‘Superintelligence,’ Ten Years On
AI catastrophe is easy to imagine, but a lot has to go consistently and infallibly wrong for the doom theory to pan out.
Sean Welsh
· 12 min read
England’s Daydreaming
Robyn Hitchcock’s new memoir takes us back to 1967—a year the British singer-songwriter never outgrew.
Dave Thompson
· 12 min read
Tabletop Gaming’s Anti-Israel Meltdown: The Strange Tale of Waffles and Syrup
When the CEO of a boardgame awards show boasted publicly that she’d be disqualifying all nominees who ‘identify as Zionists,’ her event was quickly dropped from North America’s biggest game convention.
Jonathan Kay
· 12 min read
In Praise of Negativity Bias
It’s the things and people that offer pushback that make personal achievement possible and meaningful. It’s the knots that drive us to comb.
Iona Italia
· 5 min read
An Interview with Dani Elgarat, Brother of Israeli Hostage Itzik Elgarat
Pamela Paresky speaks with Dani Elgarat about the 7 October Hamas attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz, the experience of hostage families, the failures of the Israeli government, and the ideological roots of Islamist violence.
Pamela Paresky
· 9 min read
The New Political Christianity
Western civilisation has not succeeded because its liberal and secular principles are Christian; it has succeeded because Western Christians have accepted its liberal and secular values.
Adam Wakeling
· 9 min read
The Travesty of the Assange Plea Deal
The complacency of American liberalism has been demonstrated yet again in its inability, or unwillingness, to guard the national interest.
Brian Stewart
· 7 min read
France’s Founding Fathers: A Review of ‘House of Lilies’
In a new book, Justine Firnhaber-Baker tells the story of the Capetian dynasty (987–1328), whose rulers stitched a set of medieval duchies and counties into a single kingdom.
Charlotte Allen
· 20 min read
The War Against Truth
It has long been a cliché that China is inscrutable to foreigners, but it is also becoming inscrutable to itself.
Aaron Sarin
· 9 min read
Podcast #240: Parsi Bombay, Then and Now
Iona Italia talks to Nev March about her historical novel, Murder in Old Bombay, and about the Zoroastrians of Bombay both past and present.
Quillette
· 43 min read
What Heterodox Feminism Is Not
It's not enough to be a dissenter: it also matters what you are dissenting from and what you're getting out of it.
Holly Lawford-Smith
· 9 min read
The Roots of Progressive Radicalism: Nellie Bowles vs. Musa al-Gharbi
In two new books, a journalist and an academic offer competing explanations for the extremist ideological tendencies within left-wing cultural, academic, activist, and political institutions.
Jonathan Kay
· 16 min read
Sin and Social Science
Glenn Loury’s startlingly frank confessional memoir offers a complex portrait of a brilliant scholar and a profoundly flawed man.
John Lloyd
· 14 min read