Adam Tooze: Chartbook This year marks the 80th anniversary of 1945. Given the turmoil we are living through, it is tempting to look both backwards and forwards for orientation. As one of the tailgunners at a conference last week at Columbia University commemorating the 1945 moment, I was asked to give 15 minutes of remarks… Read More The future of the world economy beyond globalization – or, thinking with soup
Lily Jamali At OpenAI’s DevDaythis week, OpenAI boss Sam Altman did what American tech bosses rarely do these days: he actually answered questions from reporters. “I know it’s tempting to write the bubble story,” Mr Altman told me as he sat flanked by his top lieutenants. “In fact, there are many parts of AI that… Read More ‘It’s going to be really bad’: Fears over AI bubble bursting grow in Silicon Valley
IDF’s bombs and ground offensive have killed tens of thousands of people and reduced entire cities to rubble. As the number of WCNSFs – ‘wounded child, no surviving family’ – grows, charities struggle to find adults to look after them A UN commission report concluded Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza Jason Burke The… Read More Gaza in ruins: how Israel’s two-year assault has devastated the territory / No family, no stability, no social fabric: the anguish of Gaza’s wounded orphans
NB: More self-serving bufoonery by a corrupt war criminal. Brittania rules – if not the waves, the graveyard of murdered Palestinians. Blair and Trump make a good circus. They and their chums among the Arab despots are the vultures of our time, circling scenes of human devastation caused by their ally Israel; and looking out… Read More Tony Blair just can’t kick the habit of imperial interference in the Middle East
The French presidential hopeful used clemency for the perpetrators of the UTA 772 bombing to secure campaign funding from Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi Diane de Vignemont The wreckage of the plane lay scattered across the ocher sand of Niger’s Tenere desert — twisted aluminum, scorched luggage, a lone shoe. There were no survivors. French investigators… Read More A Plane Crashed in the Desert. Thirty-Five Years Later, It Would Help Take Down Nicolas Sarkozy
As platforms degrade into outrage and slop, users are turning away John Burn-Murdoch In years to come, we may well look back on September 2025 as the point at which social media jumped the shark and began rapidly accelerating its transition from the place to be seen (through a flattering Instagram filter), to a gaudy… Read More Have we passed peak social media?
By Alfred McCoy / TomDispatch In his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, which is eerily evocative of our current political plight, Gabriel Garcia Marquez described how a Latin American autocrat “discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, [and] became convinced… Read More A Dying American Empire, ‘Rotten to the Heart?’
NB: I respect this writer and this film maker for speaking the truth as far as their resources allow. The term community of crime is something terrifying because it reflects the truth about the fragility of human consience; and the power that ideologies possess to pervert the conscience into its opposite; to literally create communities… Read More Two years after the massacre, I look back in disbelief. I, too, missed the October 8 surprise / ‘If 1948 was a war of Independence, the current war could be the one that ends Israel’
This idea that the world was increasingly being shaped by a freemasonry of Western majoritarians seems to have seduced Modi’s government into thinking of India as the West’s indispensable partner…. By mimicking the rhetoric and the practices of the West’s ‘savarna’ nations, Modi’s government thought it could deal at the world’s top table. This strategy… Read More Heavy recoil
Shubhanga Pandey Friday 3 October 2025 When thousands of Nepalis in their teens and twenties descended on Kathmandu’s government district on 8 September, it was, for most, their first political experience. The immediate trigger for the protests, which had been gathering steam for several days, was a government ban on more than two dozen social-media… Read More Himalayan Uprising
After the truth-shower 