Tag Archives: Politics

Cover Preview: Harper’s Magazine – July 2022

Empire Burlesque by Daniel Bessner

What comes after the American Century?

In February 1941, as Adolf Hitler’s armies prepared to invade the Soviet Union, the Republican oligarch and publisher Henry Luce laid out a vision for global domination in an article titled the american century. World War II, he argued, was the result of the United States’ immature refusal to accept the mantle of world leadership after the British Empire had begun to deteriorate in the wake of World War I. American foolishness, the millionaire claimed, had provided space for Nazi Germany’s rise. The only way to rectify this mistake and prevent future conflict was for the United…

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Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – June 20, 2022

Elizabeth Colomba’s “157 Years of Juneteenth”

The artist discusses Harlem and the necessity of painting Black bodies into historically white spaces.

Preview: The Economist Magazine – June 11, 2022

Artificial intelligence’s new frontier

The promise and perils of a breakthrough in machine intelligence

Jun 9th 2022ShareGive

Picture a computer that could finish your sentences, using a better turn of phrase; or use a snatch of melody to compose music that sounds as if you wrote it (though you never would have); or solve a problem by creating hundreds of lines of computer code—leaving you to focus on something even harder. In a sense, that computer is merely the descendant of the power looms and steam engines that hastened the Industrial Revolution. But it also belongs to a new class of machine, because it grasps the symbols in language, music and programming and uses them in ways that seem creative. A bit like a human.

The “foundation models” that can do these things represent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, or ai. They, too, promise a revolution, but this one will affect the high-status brainwork that the Industrial Revolution never touched. There are no guarantees about what lies ahead—after all, ai has stumbled in the past. But it is time to look at the promise and perils of the next big thing in machine intelligence.

Morning News: Turmoil In Pakistan, Ukraine Seed Bank, Words For Family

Pakistan’s government faces an unpleasant choice between doing what’s popular and what is economically necessary, as Imran Khan, the former prime minister, exploits widespread discontent for his own ends. 

Russia’s invasion is threatening Ukraine’s unique seed bank. And why so many languages have such a rich variety of words to describe family members and relationships.

Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – June 13, 2022

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – June 6, 2022

Chalk drawings outlining the shapes of children on a black background.

The Magazine – June 6, 2022

Eric Drooker’s “Uvalde, May 24, 2022” – Gun violence and the American way of life.

By Françoise Mouly, Art by Eric Drooker

  • On May 24th, an eighteen-year-old gunman shot and killed nineteen children and two adults at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas. The horrific spree came just ten days after thirteen people were shot—ten of them killed—at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, by a self-professed white supremacist. In the past two months, Americans have also been confronted with mass shootings at a church, a flea market, and inside a subway car during the morning rush-hour. The magazine’s cover for the June 6, 2022, issue, is by the artist Eric Drooker, who echoes the weary rage of many when he says, “I hastily scrawled this image, wondering, Why are Americans so infatuated with guns in the first place? What are they so afraid of?”

Wednesday News: Turkey’s Foreign Policy, Russia In Donbas, World Economies

What are Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s foreign-policy aims? Plus: Russian troops try to encircle Ukrainian special forces in the Donbas region, a dispatch from our team at the World Economic Forum, and the latest business news. 

Cover Preview: Harper’s Magazine – June 2022

Permanent Pandemic

by Justin E. H. Smith

Will COVID controls keep controlling us?

In January 2022 I came down with mild symptoms of something or other. I was already triple-vaxxed, with a French vaccine passport (“pass vaccinal”) on my iPhone to prove it, and like a true pioneer I had already suffered through a bout of COVID-19 long before, in March 2020.