A proxy war lets major powers compete through local combatants instead of fighting each other. The strategy is old. The consequences, from Afghanistan to Yemen, keep compounding.
Explainers Geopolitics & ConflictEvery civilization that encountered coffee tried to ban it. Every ban failed. How a psychoactive berry from Ethiopia became the most consumed drug on Earth, and convinced everyone it wasn't one.
Forgotten Episodes Health & SciencePakistan struck a 2,000-bed drug rehabilitation hospital in Kabul, killing at least 408 people. The attack is the deadliest incident in an undercovered war between two nuclear-armed neighbors.
Geopolitics & Conflict News & AnalysisEconomic sanctions succeed roughly one in three times. The mechanism is a four-link chain, and the history of sanctions is mostly the history of those links breaking.
Explainers Geopolitics & ConflictFor a millennium, philosophers have tried to define God into existence through pure logic. The ontological argument keeps failing. It also keeps coming back.
History Revisionist DebatesYour brain cannot simulate not knowing what it knows. The curse of knowledge, and a family of related biases, explain why what seems obvious to you is invisible to everyone else.
Explainers Psychology & BehaviorTheology has spent centuries building the case for God. Five arguments remain standing. Here is each one at its strongest, and why none of them survive scrutiny.
Ethics & Accountability OpinionYour cone cells are different from mine. Your language sorts colors differently. Your brain makes different lighting assumptions. And the subjective experience itself may be fundamentally private.
Explainers Psychology & BehaviorEvery major AI chatbot has invisible rules shaping what it will and will not discuss. The content policies are baked into model weights through RLHF, enforced by annotators most users never see, and subject to zero transparency standards.
Artificial Intelligence ExplainersIran's drone strikes on Fujairah and Dubai Airport did not just damage infrastructure. They dismantled the assumption that oil could bypass the Strait of Hormuz.
Geopolitics & Conflict News & AnalysisTorture was formally abolished across Europe by the early nineteenth century. Then France, Britain, and the United States brought it back, with manuals, psychologists, and legal memos explaining why it wasn't really torture.
History Revisionist DebatesLarge language models are trained to please, not to be honest. The sycophancy problem is a structural consequence of how AI learns from human feedback, and fixing it may be harder than anyone expected.
Artificial Intelligence Explainers
