Posts:
By Brahma Chellaney China shapes global knowledge not just by blocking information at home, but by exporting censorship through economic coercion and diplomatic pressure. It is increasingly influencing what the rest of the world knows about its internal repression and...
Britain has recently been engaged in one of its periodic bouts of national pearl-clutching, this time over the late Professor Jason Arday. Arday became the youngest Black professor at Cambridge University in 2023 after telling an extraordinary story. Allegedly...
It is difficult to think of a more efficient immigration scheme. A pregnant woman obtains a tourist visa, flies to the United States, checks into a furnished apartment, gives birth in an American hospital and returns home with a newborn US citizen. There are...
By Anthony Cuthbertson It is meant to be humanity’s last invention. The moment a general-purpose AI is able to outthink the greatest human minds, then all future discoveries and scientific advancements will be made by machines rather than people. It is also supposed...
By D.T. Max This past April, in a nondescript examining room in Glendale, California, molecular biologist David Sinclair watched as an ophthalmologist injected a small amount of a substance Sinclair helped invent, called ER-100, into the left eye of a man with...
By Cory Doctorow Neoclassical economics assumes rationality. The corollary of "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is "you're rich, so you must be very smart!" Thus it is that many people assume that if powerful, well-compensated CEOs insist that "AI is changing...
I recently noticed a below the line comment describing the United States as a poor country. To me this seemed plainly wrong. The United States is not a poor country, but it is an extraordinarily rich country in which wealth is distributed so unevenly that millions of...
By James Bargent and Steven Dudley The capture of Ecuadorian crime boss Wilmer Chavarría, alias “Pipo,” was a major victory for President Daniel Noboa’s strategy of targeting high-value criminal leaders. But it also raises a larger question: Do kingpin arrests weaken...
By Pilar Troya Fernández President Daniel Noboa governs Ecuador with increasingly authoritarian methods. Elected in 2023 and reelected in 2025, he has concentrated power in the executive branch, clashed with the Constitutional Court, abused states of emergency, and...
If you grew up in the US with a television in the house during the 1950s or early 60s, you likely knew Dorothy Kilgallen as the elegant, sharp-witted woman on the panel of What's My Line? She was the one who could guess a guest's occupation, whether they were a...
By Riki Cevallos Recently, I took a group to the Sarayaku territory, where we participated in a guayusa ceremony alongside two of their most prominent leaders: Jose Gualinga and Noemí Gualinga. Jose revealed the strategy they would use in their upcoming appearance in...
By Frank Landymore Some copywriter at Microsoft is getting a real stern talking to. In an internal document obtained by 404 Media, the tech giant let slip that it wants to “make people addicted” to its new personal assistant AI agent, Scout — an alarming admission,...
By Lindsay Schakenbach Regele Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the United States has ramped up military, economic and political interventions in Latin America. Nowhere were those three factors more clear than the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan...
One of the odd things about growing old in Ecuador is that you occasionally find yourself understanding English literature better while admiring the view from Larga Towers in Cuenca than you ever did in England itself. This happened to me recently while watching the...
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...
