Lessons From Singapore – Nothing To Lose
by Eric Feigenbaum at 3 Quarks Daily: For a strange five minutes in 1994, Americans were talking about caning. An American teenager named Michael Fay drew Singapore into the international
Pakistan: Warping its Democracy
by Rashid Husain Syed at Globe and Mail: Pakistan, the nuclear-armed country that is the fifth most populous in the world, is on the cusp of a revolution – at
Brothers in Arms or Just Good Friends?
by Michael Ignatieff at Literary Review: Nearly three quarters of the world’s population, according to the experts, live in autocracies. Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc wants us to see the resemblances
Unmasking the Fear of AI’s Energy Demand
Vijaya Ramachandran, Juzel Lloyd, and Seaver Wang at the Breakthrough Journal: Amongst the many energy-hungry technologies supporting modern society, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a major driver of energy
Economics for the Age of TikTok
Rachel Dec in LA Review of Books: IN 2022, AS THE labor market thrived, a noticeable gap emerged between traditional economic indicators (which seemed good) and the lived experiences of
A Gentleman in Moscow Has a Little Bit of Everything
Bill Gates in Gates Notes: Melinda and I sometimes read the same book at the same time. It’s usually a lot of fun, but it can get us in trouble when
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Great Thinkers and Their Clutter
Samira Ahmed in New Humanist: There is a painting of the late Peter Higgs, the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, that hangs in a science building at the University of Edinburgh. It
Can a Word have an Existential Crisis?
By Edwin L. Battistella at OUP: A while back, a philosopher friend of mine was fretting about the adjective “existential.” She was irked by people using it to refer to
Are We Living in ‘Late Soviet America’?
From The Free Press: A few weeks ago, fresh from being knighted by King Charles, historian Sir Niall Ferguson officially joined The Free Press as a columnist. His first piece
Thoughts On The Advice Pandemic
by Tom Cox at The Villager: In my experience, it is the people who seem most adamant that they know the correct way to live, and are most keen to
Explosion in AI-driven Data Centres is Putting Pressure on the Grid
Eric Smalley at The Conversation: Asking ChatGPT a question is quite a bit different from searching on Google. This is for a number of reasons. But one that can be
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