“In 2019, Egyptologist Patrizia Piacentini of the University of Milan began to work at a site outside the thriving ancient frontier city of Aswan in southern Egypt. It would take five years for her to truly appreciate the site’s import. In their first season, Piacentini’s team, in cooperation with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, noticed a few tombs cut into a hill on the banks of the Nile that had been looted in antiquity. Upon closer inspection, Piacentini saw dark patches in the yellow sand clearly indicating the presence of mudbrick. ‘Let’s try here,’ she said. ‘I think there’s a tomb.’ There was, indeed, a huge tomb containing the remains of 46 men, women, and children dating from the second century b.c. to the second century a.d., along with artifacts such as statuettes and brightly painted cartonnage, the layers of plaster and linen used to encase mummified people … It was only in 2024 that it became clear that the necropolis is unique in Egypt. While Egyptian necropolises were usually constructed on two or three levels to accommodate many burials over a long period of time, the builders of the Aswan necropolis outfitted it with no fewer than 10 levels. The necropolis includes more than 400 tombs containing the remains of thousands of people. The team has learned that, while the top levels were reserved for wealthy people, including the chief of the Egyptian army in the second century b.c., the lower levels explored in 2024 were used to bury members of the middle class. ‘We want to understand who these people were and how the necropolis was organized,’ says Piacentini. Like many great discoveries, the answers to these questions will be the cumulative result of past and future work.” (Jarrett A. Lobell/Archaeology)
“American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo’s six-year ‘battle with the feds’—a fight that spans two dismissals, three appellate reversals, and an extradition and deportation from at least two countries—concludes today with his sentencing to federal prison for attacking ideological opponents at political rallies across California in 2017. Along with several members of the Rise Above Movement, a fight club-cum-street gang Rundo cofounded with fellow extremist Ben Daley in Southern California during the peak of the alt-right movement, Rundo was convicted on 2018 charges of conspiracy to violate the federal Anti-Riot Act for training and planning a series of attacks on political opponents at rallies across California and Unite the Right in Virginia the year prior. While Rundo may be locked behind bars for years, the movement he created is running wild around the globe. In the interceding years since his initial arrest, indictment, imprisonment, and flight from the US after his case was initially dismissed in 2019, Rundo helped mastermind an international network of RAM clones known as ‘Active Clubs.’ A transnational alliance of far-right fight clubs that closely overlap with skinhead gangs and neofascist political movements in North America, Europe, the Antipodes, and South America, the Active Club network is proliferating internationally. There are dozens of Active Clubs in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, Australia, and Colombia, according to the groups’ presence on Telegram and extremism researchers … Federal attorneys scoured Rundo’s media output—which is considerable, ranging from a series of far-right ‘influencer’ Telegram channels to the Media2Rise propaganda outlet that he ran in conjunction with stateside followers and members of Patriot Front—for their explanation of how seemingly innocuous fitness organizations like Active Clubs serve as vehicles for radicalization.” (Ali Winston/WIRED)
“Berthed in China’s port city of Guangzhou is the future of scientific ocean drilling: the $470 million Meng Xiang, a brand-new, 180-meter-long ship. Starting next year Meng Xiang—Chinese for ‘Dream’—will begin drilling into seafloor rock and sediment at sites throughout the world’s oceans to investigate plate tectonics, ancient marine climates, and deep-buried microbial life. It will also embark on a daring mission to pierce Earth’s crust and reach the mantle below. At a workshop last month in Guangzhou, researchers discussed the research agenda and toured the ship, which has nine dedicated science laboratories and a drilling rig that promises to delve deeper than any previous research ship. ‘I’m green with jealousy,’ says Henry Dick, a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. ‘This ship has the capacity to answer fundamental climate, oceanographic, microbiological, and earth science questions … for the next 50 years,’ says paleoceanographer Peter Bijl of Utrecht University. China’s new ship—and an accompanying research program expected to be open to foreign scientists—marks a handoff in ocean drilling from the United States. Japan has a formidable research ship, the Chikyu, but for decades the U.S. led the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) with its drilling ship the JOIDES Resolution, which retired in September. ‘I’m very happy that China has stepped up in providing a ship,’ says James Austin, a seismic stratigrapher at the University of Texas at Austin. But, ‘It’s a sad day for the United States.’” (Dennis Normile/Science via News Items)
“As news broke that Damascus had fallen to rebel forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, the figurehead prime minister of the Assad regime, issued a statement welcoming any government chosen by the people and calling for free elections. He was later seen escorted to work by the rebels, after HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (a nom de guerre) issued orders (under his real name, Ahmed Al-Shara) December 8 that Jalali would continue to supervise state institutions until a later stage in the post-Assad transition. Reports indicated that Assad had flown from the capital on Syrian Air and has requested and been granted political asylum in Russia. Damascus fell without much of a fight as did the strategically located city of Homs barely 12 hours earlier. That falling domino, after the earlier routs of regime forces in Hama and the crucial northern city of Aleppo, sealed the regime’s fate, particularly after Iran and Russia failed to respond as the rebels’ offense erupted with astonishing force and speed. Videos showed Syrians wandering through or politely helping themselves to items in the presidential palace. The Iranian Embassy was stormed by Damascus residents. The status of Russian forces, and their grip on cherished naval and air assets in Tartous and Latakia on the northern Syrian coast remains unclear. A day before the fall of Damascus, the deputy foreign minister of Turkey, Nuh Yilmaz, told delegates at the Manama Dialogue that Turkey had not supported the offensive either in concept or execution, a claim that lacks credibility given Turkey’s Syria policy, close relations with HTS, and even closer relations with allied factions in the offense. He added, more credibly, that the international community would have to come to grips with ‘the new realities.’ While other rebel groups, including the Syrian National Army, have a closer proxy relationship with Turkey, HTS in its current incarnation has been shaped significantly by Turkey’s handiwork.” (Ambassador William Roebuck and Hussein Ibish/AGSIW)
“YOU ONLY NEED to know the title of Hannah Arendt’s most famous book—The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951—to understand why her work might matter now. Arendt’s winding syntax is famously complex, and her writing voice torqued with intellect, in sentences like these, from the preface: ‘Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.’ Writing in English, a language she learned working as a summer house cleaner in Winchester, Massachusetts, in a program for refugees, Arendt and her philosopher husband had metamorphosed through Ellis Island in 1941 into American citizens, escaping Axis-occupied Europe where both Jews escaped the dire fate of a generation of others. Arendt brought with her a notebook of poems, written in her mother tongue, German. In What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (2024), editor Samantha Rose Hill and translator Genese Grill have given us that rare thing—a testament to what poetic thinking might be, available to all readers, and keenly attuned to our political moment. In their hands, this is less an academic volume than a story well told. When Hannah Arendt’s archive was opened in 1988, the world discovered Arendt’s youthful love affair with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose contribution to 20th-century thinking has been tarnished (but perhaps not stained) by his membership in the Nazi Party. Another discovery waited in that archive—74 poems bound, for the most part, in two notebooks with an intention as privately focused as Emily Dickinson’s handsewn fascicles. This work should deepen our attachment to Arendt not simply as a philosopher but also as a thinker whose value stands above disciplines, a human person who left a record of a life lived awake and alive. Arendt turned to poetry both for release and for reflection. This book reminds us of what poetic thinking is and why we need it now.” (Katie Peterson/LARB)
“(Alex) Jones, in a just world, would perhaps be tarred, feathered, and deported to Siberia by now. But he has managed to ‘use the chapter laws,’ as Donald Trump once described his six bankruptcies, to cling to his empire of lies and supplements. Somehow, even having been adjudicated to owe $1.5 billion dollars to his victims, and agreeing to liquidate assets to come up with the money, he has managed to get his pals to reorganize his former holdings into a new company to which he seems to maintain some access. The Onion had planned to kick Jones out and relaunch Infowars in January as a parody. The Onion taking over Infowars was an especially delicious prospect because it was teaming up with gun control advocate Everytown for Gun Safety and planned to turn Infowars into an enterprise both funny and good for America. But Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez agreed with Jones that The Onion’s offer was too much lower than that of the Jones-affiliated bidder, and so, canceled the sale. He argued that the families were not being served by the lower bid, even though the families have specifically stated that their satisfaction of the judgment against Jones includes him no longer having control of his media operation. Lopez's decision means Jones can stay at Infowars in Austin, Texas. Jones immediately went on X and live-streamed himself gloating to 440,000 viewers. That this conspiracy-mongering, evil side of beef on testosterone and other supplements has nearly half a million fans is still shocking - even though I know it shouldn’t be after the re-election of Trump. But that the decision rewarding him comes off the Texas federal bench is no surprise. Texas judges are so devoted to the ‘cruelty is the point’ MAGA ethos that they have long been the favorite destination of venue-shopping fetal fanatics, xenophobes, gun-nuts, and greedy oligarchs and their flinty friends in the small business communities.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“The resource-rich region of Central Africa has historically been home to some of the most enduring authoritarian regimes on the African continent. For example, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Paul Biya of Cameroon and Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) are currently the three longest-serving African heads of state, with 45, 42 and 38 years in power respectively. Unsurprisingly, there were no hints of a democratic opening in any of these countries in 2024 … The start of the new year in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) coincided with the second inauguration of President Félix Tshisekedi, reelected in December 2023 with more than 70% of the vote in another contentious election. Unlike his first term, he kicked off his new mandate with a comfortable parliamentary majority. However, his consolidation of power has not been without blemishes, with the regime targeting journalists, civil society activists and political opponents throughout the year. All these examples highlight a pattern of weakening democratic norms in Central Africa.” (Rudy Howard Massaba/The Africa Center)
“I have been warning you for the best part of a year that generative AI has no killer apps and had no way of justifying its valuations (February), that generative AI had already peaked (March), and I have pleaded with people to consider an eventuality where the jump from GPT-4 to GPT-5 was not significant, in part due to a lack of training data (April). I shared concerns in July that the transformer-based-architecture underpinning generative AI was a dead end, and that there were few ways we'd progress past the products we'd already seen, in part due to both the limits of training data and the limits of models that use said training data. In August, I summarized the Pale Horses of the AI Apocalypse — events, many that have since come to pass, that would signify that the end is indeed nigh — and again added that GPT-5 would likely ‘not change the game enough to matter, let alone [add] a new architecture to build future (and more capable) models on.’ Throughout these pieces I have repeatedly made the point that — separate to any lack of a core value proposition, training data drought, or unsustainable economics — generative AI is a dead end due to the limitations of probabilistic models that hallucinate, where they authoritatively state things that aren't true. The hallucination problem is one that is nowhere closer to being solved — and, at least with the current technology — may never go away, and it makes it a non-starter for a great many business tasks, where you need a high level of reliability. I have — since March — expressed great dismay about the credulousness of the media in their acceptance of the ‘inevitable’ ways in which generative AI will change society, despite a lack of any truly meaningful product that might justify an environmentally-destructive industry led by a company that burns more than $5 billion a year and big tech firms spending $200 billion on data centers for products that people don't want. The reason I'm repeating myself is that it's important to note how obvious the problems with generative AI have been, and for how long.” (Ed Zitron)
“Webcam studios across Colombia have subjected models to horrific abuses and facilitated the creation of child sexual abuse material, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch … Human Rights Watch interviewed 50 models working in studios across Colombia, which has a large webcamming industry, as part of its report. The models broadcast performances — which may include sexual content, but do not always do so — in exchange for payment or tips. Models can stream on these platforms from their own homes, but some choose to work for studios to have privacy or access to a computer and Internet connectivity. Both the platform and the studio take a cut of the models’ revenues, leaving the performers with as little as 10 percent of the income generated by their performance, the report found. Adult webcamming is a billion-dollar industry that employs thousands of people. Some of the large Internet platforms that stream the content produced by these studios are making massive profits: the Cyprus-based Stripchat, one of the platforms widely used by the Colombian models interviewed by HRW, made over $100 million in gross profits in 2022, according to documents available on Cyprus’s corporate registry. Hungarian billionaire Gyorgy Gattyan also made the bulk of his fortune from LiveJasmin, a platform he founded that was highlighted in the report, according to Forbes. (The subscription-based service OnlyFans, while not mentioned in the report, also paid its owner, Leonid Radvinsky, a staggering $1 billion in dividends from 2021 to 2023.)” (David Kenner/ICIJ)
“Earlier this year, officials at US Space Command released a list of priorities and needs, and among the routine recitation of things like cyber defense, communications, and surveillance was a relatively new term: ‘integrated space fires.’ This is a new phrase in the esoteric terminology the military uses to describe its activities. Essentially, ‘fires’ are offensive or defensive actions against an adversary. The Army defines fires as ‘the use of weapon systems to create specific lethal and nonlethal effects on a target.’ The inclusion of this term in a Space Command planning document was another signal that Pentagon leaders, long hesitant to even mention the possibility of putting offensive weapons in space for fear of stirring up a cosmic arms race, see the taboo of talking about space warfare as a thing of the past. ‘While we've held it close to the vest before, some of that was just kind of hand-wringing,’ said Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top general in the Space Force, who also serves on the joint chiefs of staff. ‘It wasn't really something we needed to protect.’ One reason for the change in how the military talks about warfare in space is that the nation's top two strategic adversaries—China and Russia—are already testing capabilities that could destroy or disable a US military satellite. The Space Force was established nearly five years ago, in December 2019, to protect US interests in space. Satellites provide the military with intelligence data, navigation, communications, and support missile defense, and in the next few years, they will become even more crucial for weapons targeting and battle management.” (Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)
“Eva Brann, dean of St. John’s College in Annapolis from 1990 to 1997, died peacefully on October 28, at the age of ninety-five. Born in 1929 in Berlin, her Jewish family was one of the last to emigrate. Her father, a doctor, had options others did not, and brought his family to New York City in 1941. Eva studied classics and archaeology before joining the college, where she taught for sixty years. In the final two decades of her time at St. John’s, she taught a reduced course load and wrote more than a dozen books on the imagination, time, feelings, and other philosophical topics, in her exploratory style and in inimitable prose. She also collaborated on a number of lively translations of Plato, sparkling with their origins in friendship with her colleagues … In 2019, Columbia University celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its Core Curriculum, and the Morningside Institute hosted a conference in its honor. The institute wanted Eva as a keynote speaker, and since Eva never once in her life used email, one of its members reached out to me for her sake. She chuckled a little. ‘I think I was at their fiftieth anniversary!’ Eva was at this time close to ninety, and she thought it would be best for us to drive into the city. On the drive up, Eva admitted that she was always nervous before giving lectures. She asked what I knew about the group we were meeting. ‘Are they very conservative?’ she asked. She leaned in to confess, ‘You know, I am a liberal Democrat.’ She knew that it was a funny thing, to be an outspoken defender of the Western canon, a featured writer on a website called the Imaginative Conservative, a recipient of a National Humanities Medal from George W. Bush, and a down-the-line blue voter, so far as I know, for her whole life.” (Zena Hitz/The Lamp)