The Melania movie sold one ticket in the UK. One. A lone cinema seat briefly warmed by what history will record as either curiosity, irony, or a scheduling error. Somewhere, a spreadsheet mistook this for “market engagement”. This was never really a film. It was a prestige-shaped offering, a glossy
Germany’s conservatives have found a new culprit for a sluggish economy, and it is not underinvestment, weak demand, or decades of political caution. It is free time. More precisely, it is the audacity of workers to choose part-time hours without first asking permission. The business wing of the Christian
Gregory Bovino is leaving Minneapolis, and Washington would very much like you to believe that this is accountability in action. A reshuffle. A quiet walk-back. A “return to a previous role”. Perhaps even, if the messaging holds, a well-earned retirement. In reality, it looks far more like the oldest trick
As the United States slides toward irrelevance dressed up as nostalgia, Europe finds itself in an unfamiliar and uncomfortable role: the least broken major democratic project still standing. This is not because Europe is pure, virtuous or immune to authoritarian temptation, but because the American model has hollowed itself out
In the 18th century, wealth was inseparable from hierarchy. Rich people were not merely affluent; they were entitled. Aristocrats, landowners and monarch-adjacent elites were widely seen as a natural ruling class, justified by birth, divine order or tradition. Admiration and resentment coexisted, but neither seriously challenged the legitimacy of extreme
Trump wants “more countries” for the same reason a failing middle manager wants more direct reports: not because he’s good at running anything, but because expansion looks like competence from far away. When domestic problems are complex, slow and politically costly to fix, territorial ambition offers instant spectacle. You
Once upon a time, children were taught to mistrust power the way you mistrust a stranger offering candy from a van. Now we hand power our data, our attention, our labor and our politics, then thank it for the opportunity. Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
China has apparently decided that if the global AI arms race is going to be a farce, it might as well be a high-budget one with customs officials as the punchline. Nvidia’s H200 AI chips, recently cleared for export by the US government after much strategic throat-clearing, have been
The internet’s self-appointed guardians of freedom have once again discovered that democracy is very inconvenient when it applies to them. Cloudflare, a private American corporation that quietly sits underneath a large chunk of the global internet like a concrete foundation no one voted for, is very upset with Italy.
We are living through an era of products that do not work, do not help, and do not meaningfully solve a problem. They exist to justify a pitch deck, absorb investment capital, and perform adequately for a five-minute demo. After that, responsibility dissolves. Bugs become “features”. Missing functionality becomes “roadmap”
Good news, everyone. Humanity gets a few more years. Daniel Kokotajlo, former OpenAI employee and part-time prophet of machine-induced extinction, has updated his timeline. The robots are no longer scheduled to kill us by 2030. They’re… penciled in for later. Maybe 2034. Give or take. Calendar flexible. This is
Satya Nadella has a request. A gentle one. A reasonable one. Please stop calling it “slop.” In a year-end LinkedIn sermon delivered from the cloud-scented heights of corporate power, the Microsoft CEO urged us to “get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication.” Which is a fascinating thing to say