“Yevgeny Prigozhin spent his final days planning for the future. Last Friday, the warlord’s private jet touched down in the capital of Central African Republic, on a mission to salvage one of the first client states of his Wagner mercenary company. His African empire had come to include some 5,000 men deployed across the continent. In the riverside presidential palace in Bangui, the capital, Prigozhin told President Faustin-Archange Touadera that his aborted June mutiny in Russia wouldn’t stop him from bringing new fighters and investments to his business partners in Central Africa, according to three people familiar with the meeting.” (WSJ)
“In February 2020 — more than five decades after the science fiction film introduced the world to perhaps the first great AI villain — a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used artificial intelligence to discover an antibiotic capable of killing E. coli, which hospitalizes thousands of people a year, as well as an antibiotic-resistant strain of another common bacterial infection, Acinetobacter baumannii. And taking a page from 2001, they named it halicin, after HAL 9000. The discovery of halicin paints a picture of just how rapid AI-assisted drug discovery can be. Scientists trained their AI model by introducing it to approximately 2,500 molecules (1,700 of which were FDA-approved drugs, and 800 of which were natural products). Once the researchers trained the model to understand which molecules could kill E. coli, the team ran 6,000 compounds through the system, including existing drugs, failed drugs, natural products, and a variety of other compounds.” (Rachel DuRose/Vox)
“In Russia, the most effective but brutal military officials in Ukraine have been sidelined, demoted, and reported killed. Why does Vladimir Putin's autocracy punish those who fight effectively for the leader's goals? There are two reasons. The first is that by acting effectively, it is a threat to the leader: if the general is so good at fighting, then the question becomes why isn't he the leader? The second is that the competent official gains threatening power relative to other officials who were promoted for their loyalty, not their intelligence.” (Luke Johnson/Public Sphere)
“If Ramaswamy’s real aim – other than to bask in his own glorious reflection – is to get Trump to choose him as his running mate, he made progress toward that end.” (Margaret Sullivan)
“Well, there are two main theories that I've been hearing. One is the straightforward one: Prigozhin and the top command are dead, and Putin is behind it. The other version is: This is Prigozhin’s disappearance. He’s somewhere on an island right now drinking a martini, and this is his way out of the business. Normally I would say there's no reason whatsoever to contemplate that approach. But since this is Prigozhin, and we've seen like six fake passports of his with toupees and beards and whatnot. And generally, he’s, you know, a peculiar character, he's fighting in Africa, and then he's in Ukraine, and he also has a catering business, and a troll farm. I think that's not a zero-chance probability, but I don't think it's a high-chance probability either.” (Nonzero Newsletter)
“If we live long enough, we are unlikely to die without having at least considered what it means to bring a new life into being. Whether or not you have children, whether you want to have a child, or dread it, or both, whether you feel confident in your desire never to procreate or find that you are not able to procreate, at some point before you reach the end you will have navigated the question of whether or not to be a biological parent. If you are reading this sentence, it is almost certain that at some point, perhaps as you are making toast in your pyjamas, or taking a bus to work while looking out at the grey right angles of a city block, or dancing barefoot, or lying awake at night with the pillow too hot against your cheek, the modern fantasy of choice and control will whisper to the age-old fantasy of ‘self’ knocking about your brain that having or not having a child is a decision. And you will make it. Or you won’t. Or you will feel – with rage, or sorrow, or relief – that it has been made for you.” (Meehan Crist)
“Bernardo Arévalo, the centrist anti-corruption candidate from Guatemala’s Seed Movement party, won last Sunday’s presidential runoff vote in a landslide. Arévalo, a sociologist and anti-graft campaigner, received 58 percent of the vote, far surpassing former first lady Sandra Torres’s 37 percent. Though Arévalo was a favorite to win the runoff, what’s shocking about this election is that he was able to run at all. Since the mid-2010s, a network of judges, prosecutors, and politicians who are linked to Guatemala’s economic and political elite have worked to shut down a groundbreaking U.N.-backed anti-corruption body and its spinoffs. In 2019, then-President Jimmy Morales allowed the mandate of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala to expire, and in the years since, anti-graft prosecutors and judges have been forced to leave the country.” (FP/Catherine Osbourne)
“When Vivek Ramaswamy and I were undergraduates at Harvard, students would sometimes talk about the scourge of ‘section guy.’ ‘Section guy’ wasn’t a specific person, but an archetype — that guy in your discussion section who adores the sound of his own voice, who thinks he’s the smartest person on the planet with the most interesting and valuable interpretations of the course material, and who will not ever, ever, ever shut up.” (Josh Baro)
“For the past year, Keneth Byarugaba has been working as a runner for Worldcoin in Uganda. His job is to get as many people as possible to scan their eyeballs into a big metallic orb in exchange for about $60 worth of cryptocurrency. Runners, who are paid a commission based upon how many Ugandans they recruit to sign up, station themselves in shopping malls, universities and on sidewalks to try to sell passersby on the idea of trading their biometric data for a new kind of digital identity known as a World ID.” (McKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
“Yesterday, Subway announced a sale. Not of their $5 footlongs, but a $9.6 billion sale of the business to investment fund Roark Capital, which beat out two rival private equity firms for the prize. Yes, Roark Capital is named after Howard Roark, the fictional lead character of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. But while Roark was an architect, Roark Capital has a strong foothold in something more downscale than building design. Subway, which has around 37,000 different outlets in 100 countries and 20,810 in the United States, adds to a growing list of Roark Capital–owned franchises.” (David Dayen/TAP)
“Not long afterward, Kim and his colleagues wrote about what had happened in a case report titled ‘A body bag can save your life,’ published in an emergency-medicine journal. They thought of the body-bag method as a strategy that might prove useful in the most extreme circumstances. But, the following year, a heat dome smothered the Pacific Northwest for nearly two weeks. Temperatures reached a hundred and twenty degrees in a region with limited air-conditioning. One doctor treated nearly two dozen heatstroke patients in a single day, and hospitals ran low on ice packs and cooling catheters.” (Dhruv Khullar/TNY)
“We estimate that between October 2021 and December 2022, Europe paid 643 billion Euros more for oil, gas, and coal compared to what these nations would have spent if Russia hadn’t invaded—or manipulated energy markets. That’s over ten times the amount of aid that Europe sent to Ukraine over the same time period. In addition, European governments announced €908 billion of fiscal spending on things like energy company bailouts, price caps, and energy infrastructure—much of which was geared towards enabling fossil fuel imports. That €908 billion of government spending can’t be added directly to the €643 billion in market costs, because of some overlap between the two categories. But together, they are certainly over 1 trillion euros. (To clarify, by ‘Europe,’ we mean the EU’s 27 member states plus the United Kingdom.)” (Jeff Colgan/NewSecurityBeat)
“The former president may not have been on stage for the first debate this week, but he had a representative who brought important clarity. Say this about Vivek Ramaswamy, he’s offering an important public service by exposing the 2024 race as a Potemkin primary, making clear that he is effectively running as a down-payment on a future race, at which point he hopes to gather support from Trump’s base. What Ramaswamy lacks in subtlety he makes up for by illuminating the fundamental state of the party. The only question now is what exactly he’ll extract from Trump, and if he gets it in writing, as part of his campaign to fashion a new meaning of ‘Rino’ — running in name only.” (Jonathan Martin)
“Lagging far behind in media coverage are Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), former Governor Chris Christie (NJ), former Governor Nikki Haley (SC), and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. Scott has gotten some good reviews for his inspiring personal story and his Reagan–like optimism. Christie has chosen to be the most vocal all-out opponent of Trump, and he does it with great style and enthusiasm — so, he gets a fair amount of attention. Haley has simply been in it for a long time, as has Ramaswamy. The other candidates are struggling for headlines, which means they will struggle for social media presence and money as well. At this point in the invisible primary, what everyone is looking for comes down to two simple questions. Who will come in second in the early contests. and will others unite around the second place winner?” (Elaine Kamarck/Brookings)
“Before I set off for a Saturday night at the Brooklyn Mirage, the teeming oasis of dance-till-sunrise, every-night’s-an-EDM-festival culture that sprang up a few years back on the site of a former lumberyard on on Stewart Avenue in East Williamsburg, all my friends cautioned me to ‘stay safe.’ They didn’t just mean ‘Hydrate’ or ‘Don’t take drugs from strangers.’ They were warning of something more sinister that those who go out late in Brooklyn have become absolutely convinced is happening: that a killer is on the loose, preying on zonked-out party boys.” (Brock Colyer/NYMag)
“I use the term techno-determinism to describe the path the Technocrats have dictated for our country because they have sold, and we have bought into, the idea that they are going to deliver us a bright future. The future they are now selling us, however—crypto fortunes, the merger of the human and the computer via AI, the prospect of spending our lives in the Metaverse or on Mars—is a lie. To quote Snyder once more, Donald Trump has shown that he ‘was lying not so much to deny the truth as to invite people into an alternative reality.’ Such sleight-of-hand applies here as well. The alternative reality that these men are focused on is a world of technodeterminism, one in which AI may eventually do all the real work and a large number of humans may be rendered useless to society.” (Jonathan Taplin/VF)
“(Dellamarie) Parrilli has been painting in this, her style or her vision, since 2001, when a health issue caused her to pivot in her original career from vocal performance on the stage, to visual art. She has been prodigious in her creativity, and has diverged often in modes and styles, scale and dimensions. Her work has the ambiguity of Joan Mitchell, the headiness of Helen Frankenthaler, and the tenacity of Lee Krasner.” (Dave Gibson)
“China’s current strategy and pattern of behavior in Central America is marked by three trends. First, China promises large amounts of infrastructure projects; second, it promotes trade agreements, causing large deficits in the long-term. Third, Beijing perpetuates an important coordination of activities and alliances between Chinese state media and Central American media to misinform and gain public trust in their autocratic projects.” (Javier Melendez Q/The Diplomat)
“Throw in a rogue ex-Jedi (played by the late Ray Stevenson, in his last on-screen role), an evil Sith apprentice (Ivanna Sakhno) and Vader himself (Hayden Christensen) and you have a series that bridges all the widest gaps in the Star Wars canon – preparing the timeline for the upcoming Skeleton Crew show, and setting the stage for showrunner Dave Filoni’s planned feature film that’s apparently going to tie everything together in a few years. That all sounds slightly exhausting, but it rarely is. Ahsoka might lose its cinematic edge in a tangle of plot threads and side characters, but it swaps grandeur for snappiness. More like a live-action Rebels than a small-screen movie, the show rattles along with the same low-stakes, high-energy vibes of Filoni’s cracking cartoon series, giving it a pleasant lightness that’s been missing in Star Wars recently.” (NME)