves to creating new technologies, many of which change the world. But it has a cost,...
By Zeynep Tufekci There’s no question that another pandemic will strike, but no one knows when or which virus will be the cause. What we can determine with pretty good clarity is how ready we’ll be, how well we’re constructing obstacles to slow the path of emerging...
By Peter Yared For years, the United States has tried to slow China’s progress in artificial intelligence by restricting exports of advanced AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment. That strategy may have bought time, but it is now backfiring. China has...
Week of September 06
U.S. sinkings of Ecuadorian fishing vessels trigger court scrutiny after 28 crew members are released.
Cuenca targets a November launch for its first new international link to Chiclayo.
Exports hit a quarterly record, but Ecuador’s import bill is rising even faster.
