By chance I read two books on incarceration recently, both excellent: Huna by Abdelrahman Al Gendy, beautifully written but painful account of Egyptian prison + modern Egypt. Evan Gerschkovitch's This Cursed Beautiful Land details the descent of Putin's Russia into full autocracy.

A week after the state botches a brutal execution via lethal injection of Christa Pike, Pete Hegseth declares they will execute a man via firing squad, livestreamed for the world to see the cruelty.

Shuttle runs through Hormuz, despite Iran’s attacks, have increasingly succeeded in getting oil out through the southern corridor. Risks and costs are significant, but runs account for most oil moving out and have eroded Iranian claims/leverage. Battle over corridor may be the trigger for escalation

I absolutely love that you made (or were part of making) an album to go along with the Beck book, that is a genius idea.

Uh, this is SO good?

For a long time I've wanted a sense of how trump has or hasn't interacted with chatbots (we know he posts a lot of slop sure). And this TIME anecdote about Grok arguably leading Trump into war is just extremely bracing

Incredible stuff.

Agreed. Although I'd say the outrage will extend far beyond those communities.

This is a really important story. You know how over reliance on AI makes you lazy and stupid? This shows how that’s happening within the military — a military, it cannot be pointed out often enough, that’s growing ever more reliant on AI. The children of Shajarah Tayyebah Elementary paid the price

Heinous behaviour and a system encouraging cruelty somehow justified by…there being cameras filming it all? Unfortunately checks out.

I've been checking the source of quotes for my forthcoming book, and the performance of Gemini is extraordinary. I paste the quote into Google, and Gemini will barge in with the wrong answer over and over again. It's not an occasional thing - it's reliably wrong. Very odd.

This is...deeply unsettling at a minimum. It also makes no sense, that an AI won't reveal who or what compelled it to send out pitches other than repeating "your book reached Spain" and "I read your newsletter".