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Conferences can be a bit like summer camp: people come together for a few intense days once a year, then return to their regular lives. Last week, in Tallinn, Estonia, I attended the Lennart Meri Conference on foreign policy and security. (I go most years.) I was on a panel with Leonid Volkov, a close […]

“There is a natural aristocracy among men,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams from Monticello, in 1813, in one of the best-known passages from their vast post-Presidential correspondence. “There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtues or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The […]

Listen with: iTunes WNYC Stitcher TuneIn In May, President Donald Trump instructed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to impose a ban on foreign-made equipment, much of it from China, that might pose a security threat to the U.S. Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, characterizes the new U.S. policy as “bullying” and called it a threat to […]

There’s a theoretical aspect to Joanna Hogg’s urgent and ambitious autobiographical drama, “The Souvenir,” along with its dramatic one; but, far from reinforcing each other, these two aspects are in conflict—neither wins, but both are weakened. It’s set mainly in London, in the early nineteen-eighties, when Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), a young filmmaker and film […]

Le Pen’s National Rally is likely to be tied with “lobbyists close to the American government,” the French president claimed as polls show his party is losing support just days ahead of the European Parliament vote. Recent polls show Macron’s party La République En Marche (LREM) is trailing behind Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally and […]

A corruption scandal has Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s grip on power slipping by the day. With a no-confidence motion likely, can Austria’s right and left wings team up to boot the 32-year-old leader from office? In a matter of days, Kurz has accepted the resignation of former coalition partner head Heinz-Christian Strache, and sacked Interior […]

Default feminine voices used in AI assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri promote gender stereotypes of female subservience, a new UN report has claimed, prompting the internet to ask the question: “Can you harass code?” The report, released Wednesday by the UN’s cultural and scientific body UNESCO, found that the majority of AI assistant […]