Tuesday, November 3, 2026
ArchiveTrump claims US will end military aid to Israel by end of this year
Four billion dollars a year, cut loose in an off-hand Election Day remark aimed at sceptical voters rather than at Jerusalem. Whether it survives Congress is the question everyone will be asking by Thursday.
Juan Atkins and the Institutional Failures of American Culture
Atkins invented a genre in a Detroit bedroom and the mainstream obituary pages barely noticed. Reynaldo's grief curdles into a precise argument about which American art gets canonised and which gets filed under 'dance'.
Revisiting the China Shock (with Joseph Francis)
One paper convinced Washington that Chinese imports hollowed out American manufacturing. Francis thinks its data is unreliable — and Roberts spends the hour refusing to let him hand-wave it.
Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
Deep Blue was a 1.4-ton cabinet of custom chips. Carlini benchmarks what a plain 1996 Pentium running today's algorithms would have done to Kasparov, and the answer is a lesson in where progress actually comes from.
Writing seen in PHerc. 306B, for the first time in 2000 years
Buried by Vesuvius, too fragile to unroll, silent for two thousand years. Letters from inside PHerc. 306B have now been read without anyone touching the page.