Travel update – from 11pm Singapore time today I will be on the road until 21st June, mostly for work with a brief bank holiday weekend at Hay-on-Wye, attending the How the Light Gets In festival for the first time since 2019. Cities on the itinerary include London, Tallinn, Tartu, Denver, Colorado Springs, Evergreen and DC! Monday briefings might be updates rather than what’s going on in the wider world.
News Roundup
Sooooooo… 59 very oppressed Afrikaners landed as refugees at Dulles this past week, ready for that sweet taste of freedom, but the Episcopalians are having none of it and are ending their refugee resettlement agreement with the government… and we have a truce, for however long that might last, in this stupid game of tariff chicken.
Watch/Scroll
My favourite crazy Slav, folks, and his modus operandi – doing work to escape himself.
I have just returned from a month in South Africa and if I saw anything vaguely resembling this account, I would probably have left the country after a few days.
Read
Back to Sarah’s complicity, which she documents for the world in Careless People, a closer read by Jaime Brooks about the China hawkishness that just about every establishment wonk tediously bleats about ad nauseam.
The new pope isn’t wasting any time declaring AI a defining challenge of the era in his first address to cardinals – “Like the machines of the industrial revolution that reshaped labor and society, AI is reconfiguring the very meaning of human action and interaction.” A timely addition indeed to a working paper that a few friends and I are co-writing with AI about AI and human collaboration.
There is a lot to hate about the rank use of AI, too, as Marie Le Conte outlines. The funniest is the boomer angle, and I have to admit, I have almost never written an essay in uni sober…
Ponder
Is “luxury” a western concept created by 20th century capitalist retailers, or has some version of elite taste always existed in every culture on this planet? Chinese consumers are beginning to question concepts that drove them to almost single-handedly prop up the likes of Hermès, Louis Vuitton, et al.