Creepy commonalities: the revival of nostalgia for evil pasts
In the bestselling satirical novel by Timur Vermes, Look Who’s Back, a scruffy character in a dusty and petrol-soaked trenchcoat with a trademark sweep of
The most endearing feature of the high-trust society is the honesty box
In many English villages, eggs or vegetables are left outside homes on tables. You take half a dozen of the former, then you slip cash into a box, ordinarily a few pounds. Nobody is guarding the table, nobody is monitoring the box. At the end of the day the person selling is almost guaranteed to reconcile to the penny.
Crude errors: the government’s flawed strategic fuel reserve plan
Two key events in the past week put Gulf oil supplies at increased risk and helped push the price of Brent crude back above $100 a barrel. The first was Saudi Arabia’s decision to shut down its East-West crude pipeline following a drone strike. The second was a sudden advance by Iran-aligned Houthi forces in Yemen, who swept south along the Red Sea coast, seizing towns and taking control of strategic islands inside the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. This gives the Houthis the capacity to close a key artery for Gulf oil, even as passage through the Strait of Hormuz remains constrained.
Marco Rubio takes on the South African elite on Constitution Day
Hello from the District of Columbia swamp! This column goes live on 17 September, Constitution Day in the United States, and I had the privilege of writing it during a long stay in the American capital. Two days earlier, 15 September, was National Voter Registration Day.
What does “slow down” even mean? (and Elon Musk’s big idea)
Keeping up is exhausting. The constant flow of WTF stories out of the global AI technopolitical ecosystem has rendered both the commentators and the curious (including this writer) a little punch-drunk.
Alternatives to a BRICS searching for a role
The BRICS grouping — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — and its other members and partners met in New Delhi over the weekend and issued a mammoth 51-page declaration. A long declaration with little really new is a sure sign that the drafters could not agree on a few big, important things.
Kneeling before narcissists
It’s been a good few weeks for pro-Palestine supporters, starting with a murder in New York.
The cost of non-non-alignment
Africa is a net food importer despite holding around two-thirds of the world’s uncultivated arable land. As the number of Africans increases annually, so too does the money spent on agricultural imports, driven up by logistics costs, inefficiencies and now, war. The annual African food import figure is some $100 billion, with 16 of 55 African countries net food importers.
Never trust an industry that begs to be regulated
AI frontier labs are raising the alarm that their models could end humanity, and ought to be restricted by the state. Weird.
Thank God I’m alive today
Over the last week I have been playing around with a fun AI tool called “Any Human Ever” . When you click the button on the site, it generates a random imaginary human life, based on statistical probability. Over the entirety of human existence, it is believed that around 100 billion people have lived, of whom 8.3 billion are alive today, most people who have lived live much closer to 2026 than to the origins of our species 300 000 years ago.