metazine

A new annual strategy document would streamline spending and signal seriousness to allies.

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s decision to rescind rules protecting journalists are being used as a cudgel to attack the First Amendment.

Rarely considered together, the intertwined legacy of this odd couple, Skinner and Lilly, has given us the world we live in now: the world of surveillance capitalism and generative AI, of high-tech woo-woo and algorithmic self-optimization, a world that is a weird and improbable synthesis between the visions of these two era-defining midcentury mind scientists. Each of these documentaries is a deft archival dive, and, taken together, they give us a new angle on this pair, the unacknowledged Romulus and Remus of contemporary technocapitalism.

Rep. Delia Ramirez called her bill “the bare minimum” to rein in ICE while Democratic leadership remains resistant to abolishing the agency.

Dunn was quite possibly the last writer anyone would have expected to resurface, after nearly two decades of silence, with the 1989 bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award.

Instead of having lots of EVs refueling simultaneously, active managed charging distributes the load through the night, stabilizing the grid.

María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader and recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been calling for a foreign—read: US-led—military

Five Republican senators had advanced a war powers resolution to block war with Venezuela. After Trump went berserk, the final vote failed.

In apparent references to Renee Good, multiple agents have asked protesters: “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days? ”

The first time I saw a sculpture by Tatiana Trouvé, in an uncommonly dim gallery at a museum in Mougins, in southern France, I assumed that I had found

Can the reuse of crypto mining’s waste heat redeem its carbon footprint?

Trump says Greenland is defended by dog sleds . But under royal decree, Denmark’s small military presence must put up a fight if attacked.

The murdered Poet became for him the gash in the center of the sun, the model and the justification for being misunderstood. From the audience, during academic conferences, he hurled passionate and senseless accusations at the speakers, which were met with chuckles and mild feelings of guilt. Even though he had a stable relationship and many occasional lovers, more and more it seemed to him that the double seduction left unfulfilled on that far-off day was the one true memorable event in his life.

Fateh and Fatimah lived on the westernmost edge of Simpelveld, at the end of a long row of apartment blocks, in the tallest building in the vicinity. To the west were sunken lanes that ascended into low hills; to the east the paved street that led to the town proper. I blew out a thick stream of smoke, musing that, as in a cartoon depiction of anger, I was literally blowing off steam.

That night I dreamed that my dad had died. The lectern at the service was too high and nobody could see me. I didn’t know what to say, so I gave a eulogy about someone I knew a little better who was still alive. When I woke up, my pillow was drenched with sweat. Had my speech been well received? I did some googling and learned that lecterns are between forty-five and forty-eight inches tall. I am nearly a foot taller than that. Thank God.

“Men make their own history, ” Marx wrote, “but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. ” That may be broadly true, but Dick Cheney got to make history under the exact circumstances he would have chosen.

The feminists got headaches and worked so relentlessly that they forgot to eat. They smoked too much and made half-hearted attempts to quit. They sent each other presents — articles of clothing, a copy of the latest pamphlet from the Radicalesbians. They slept with disappointing men and mused about bad sex under capitalism. They expressed adoration for one another. They earnestly poured their hearts into writing and recording songs about housework. They organized community meetings with the mothers of schoolkids and then got bored with the mundane things the mothers wanted.

In the contemporary Chinese context, the idea that crucial parts of the central government could simply cease to operate for more than a month, as part of a procedural standoff between rival governing factions, would beggar belief. And in turn, to an American observer, the thought that miles of new high-speed rail lines could simply materialize by bureaucratic fiat, unencumbered by years of legislative horse-trading, environmental review, suburban backlash, and budgetary overshoot, is no less astonishing.

Instead of fearing that LLMs will replace me by writing better essays, I’d love to hear how they can support me write essays better.

The story of humanity in space is not over, but the reality is that Musk is probably already yesterday’s man. The apogee of his arc was most likely the chainsaw tableau onstage at CPAC — and what a pathetic apogee it was: a man in late middle age, haunted and horribly unhappy, drug-addled and gibbering, further in that moment from Mars than he had ever been. If he has a legacy in space, it is less likely to be the Martian accomplishment and more likely to be that he took Kennedy’s dream and made it tawdry, partisan, and stupid.