"The absence of consciousness in AI is not merely a philosophical finding.... It means that every human-AI system must be architected to preserve the human’s capacity for meaning-making, judgment & coherence-holding, because no one else in the arrangement will do it" www.noemamag.com/what-the-ai-...

"The diagnosis of Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman about the mismatch between planetary-scale crises and governance systems centered on the nation-state... points toward arrangements that echo the distributed authority long practiced in Indigenous territories." news.mongabay.com/2026/03/why-...

Virtually every gold medal calibre athlete is in some way a wild biological outlier. One example: Michael Phelps has an estimated lung capacity of 12 liters — about DOUBLE the average male. Or another: only one in 100,000,000 people are as tall as Victor Wembanyama. Should they be banned?

Not sure if this is true but if it is that’s a quadrupling of revenue

Trump to St Helena in 2029? podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...

Anticipating what these guys are going to do is not hard because they say what they’re going to do right out loud

This Borderline Personality Administration is undoubtedly proving itself effective at dismantling legacy systems, but it will leave behind nothing but ransacked and wrecked institutions, rather than a stable new order.

I’ve been saying it for years: Trump himself is animated by neither ideas nor ideology, but he does have a fairly stable set of (feral) instincts and (personal) interests. Working off that sort of assessment is not what traditional think tanks do, however.

“Green technologies possess fundamental thermodynamic advantages over fossil fuels, which suffer from expensive energy losses during extraction & refining…EVs, being simpler to manufacture & maintain, are already functionally superior to internal combustion engines” foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/23/c...

NATO military official: “We realize that we need to step up and take much more responsibility for our own security, and we are. But we need predictability.” www.politico.com/news/2026/03...

“Genetically homogeneous [dogs were] already widely distributed across Europe & Anatolia during the Late Upper Palaeolithic. This finding suggests that dogs were exchanged among genetically & culturally distinct western Eurasian Late Palaeolithic human populations.” www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The view expressed here is one of the most distilled forms of cognitive evil I have ever seen www.instagram.com/reels/DQxCeq...

Nuts: Former close ally Denmark deployed soldiers to Greenland prepared to blow up airport runways to stop a U.S. invasion. France, Germany, Norway & Sweden quietly coordinated with Denmark. Do Americans understand how much POTUS has damaged our standing in the world? www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/w...

This is wild www.latimes.com/california/s...

Really excellent and jarring glimpse into the approaching energy-driven geopolitical future by @nilsgilman.bsky.social “Ultimately, the choice for the middle powers comes down to what kind of modernity they want to inhabit…”

In this case, for a change, the polls reflect reality quite well: the American military is being highly tactically and operationally effective at executing an illegal and likely disastrous strategy www.foxnews.com/politics/fox...

The corruption is breathtaking and everyone involved in it needs to go to jail or exile when this is over.

The future is already here, it’s jus unevenly distributed

Trump has confounded his domestic opponents, in large part because they entered and advanced their careers in politics as a transactional endeavor. Many of their problems would be solved by letting that ideal go for now, and adopting the right posture. www.offmessage.net/p/donald-tru...

What is going on?!

When this is all over, these people need to be sent into exile.

Ten years ago (in 2014), V-Dem assessed that 48% of the world’s population lived under autocratic rule, circa 3.5–3.6 billion people. That number has since grown to 72% — roughly 5.7–5.8 billion, or what was the entire population of the world in 1996.

"The culture of three cities: Marseille, 'white, warm, throbbing with life'; Rome, a labyrinth of romance and mystery; and Paris, a morass of duplicity and corruption..." — two centuries later these generalizations kinda still hold up. substack.nybooks.com/p/revenge-of...

How Google Maps splits the difference (when you’re abroad)

The death rattles of empires are rarely edifying

JD Vance, sitting up all night, obsessively reading Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (fils)

Faster, please

Little known fact: the word “communist” and the word “pornography” were both invented by the same person, Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, who was also a notorious shoe fetishist.

I am going to do something I rarely do: share a link whose details I am not competent to evaluate, and which does not come from a source I know enough to trust. I do not vouch for any of the details about targeting, for instance. But the way of thinking about AI in war is, imho, really valuable.

Costco is everything that is great and terrible about America www.tiktok.com/t/ZTkR1UkUE/

For a granular view of who is poised to win and lose in this new order, dig in to our Clean industrial capabilities explorer: cice.netzeropolicylab.com

"Petrostates will deploy energy as leverage...United States and Gulf producers will use cheap, readily available fossil fuels as a tool of clientelism—offering developing nations fast, affordable energy access in exchange for long-term infrastructural lock-in" foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/23/c...

If I describe a country that “generates massive technological innovation yet fails create sufficient jobs to employ young people, who are disillusioned with a political and social model that seems to offer them only a pressured and financially precarious lifestyle,” what country first comes to mind?

Axis of Petrostates hegemon doing ecological evil empire things... www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/c...

Entrepreneurship is not and can never become a science colossus.com/article/we-h...

"The Axis of Petrostates is a reactionary coalition—led notably by the US, in tacit coalition with .. states such as Russia and the Gulf monarchies—whose economic models and civilizational narratives are inextricably tied to fossil fuels." foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/23/c...

ICE has become Trump’s Praetorian Guard.

Part of what this story underscores is that the right perceives ICE not just as an immigration enforcement machine but more broadly as a sort of executive cheat code that allows Trump to override by fiat all normal administrative proceduralisms www.cnn.com/2026/03/23/m...

Among the brilliancies in this essay is the concept of the “bureaucratic double bind”: an organization cannot function without its members exercising independent judgment, but it cannot acknowledge the judgment without undermining itself & being seen as “political.” open.substack.com/pub/artifici...

When the metabolic rift leads to a metabolic clash - brief thoughts on an essay by @nilsgilman.bsky.social in FP.

“What now”?! It’s going to get hotter yet of course! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The central faultline of the emerging post-liberal international order will be a geopolitical struggle over what metabolic-industrial system will dominate the 21st century — with smaller powers struggling to avoid total alignment with either bloc. My latest: foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/23/c...

The $64k question: how much of a political price will they pay?

"The zombie apocalypse portrayal of abandoned cities, he said, is not a realistic prediction of the future. The most dangerous places, @alexsteffen.bsky.social said, are rural or exurban, because they tend to lack amenities, infrastructure and a sense of community." www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/n...

Can we pause for a sec to make a comment on basic language? AP writes, “The ceasefire has still seen almost daily Israeli fire. Israeli forces have carried out repeated airstrikes & frequently fire on Palestinians.…” It’s not a “ceasefire” if either side is still firing! apnews.com/article/isra...

"If you believe not only that all men are created equal but also that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, then war cannot be justified as a pure display of power & dominance" — true, and obviously MAGA doesn't believe in those things www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/o...

“Everything exists in a state of almost.” www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/b...

Is that a promise or a threat?! www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The point of a difficult style — I think here of everyone from Kant & Adorno to Woolf & Pynchon — is to demand that the reader situate herself in the specific density of the lexical situation, against the cheap facility of what surrounds it, as a form of intellectual Danegeld for genuine thinking.

The Ecological Evil Empire of the new Cold War, doing its thing www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/c...