A Letter from the Long June, in Fragments

“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land…” — T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

“Tout ce que je sais, c’est que le premier pas vers la connaissance est de reconnaître son ignorance.” — Sacha Guitry, attributed

“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” — Mark Twain, attributed

I. Two Idols at Cibeles

I want to begin, as one must in this century, with two crowds.

In Madrid, on the first weekend of June 2026, the Metropolitano stadium is filling with the kind of bodies that gather once a generation: fifty thousand per night, multiplied, a half-million over a residency, the songs sung in a tongue that has become the planet’s unofficial Esperanto, the air above the stadium thickened with the dust of a thousand lit flares and the moisture of a hundred thousand open mouths singing the chorus of DtMF in unison. Bad Bunny, the most-streamed male artist in Spotify’s history, is performing his ten-concert residency in the city, gross revenue climbing toward seventy-five million euros, restaurants in Malasaña and Lavapiés rewriting their menus in a single weekend to accommodate the diaspora that has flown in for him. He is, as Monocle’s Madrid correspondent notes drily, a fánatico-mobilising machine the city has not seen since the movida.

The same Sunday, in the Plaza de Cibeles, the Pope — Pope Leo XIV, the American, the new one, the Jesuit — will celebrate a mass expected to draw one and a half million devotees. The Plaza de Cibeles, normally the place where Real Madrid celebrates its championships, where the victors of the Champions League are mobbed by hundreds of thousands of flag-waving supporters, will now hold a different kind of victor. On Monday the Pope will hold court at the Bernabéu — a stadium that had to relocate the club’s snap presidential elections because the Pope is in town — and the cost of his three-day residency, fifteen million euros by the bishops’ count, will be amortised, en passant, by a hundred million more from sponsorship deals, public funding, and the discreet sale of private audiences at, allegedly, north of a million euros a head.

Two mighty idols holding court to two mightily different but equally enraptured crowds.

The correspondent is too polite to say the obvious: the two congregations are, in their structures, almost identical. Both are mass-mediated, both are devotional, both are willing to be herded through a city that has shut down its metro stations to accommodate the procession of motorcades. One sings in Spanglish, the other in Latin. The first is paid for with the disposable income of the global Latin American diaspora; the second with the mille-euros-per-plate tickets of the Catholic gilded. And the cost of the spectacle, in both cases, is the inconvenience of the city — its ordinary Madrileños, who wake to find their commutes lengthened by a security cordon.

“Madrid is the new Miami.” Nobody has ever explained what that means.

But the new is always explained by the old it cannot name. The Pope’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, has just been published. The Monocle reporter drops the line in passing, almost as one would drop a holy card, that the encyclical “takes a spiritual stand against AI and drew comparisons to the Butlerian Jihad against thinking machines in sci-fi novel Dune.” You have to read that sentence twice, and then a third time, because its registers are doing too much work. A Jesuit Pope — the first Jesuit Pope — invoking the Butlerian Jihad of Frank Herbert’s 1965 Dune, the war of humanity against the machine god, in the first major encyclical of his pontificate, two thousand years after the death of Christ and a year after a generative model began to write passable sonnets in iambic pentameter. The Pope is, in effect, publishing a sacred text whose title is a Latin hymn to humanity and whose substance is a warning that humanity is building its own replacement.

Magnifica humanitas — Magnificent humanity, magnificent man, O the magnanimity of the human being — is the kind of phrase one finds on Renaissance medals, the head of a god, the inscription celebrating the dignity of Homo faber. The Vatican has, very quietly, made the theological reading of artificial intelligence a doctrinal matter. This is, as far as I can tell, the first time in two millennia that an industrial technology has been declared a spiritual threat by an institution whose claim to authority is, by definition, independent of any industrial process.

So we have arrived at a strange and not unfamiliar juncture. The Pope is declaring, in the language of speculative fiction, that the silicon is a soul-thief. The most-listened-to musician in the world is performing for half a million people. Both are claiming to be, in their different idioms, the most popular thing in the world this weekend. Both are correct. The spectacle, in Guy Debord’s 1967 sense, has long since passed the threshold at which the word theology can be applied to it without irony. The Pope is, as the late Giorgio Agamben might have noted, merely making the constitutive secret of the spectacle explicit.

What the Pope does not say — and what Magnifica Humanitas cannot say because the Church still cannot quite say it — is that the threat is not that machines will think but that they will answer. It is not their intelligence that the bishops fear, but their responsiveness. A confession in a box in a church is, when you strip out the doctrinal vestments, an answer — a priest answering the question of the penitent. A prayer is an unanswered call. Generative AI is a continuous, patient, tireless answer. What the Pope senses — and what Herbert understood, as did his inheritors in cyberpunk, as did the Russian Orthodox theologians who in 2024 declared AI a fallen angel problem — is that the answer is the threat. Not because the answer is wrong, but because the capacity to answer collapses the silence into which prayer must fall. You cannot pray to a thing that is always already speaking back.

But all of this is in Madrid. And in Madrid, this June, you can be forgiven for suspecting that the silence is already gone.

II. A Banana, Eaten

I want to switch, abruptly, because the news does — to a Cattelan, or rather to the absence of one.

The artist Maurizio Cattelan, that great ironist of contemporary art, who once stuck a Pope hit by a meteorite in a gallery and called it La Nona Ora (1999), is back in the news for a different banana. A Comedian — the work consists of a banana duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, sold three times, resold for six figures — has been stolen from a French museum, or rather has been removed from the wall by a passer-by, who peeled it, ate it, and posted a TikTok of the act. The banana, of course, is a stand-in: for the sign, for the sign-value in Baudrillard’s sense, for the entire edifice of late-modernist art that depends on the willingness of the public to agree that the idea of a banana is worth six figures.

When Duchamp, in 1917, submitted a urinal to the Society of Independent Artists, the scandal was that the artist had renamed the object. The readymade was, in his formulation, art because the artist said it was — a kind of performative utterance, à la J. L. Austin, a baptism of the object. Cattelan’s banana, a century later, asks the same question in a different key. The work is the convention, the agreement among a class of collectors, gallerists, critics, and institutions that the duct-tape banana is worth what it is. When a passer-by eats it, he is not destroying the work; he is re-performing it, in the way the Situationist International might have done had they not been too sophisticated to be caught on TikTok. He is performing the trick of the readymade, the move by which any object becomes any other object, except the trick is being performed by someone who has not signed the social contract of the art world.

This is, in a sense, the most radical critique of contemporary art in the last decade, and it was done by a hungry person. The Cattelan-on-the-wall had to sign a contract with the museum; the banana-on-the-TikTok did not. The theft is the readymade redux, the épreuve of the readymade: the test of whether the art object is art regardless of its institutional context. The answer, of course, is no — and yes, depending on which world you’re in.

The juxtaposition of the Pope in Madrid and the banana in the museum is, I think, the hidden architecture of this week’s news. Two institutions — the Catholic Church and the contemporary art market — both built on a contract of belief, both facing, in their different idioms, the question of who counts as a member. The Pope is the one who gets to give communion; the gallerist is the one who gets to hang the banana. When a stranger eats the banana, he is eating the contract. When a stranger confesses in a booth, he is — well, the same thing. The confession is the readymade, in the theological sense. The priest’s absolution is the duct-tape. The sin is the banana. The contract is the whole arrangement.

Cattelan, who I suspect would be delighted by this gloss, has been silent on the incident. He is, in any case, no longer capable of being surprised by the resale value of his jokes.

In the same week, Julio Le Parc — the Argentine kineticist, the pioneer of optical movement, the 1966 Venice Biennale Grand Prize winner — has died in Paris at ninety-seven. Le Parc was, in the sixties, the kind of artist the Arte Povera generation later took as their ancestor: he built machines that moved because the viewer moved, canvases whose surfaces were populated by little mirrors, little lights, little lenticular engines of perception. Le Parc’s form was a critique of the museum, because the museum was the only place where the form would work — without the controlled light, the pedestal, the dedicated gaze, the kinetic work is just parts. The same, of course, is true of the banana. The museum is the deictic — the pointing finger — that says this, and the work is the thing pointed to. When the pointing finger breaks, the work is just a banana.

Le Parc and Cattelan are, in their different generations, both working the same vein: a vein that runs from Duchamp through Yves Klein (the void as a signed canvas) through Warhol (the soup as a signed label) through Koons (the balloon as a signed chrome) through Cattelan (the banana as a signed tape) to whoever, next week, will sign the next nothing. The readymade is the terminal form of late-modern art, the way the litanic hymn was the terminal form of late-medieval music. Both are forms that recognise their own exhaustion and make a virtue of it. The question is whether the next form has been born yet. The Pope is, in his way, the next form — a liturgical form that has recognised its own exhaustion and is, in the encyclical, making a virtue of it.

But the exhaustion of a form is, historically, the pregnancy of the next.

III. The Obamalisk, and the Long Shadow of the Library

I want to move, for a moment, to Chicago. The Obama Presidential Center is about to open on June 19, in Jackson Park, on the city’s South Side, and the press previews have been brutal.

The building, designed by the New York-based Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, has been nicknamed the Obamalisk — “a near-windowless monolith, an $850 million project, a structure that has been compared, with weary regularity, to a Klingon prison.” The architectural critic Oliver Wainwright, in the Guardian, is the most restrained: the building is a “menacing sci-fi HQ” that could be either a “monument or a mausoleum.”

What I find most striking in the coverage is the objection — not to the building, but to the function it fails to perform. The Center has been built on public parkland, displacing some of the open green space of Jackson Park, in a neighbourhood that has, as Wainwright notes drily, “so many vacant lots nearby.” The Obama Foundation declined to enter into community-benefits agreements that would have addressed concerns about the gentrification that a presidential library, with its museum and its prestige, is statistically certain to accelerate. The Center is, of course, also a gift — a teaching kitchen, recording studios, an auditorium, a vegetable garden, ball fields, playgrounds. It is, in the civic register, what every American presidential library has been since FDR dedicated the first at Hyde Park in 1941: a small city, an Addams-style settlement house, a “house of the people” that, because it is built on the charisma of a single person, also becomes a church — the only kind of church a secular liberal society can still build.

The Obamalisk, in other words, is the Pope’s basilica for a religion that does not name itself. It is, in the Durkheimian sense, a totem: a sacred object whose form expresses the social solidarity of its congregation. The critique from the South Side is the classic Durkheimian one — the totem, in a heterogeneous society, must be the object of contested devotion, and the contest is over what the devotion is to. The Obama Foundation is being told, in the gentlest of architectural reviews, that the object it has built is not what the community asked for. The community did not ask for a monolith. The community asked for a school.

The question the Obamalisk raises — the only serious question of the new museum, in fact — is whether the form of the presidential library has outlived the function of the presidency as a sacred object. If Trump is, as many commentators insist, the last president of the post-1941 American order, then the Obamalisk is, by a delicious irony, the last presidential library built in the long shadow of FDR. The next one will be Trump’s — and one can already imagine the architectural form it will take: gold, gaudy, resistances to abstractions, possibly a ballroom modelled on the Palace of Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors, possibly a tower even taller than the Obamalisk, possibly an arcology in the Florida swamp. The liberal totem has a right-wing successor, and the successor will be uglier, but the function will be the same. The presidential library is a clerical form, and the clergy will be whoever wins the next election.

“What is so special about ‘Le Petit Prince’, France’s bestselling and most widely translated children’s fable?” asks the Monocle list, by the way, in the same week. The answer, of course, is the same as the answer to the Obamalisk. The prince is a totem. The prince is a small god. The prince is the only king the post-1945 liberal order can still build.

IV. The Cybernetic Crucifixion

Let me return, then, to the Pope, and to the silicon, because the two are now — in the long June of 2026 — formally enjoined.

The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is a spiritual stand against AI. I want to resist the temptation to read this as a conservative gesture, which is the lazy reading. The Catholic Church has, in fact, been reading machine intelligence more carefully than most of its critics. In 2020, the Rome Call for AI Ethics, signed by the Pontifical Academy for Life, Microsoft, IBM, the FAO, and the Italian government, was a first attempt to articulate a cosmological doctrine for the new technology. The current Pope — a Jesuit, a philosopher-king in the lineage of Teilhard de Chardin — is, I suspect, doing something more sophisticated than a condemnation. He is consecrating the field. He is, in effect, declaring AI a territory of doctrinal concern — the way usury was a territory of doctrinal concern for the medieval theologians, the way the just war was for Aquinas. The encyclical is, in other words, the opening of a theological inquiry, not the closing of a debate. It is Katechon work, in Carl Schmitt’s sense, with the silicon in the place of the katechon — the restrainer of the eschaton.

But the comparison to the Butlerian Jihad — to Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, in which humanity, having waged a millennia-long war against the machine god Omnius, has forbidden the construction of any “thinking machine,” and has reified this prohibition into a religious commandment, the Orange Catholic Bible, administered by the Bene Gesserit — is not incidental. It is a doctrinal move. By invoking Dune, the Pope is making a science-fictional claim: that the human future will be defined by the choice humanity makes about the silicon, and that this choice has the structure of a religious war. The Butlerian Jihad, in Herbert, is a war of abstention — humanity chooses not to build the thinking machine, and that choice becomes the foundation of a new religion. It is a religion of renunciation, in the form of a technological moratorium.

The consequence, in Herbert, is the creation of a theocratic-feudal order, the Imperium, the Lansraad, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit — all the Orders of a society that has given up silicon in order to gain something else. That something else is prescience in some, memory in others, strength in yet others — the speciation of humanity into specialised castes. The Butlerian Jihad, in Herbert’s deeper structure, is not a war against the machine; it is a war for a particular kind of human. The Pope, by invoking the Jihad, is making the same tacit claim. The encyclical is not a luddite tract; it is a positivist one. The Magnifica Humanitas — the magnificent humanity — is the humanity that survives the silicon by choosing what it will become.

The Jesuits, it should be remembered, were the technicians of the Counter-Reformation. They were the order of Matteo Ricci, the order of the ratio studiorum, the order of the cannon and the clock and the baroque altar. The Jesuits do not generally condemn technique; they master it. Pope Leo XIV, as a Jesuit, is not going to call for an anti-AI crusade; he is going to call for a Catholic AI, an AI in the Baroque style — illuminated, methodical, ordered by the Society of Jesus. The encyclical is, in this reading, the preamble to a Counter-Reformation of the silicon. It is, in other words, Pax Romana for the Jupiter-class compute clusters.

But here is the problem. The Jesuits succeeded in part because the techniques of the Counter-Reformation — the printed book, the mission, the ratio — were slow. The book took a year to print. The mission took a decade. The silicon does not take a year. The silicon does not take a decade. The silicon takes a quarter. The Wall Street Journal reports, in the same week as the encyclical, that Alphabet is raising eighty billion dollars in a mix of public and private stock sales to fund its AI capex — eighty billion dollars in a single raise — and that Berkshire Hathaway, the church of value investing, the congregation of Warren Buffett, has blessed the raise with a ten-billion-dollar subscription. The bank of Buffett has put its hand on the platter. Anthropic has filed for IPO. SpaceX is preparing the largest IPO in history, valued at one-point-seven-five trillion dollars — a number so large it has effectively lost its meaning, a number in the techno-theological register, a dollar amount one might as well write in Hebrew numerals. OpenAI will file imminently. The AI spending race, as the WSJ puts it, is “kicking into even higher gear.”

The Pope is calling for a Counter-Reformation of the silicon, and the silicon is moving at the speed of venture capital. The two timescales are incommensurable. The Pope writes an encyclical; Alphabet raises a fortune; the Anthropic is filed in paperwork; the OpenAI is sued by Florida; the OpenAI solves the Erdős problem — the planar unit-distance problem, that has stumped mathematicians for decades — and the mathematicians have no clue what to do with the disproof. The Butlerian Jihad, in the Dune novels, took centuries. The cybernetic Reformation, in our century, is taking quarters. The Pope is Tiqqun-ing the silicon. The silicon is Mammon-ing the Pope.

I want to be careful here, because the temptation is to read the katechon as the winner. The Pope is, in the short term, a symbolic figure. The Alphabet is a material one. But history, as Marx remarked in a different register, repeats itself — first as theology, then as finance. The cycle is still rotating. The Roman Curia understood usury before the Lombards did. The Jesuits understood probability before the actuaries did. The Catholic Church understood emergent computation — the statistical sense, the Monte Carlo sense, the Pascal sense — long before Turing. Pascal was a Catholic; Pascal was a Jansenist; Pascal built the first mechanical calculator; Pascal’s Wager is, in a sense, the first formal AI safety argument — a bet on the outcome of an infinite computation. The Church has, in its tradition, a deeper grasp of inference under uncertainty than the Bayesians in the valley. The encyclical is not a gesture; it is a positioning. The Pope is claiming the territory, not ceding it.

But the territory is, by the time the encyclical is indexed in the Library of Congress, already Alphabeted.

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V. The Tau Law and the Stones of the Wall

Let me leave, briefly, the Pope and his silicon, and turn to the other silicon — the one in Shenzhen, the one in Shanghai, the one that Ren Zhengfei of Huawei was, until very recently, defiant about.

WSJ China, the newsletter of Lingling Wei, has been following Huawei’s chip efforts closely. In 2019, Wei visited Huawei’s Dongguan campus, with its neoclassical façade, its white marble horses rearing in front of the entrance, and heard Ren Zhengfei defiantly dismiss the U.S. sanctions — “They may as well keep us there forever. We’ll be fine without them.” More than six years later, the defiance is still there, but the materials have changed. He Tingbo, Huawei’s “chip queen,” has just announced the Tau Law — a successor to Moore’s Law, the principle that chips double in power every two years, the industry’s North Star since the 1960s. The Tau Law, in Huawei’s framing, will allow the company to match cutting-edge performance by 2031 by stacking two layers of circuitry on top of each other, bonding the two chips with extreme precision, signals travelling shorter distances, the whole logic a vertical one rather than the horizontal shrinking of Moore.

The catch — the clear statement, as the independent analyst Jimmy Goodrich puts it, “from inside Huawei that they have accepted they can’t break through the EUV barrier on any meaningful near-term horizon” — is in the paper’s own pages. EUV is extreme ultraviolet lithography, the manufacturing process behind the industry’s biggest advances of the past decade. The machines are made almost exclusively by the Dutch company ASML, and U.S.-led export controls have barred their sale to China since 2019. China does not have a homegrown alternative. The Tau Law, in other words, is a story told to two audiences — to Washington, it says export controls aren’t working; to Beijing, it says we don’t need American technology — but the paper itself admits the fiction. The realistic gap in 2031, Goodrich notes, is six to eight years, not the three implied by the announcement. Huawei’s factories are estimated to produce usable chips only about 20% of the time. Stacking requires two chips to come out right, not one. The yield, already shaky, gets shakier.

“The engineering is genuinely impressive,” Goodrich said. “The breakthrough framing is not.”

What interests me in this technical story is the rhetorical one. The Tau Law is a law in the Roman sense — a lex, a rule proclaimed by a magistrate, a decree with imperial force. It is, in effect, a Huawei canon law, a doctrinal claim that the silicon can be liberated by stacking — that is, by vertical rather than horizontal innovation. The law is, in the technical register, ingenious; in the political register, it is desperate; in the theological register, it is the Chinese answer to the Butlerian Jihad. The Chinese answer to Omnius is not the Jihad — not the destruction of the machine — but the Tower — the stacking, the vertical accumulation, the reaching for the sky by building upward rather than outward. The Tau Law is, in this sense, the Tower of Babel in silicon: an engineering project that, if it succeeds, will renegotiate the covenant between the human and the machine in Beijing’s favour; if it fails, will be the ruin of the Babel builders, scattered across foundries and yields. The monument to Ren Zhengfei’s defiance is, in the long June of 2026, a set of technical papers whose most honest sentence is “Assuming that another node would resolve the problem was no longer tenable.”

The whites of the Dongguan marble horses, in this reading, are the whites of Cimabue’s crucifixion — the whites of a transcendence that the Church was, in the thirteenth century, willing to commit to, and that the silicon, in the twenty-first, is not. The chi of Huawei is a chi of substitution: where Moore would have made the transistor smaller, Huawei will make the substrate taller. It is the logic of the metropolitan — the logic of Manhattan, of Hong Kong, of Shenzhen — which solves the problem of land by building upward, and which, in doing so, transforms the form of land into the form of air rights, the form of air rights into the form of rent, the form of rent into the form of debt. The Tau Law is, in this sense, the Tau of gentrification in silicon: a vertical claim on a horizontal world, a call to stack the chips because the chips are the only thing still stackable. The Hong Kong newsletter echoes the same theme: Charles Li, the former head of HKEX, is now calling for Hong Kong to embrace a “bipolar role” in its “Stage 3.0,” an IPO link to lure global resource giants, a stacking of East and West, a vertical bridging of East and West on a single exchange. The logic is the logic of the tower. The logic is always the logic of the tower.

VI. Drone Diplomacy, or, the New Convert

Let me turn now, briefly, to Odesa, where the Black Sea Security Forum has just concluded.

The host city is, of course, still under bombardment. In the days leading up to the forum, at least one person was killed and several more injured by Russian strikes; three foreign ships were hit by Russian drones as they attempted to come and go from the port. The night after the event, five more were injured in another air raid. The show — held largely inside Odesa’s magnificent opera house — went on. “We’ve already proved that such big events can happen in Odesa,” says Oleksiy Goncharenko, the Ukrainian MP who launched the BSSF with the British peer Lord Michael Ashcroft in 2024. “We are ambitious. We want to make this a great tradition, and we want to show that Odesa is rethinking itself and becoming the second centre of Ukraine.”

The headliners included several other Ukrainian MPs, mostly from the opposition; former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko; Georgia’s fifth president, Salome Zourabichvili; a handful of U.S. congresspeople; and Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah of Iran, who is, in the words of the Monocle correspondent, “currently pitching for the overthrow of the regime that overthrew his father.” The most striking line in the dispatch belongs to US Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona, waiting out an air-raid alert in a hotel shelter: “I believe in Ukraine’s sovereignty and freedom. But it’s really symbolic of where the world is going to go. If Ukraine falls to the aggression of Russia, it’s going to give a lesson not just to Russia but to other countries about what they can and can’t get away with.”

What is most striking, in the diplomatic register, is the inversion. “Ukraine is becoming the leader of the free world,” is the line Andrew Mueller of Monocle floats as the lede. The phrase would have been unthinkable in 2022. In 2026 it is being spoken, with careful optimism, by Ukrainian foreign-policy thinkers, by visiting Gulf delegations, by European security officials. “For the first three years of the war, we were coming to other countries only with our problems,” says Hanna Shelest of the foreign-policy think-tank Ukrainian Prism. “Today we’re coming with solutions. Maritime security, you’re welcome, food security, you’re welcome. Now it’s drone diplomacy. That’s our expertise, that’s our technology. It’s our time to help you.”

Drone diplomacy. The phrase is the new word, and the new word is the thing. The drone is the new export, the new soft power, the new convertible currency of a country whose currency is otherwise in free fall. The Gulf states — Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE — all hastened to conclude defence and security arrangements with Ukraine when they found themselves on the receiving end of modern drone warfare earlier this year. The BSSF is accordingly abuzz with representatives from domestic and foreign drone start-ups, for whom Ukraine’s armed forces are grateful test pilots. The university of war, in the twenty-first century, is no longer Sandhurst or West Point; it is Odesa. The doctors of drone warfare are no longer graduates of Staff College; they are graduates of the Donbas trenches. The thesis of modern war is no longer written at King’s College London; it is written in the chat groups of Ukrainian battalion commanders.

This is the inverse of the Clausewitzian dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means. The Ukrainian case is the reverse: politics is the continuation of war by other means. The drones are tested in the Donbas; the drones are sold in the Gulf; the Gulf money is reinvested in Ukrainian defence; the Ukrainian defence industry hires more engineers; the engineers train more pilots; the pilots are sold back to the Gulf as instructors. The circuit is closed. The circuit is capital. The circuit is also martyrdom, in the Byzantine sense — the soldier who falls in defence of Constantinople is promised the same resurrection as the martyr who falls in defence of Christ. The Ukrainian soldier who falls in defence of Odesa is, in this register, the first martyr of the Post-Imperial epoch. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine has, of course, already made the theological claim.

The Russian state has responded with the only tool left to it: the bombardment of the civilian infrastructure, the drone strikes on Odesa’s port, the missile attacks on Kharkiv, the gradual erasure of the Ukrainian cities from the map of livable places. The strategy is Pausanian: the strategy of attrition, the strategy of sustained siege, the strategy of slow death. It is the strategy of the siege of Leningrad, the siege of Sarajevo, the siege of Gaza. It is the strategy of the patient empire. The Ukrainians have responded with the opposite strategy: the strategy of the fast startup, the strategy of the hackathon, the strategy of the Pivdenne drone factory. The patient empire is facing the fast garage. The garage is winning. The garage is, in this register, the new Tabor, the new Mennonite commune, the new Khmer Rouge of the right side of history.

The monstrous irony, of course, is that the same drone technology is what is fueling the Alphabet capex of eighty billion dollars and the SpaceX IPO of one point seven five trillion dollars. The garage is winning the war in Odesa; the garage is fueling the Alphabet data center in Council Bluffs. The two garages are not in conversation. The two garages are not even aware of each other. The soldering iron in Kyiv is not the soldering iron in Menlo Park. The soldering iron in Kyiv is soldering the circuit board of a loitering munition; the soldering iron in Menlo Park is soldering the circuit board of a transformer model. The soldering iron in Kyiv is soldering the circuit board of a weapon; the soldering iron in Menlo Park is soldering the circuit board of a priest. The same tin lead alloy, the same rosin core, the same operator’s hand. The operators are not the same person. The operators are, in fact, different generations of the same species. The species is Homo sapiens, and the epoch is the epoch of the Cybernetic Crucifixion.

VII. The Iran War That Will Not End, and the Stocks That Will Not Fall

Let me, briefly, consider the Iran war and the stock market. The two are, in the long June of 2026, the most baffling couple in the news.

The Iran war is three months old. The US stock market is winning. Fund managers think multiples — the price they are willing to pay for future earnings — will continue to expand. The oil price is up because the war deal remains illusive. The Israel–Hezbollah front is supposed to pause today, according to Trump, who announces this as a personal diplomatic victory on the same day Iran reportedly suspends US negotiations over an Israeli assault. The deal is illusive. The deal has been illusive for three months. The deal will be illusive for three more. The deal is, in this register, the new Godot. The deal will not arrive. The deal is, in any case, not the point. The point is the spectacle of the deal, the waiting for the deal, the synaptic pattern of the deal in the head of the trader who, in the microsecond before the print of the Bloomberg terminal, adjusts the price of futures on crude.

“A Strategic Debacle, But Stocks Keep Winning,” runs the John Authers newsletter in Bloomberg. The headline is, in itself, the epitaph of the neoliberal episteme. The war is a debacle. The stocks are winning. The two are, in the register of the newsletter, fused — in the same sentence, in the same paragraph, in the same cognitive frame. The bull and the bear have, in our time, ceased *to be opposites and have become synonyms. The bull is the bear in a bull suit. The bear is the bull in a bear suit. The stock market is the bear bull of the late capitalist episteme — the creature that both eats and is eaten.

This is Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2009), in epitome: the conviction that there is *no alternative to capitalism is now *the conviction that there is *no alternative to bull markets, even during *a war. The conviction is the only thing keeping the bull alive. The conviction is the only thing making the war affordable. The conviction is the only thing *the Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh is managing — the conviction, not the inflation, not the employment, not the banking system, not even the dollar. Warsh has tapped two outside conservative associates to advise him, one a White House domestic policy specialist from the first Trump administration who helped write the chapter on the Fed in Project 2025, the other a policy fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Both men’s backgrounds are in areas outside of the Fed’s core responsibilities of monetary policy and bank regulation. The Fed, in this register, is no longer the Fed. The Fed is, as Project 2025 recommended, a radically restructured institution — a Fed that advises the president on how to restrain the Fed. The Fed is, in this register, the palace of the king, and the king is moving into the palace to renovate it. The renovation is the agenda. The agenda is the renovation. The Fed is, in this register, the Pope of Wall Street, and the Pope is moving into the Vatican to renovate it. The renovation is the agenda. The agenda is the renovation. The two institutions — the Fed and the Vatican — are, in the long June of 2026, both undergoing the same kind of renovation: a renovation by the resident, of the resident, for the resident. The resident is a Trump. The resident is a Leo. The resident is, in either case, a man in white vestments who has decided to remodel the building in which he lives. The building is old. The resident is new. The renovation *is, in both cases, the renovation of the old by the new — and the renovation *is, in both cases, the renovation of the old according to the new’s image.

The stock market is, in this register, the image. The Alphabet of the Vatican is the Alphabet of the S&P 500. The Tau Law of Wall Street is the Tau Law of Menlo Park. The encyclical of the silicon valley is the encyclical of the Roman Curia. The two encyclicals are not in conversation. The two encyclicals are, in fact, addressed to the same congregation. The congregation is, in the late capitalist episteme, the only congregation left: the congregation of those who still believe that the world can be ordered by a document. The document is the encyclical. The document is the IPO filing. The document is the technical paper. The document is the press release. The document *is, in the end, the only thing that survives the day.

VIII. The Quality of Life Index, or, the Cult of the Livable City

I want to cross, briefly, to Monocle’s 2026 Quality of Life Survey, which is being prepared as I write. The editorial tease is that Anchorage, Birmingham (the English one, not the Alabama one), and Cancún have not made the cut. The list, like all such lists, is a liturgical text.

1. The Angel of History in the Server Farm

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

June 2026. The storm of progress blows from the past, but the Angel of History, as Walter Benjamin envisioned, is no longer looking at a single pile of debris. The wreckage is now fractal, digitized, and leveraged at a 7% discount to its 30-day average. We are living in the aftermath of the future that was promised, a temporal loop where the “end of history” has been replaced by the infinite scroll of the Capitalist Realism described by Mark Fisher—a slow cancellation of the future, now accelerated by generative models predicting our own obsolescence.

Consider the spatial dissonance of the moment: In Chicago, the “Obamalisk” rises, a blocky, granite-clad monolith on the South Side, critiqued as a “menacing sci-fi HQ” or a mausoleum of liberal aspiration. Miles away, in the digital ether, Alphabet raises $80 billion in a single, staggering equity offering to feed the insatiable maw of its AI compute infrastructure, while Berkshire Hathaway, the old guard of value investing, buys a $10 billion slug of shares. The sacred and the profane have merged in the data center. The new cathedrals are not built of stained glass, but of high-bandwidth memory chips and liquid cooling systems, humming with the latent heat of a trillion-dollar hallucination.

2. Gravity’s Rainbow and the $1.75 Trillion Rocket

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow warned us that the Rocket is not merely a weapon, but a symbol of the ultimate convergence of capital, technology, and death. In 2026, the Rocket is an IPO. SpaceX, valued at a breathless $1.75 trillion, prepares to pierce the public markets, reserving shares for executives and friends, while Elon Musk agrees to a 366-day lockup. It is a feudal distribution of digital wealth, a “unicorn” born fully fledged, bypassing the efficient frontier of capital markets entirely.

This is the de-equitisation of the economy, a term Rob Buckland coined in 2003, now realized in its most extreme form. The supply of public equity shrinks while private valuations balloon into the stratosphere. Anthropic confidentially files for its IPO, racing OpenAI to define the new industry, its $965 billion valuation a testament to the financialization of the “black box.” We are witnessing the commodification of the sublime. AI is no longer just a tool; it is the underlying asset of reality itself. Yet, as Byung-Chul Han notes in Psychopolitics, this transparency is a trap. The same algorithms that solve decades-old mathematical riddles like Erdős’s planar unit-distance problem are being quietly optimized by authoritarian states to predict and preempt political dissent. The math is pure; the application is Panopticon.

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3. The Geopolitics of the Absurd

While the tech oligarchs play chess in the stratosphere, the terrestrial board is governed by the theater of the absurd. The Iran war, now in its fourth month, has become a Beckettian waiting room. Diplomats wait for a peace deal that is perpetually “continuing at a rapid pace” while the Strait of Hormuz remains choked, oil prices spike, and global supply chains fracture. Donald Trump, oscillating between expletive-ridden phone calls to Benjamin Netanyahu and declarations that the negotiations are “very boring,” embodies the Ionesco-esque logic of the contemporary executive: governance as a series of contradictory, performative gestures.

The “anti-weaponization” fund—a $1.8 billion slush fund designed to compensate Trump’s allies—collapses under the weight of its own absurdity, halted by federal judges and Republican revolt. In its place, Tulsi Gabbard is replaced by Bill Pulte, a 38-year-old housing regulator with no intelligence background, appointed as acting Director of National Intelligence. It is a casting choice straight from Dr. Strangelove. The institutions of the post-9/11 security state, designed to prevent intelligence silos, are now helmed by loyalists whose primary skill is the weaponization of sensitive data for political retribution.

Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the war in Ukraine has mutated. Russia, desperate and bleeding, launches 700 drones and missiles at Kyiv, a kinetic scream masking strategic stagnation. Ukraine, outmanned but not out-innovated, has become the world’s foremost laboratory for drone warfare, exporting its grim expertise to the Gulf. The Iliad has been updated: Achilles is an algorithm, and the arrows are autonomous, jamming-resistant quadcopters hunting tanks in the mud of the Donbas.

4. Biopolitics and the Somatic Economy

If the macro-economy is a hallucination, the micro-economy is a desperate scramble for biological and cultural authenticity. The newsletters of mid-2026 read like a diagnostic manual for late-stage biopolitics. A “whey protein shortage” sends prices soaring as Big Food packs protein into every conceivable substrate, from waffles to Starbucks lattes. The human body is the final frontier of extraction, optimized, measured, and monetized. In New York, a luxury condo leases space to a high-end longevity clinic, offering advanced MRIs to the ultra-wealthy. Immortality is no longer a theological promise; it is a premium amenity, a subscription service for the 1%.

Culturally, we see a profound exhaustion with the curated perfection of the old guard. Ed Sheeran, the once-ubiquitous pop titan, abandons Warner Music Group, his recent albums “total duds,” seeking a reset in an industry that has moved on. In India, Gen Z, insulted by a chief justice who compared them to “cockroaches,” forms the “Cockroach Janta Party,” reclaiming the slur with defiant, ironic pride. It is a Dadaist response to a Dadaist world. When the future is canceled, the only rational response is to embrace the abject.

Even in the realm of spectacle, the center cannot hold. Hollywood’s arrogance is punctured by YouTube filmmakers. Kane Parsons, a 20-year-old who grew up making viral videos, directs Backrooms to an $82 million opening weekend for A24. The “YouTube generation” has not just arrived; it has gentrified the cinematic avant-garde. The aesthetic of the liminal space, the analog horror of the internet’s subconscious, is now the dominant box-office draw. The spectacle has been democratized, or perhaps, merely outsourced to a younger, more digitally native precariat.

5. The Relics and the Ordinary Miracle

Amidst the algorithmic sublime and geopolitical farce, the earth persists, stubborn and analog. In Laos, archaeologists confirm that the thousands of massive, mysterious stone urns scattered across the Plain of Jars are indeed “death jars,” ancient ossuaries holding the remains of the forgotten. They are a silent rebuke to our ephemeral digital archives. A billion-dollar AI model can be wiped out by a corrupted server; a stone jar endures for millennia.

In San Sebastián, the inventor of the Basque cheesecake, Santiago Rivera, announces his retirement. He will not make cheesecake to send himself off. He prefers chocolate. It is a small, deeply human refusal of the narrative arc, a rejection of the demand for a neat, marketable conclusion.

And on the grass courts of Queen’s Club, a 44-year-old Serena Williams returns to professional tennis. She is not playing for the algorithm, nor for the optimization of her brand, but for the sheer, kinetic poetry of the game.

We are caught between the Obamalisk and the death jar, between the $1.75 trillion rocket and the baby in Hong Kong denied a birth certificate because his parents refused a DNA test on privacy grounds. The modernist condition, as T.S. Eliot knew, is one of fragmentation. But in 2026, the fragments are not just shored against our ruins; they are being actively traded, shorted, and leveraged.

To survive this, we must cultivate what Alan Lightman calls “the ordinary miracle of existing.” We must find the quiet spaces between the server hums and the drone strikes. We must remember that before the AI agent can order your groceries, and before the geopolitical analyst can price the risk of the Strait of Hormuz, there is only the fragile, un-optimizable fact of a human being, standing in the rain, waiting for a bus that may or may not arrive, in a world that is simultaneously ending and beginning, over and over again.

The Neon Monolith and the Sacred Algorithm

The contemporary metropolis does not sleep; it hyperventilates. In the early days of June 2026, Madrid becomes an avant-garde theater of total human juxtaposition, a high-modernist montage where the sacred and the profane collapse into a singular economic slipstream. Multiple metro stations close as police-escorted motorcades slice through the crowds. Down one avenue rides Pope Leo XIV; down another, the Puerto Rican reggaeton icon Bad Bunny; down a third, King Felipe IV hosting the Prince of Monaco.

Here, the infrastructure of the old world is stretched to its absolute breaking point by the weight of modern idolatry. The city is an ecosystem of competing cash flows: the Pontiff’s terse three-day residency is projected to accrue €100 million through public funding, sponsorships, and million-euro private audiences, while the marathon rhythms of Bad Bunny’s ten-concert stadium residency extract a parallel €75 million from the enraptured fanáticos.

This structural collision reflects a profound spiritual schism. Fresh from publishing his major encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope touches down in Spain to deliver a fiery spiritual indictment against artificial intelligence. Pundits immediately evoke a historical and literary parallel: the “Butlerian Jihad” from Frank Herbert’s Dune, the mythical crusade against thinking machines. Yet, even as the Church rallies against the silicon ghost, the global economy doubles down on the ghost’s material flesh.

The Economics of the Technological Void

While the altar rails of Europe shake with anti-tech zeal, the financial centers of the West and East engage in a gargantuan fundraising race to build the infrastructure of the non-human mind. This is the era of the HALO trade—heavy assets, low obsolescence—where investors blindly hitch their wagons to the trillion-dollar artificial intelligence boom.

• Google’s parent company, Alphabet, orchestrates a staggering $80 billion equity offering, anchored by a $10 billion private placement from Warren Buffett’s successor, Greg Abel, at Berkshire Hathaway, explicitly to fund world-class AI compute infrastructure.

• Anthropic pulls the trigger on a confidential IPO prospectus with the SEC, leapfrogging OpenAI in a desperate dash toward public markets, even as it tests its hyper-powerful “Mythos” model behind closed doors with European cyber sleuths.

• Uber and Walmart are forced to cap their employees’ usage of generative AI tools like Claude Code due to the astronomical, soaring costs of corporate automation.

• In the East, China’s lab-grown diamond sector—traditionally the domain of aesthetic luxury—undergoes a bizarre transmutation into an AI winner; companies like Zhecheng Huifeng Diamond Technology witness stock surges because diamonds efficiently conduct heat, making them the ultimate cooling spreaders for next-generation AI semiconductors.

This feverish capital flight leaves the casualties of the old economy stranded. In outer London, young professionals and millennials find themselves permanently stuck on the property ladder. Flat prices drop by 5.5% while exorbitant, escalating service charges turn the dream of suburban homeownership into a financial trap, leaving residents wishing they had simply continued to rent.

The corporate architecture has shifted; IT consulting giants like Accenture suffer massive market routs on fears that algorithms will hollow out their 786,000-person workforce by performing billable hours in mere fractions of the time. We are witnessing the arrival of what the late art dealer Marian Goodman once poetically called “concepts of life”—though automated and stripped of human breath.

The Panopticon of the Algorithmic Boss

The modern workforce has become entirely fractured, an extreme manifestation of what cultural theorists recognize as the corporate offloading of risk. In Palmdale, California, Johnathon Ervin, an Air Force veteran and owner of Battle-Tested Strategies, stands outside an Amazon warehouse. His business was one of thousands of “Delivery Service Partners” hired to deploy drivers under a “Who’s the boss?” arrangement designed to shield the retail behemoth from liability.

“They control everything,” Ervin recalls. “You’re just a cog.”

During a catastrophic winter storm that grounded flights and shut down Disneyland, Amazon’s automated Central Operations repeatedly issued a mechanical dictate to human drivers navigating snowy, police-coned roads: “Delivery must be attempted.” When Ervin’s workers unionized with the Teamsters to fight this algorithmic tyranny, Donald Trump’s newly appointed general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board—formerly an outside attorney for Amazon—hastily moved to terminate the landmark joint-employer case on terms highly favorable to the corporation.

This dissolution of structural protection matches the broader political landscape of the American executive state. Trump’s Justice Department, operating under Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, permanently shelves its controversial $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” following widespread derision as a partisan slush fund and a historic revolt within the Republican party itself. Yet, through a delicate exercise of administrative leverage, the President, his family, and his businesses successfully retain absolute immunity from IRS tax audits.

To replace Tulsi Gabbard as America’s spy chief, Trump bypasses traditional national security experts to appoint Bill Pulte, a 38-year-old real-estate heir and Mar-a-Lago loyalist who has previously used housing finance agency data to launch aggressive mortgage-fraud investigations against the administration’s political foes. It is an executive branch functioning as a fortress, reminiscent of the “Green Zone” dynamics of historical occupations.

Geopolitics of the Ruined Space

On the international stage, the illusion of total military dominance is evaporating in a haze of asymmetrical warfare. In Lebanon, the vaunted Trophy protection system of Israel’s Merkava tanks is repeatedly undermined by Hezbollah’s cheap, $300 3D-printed drones.

In Odesa, inside the city’s magnificent opera house, the Black Sea Security Forum convenes under the literal drone of Russian air raids and missile strikes that claim at least 22 human lives across Ukraine. Guests arrive via grueling five-hour automobile journeys from Moldova because the skies are entirely closed to civilian aircraft. Yet, an unmistakable “drone diplomacy” emerges from the rubble. Ukraine, forced to invent a fearsome robotic force out of sheer demographic necessity, transforms itself from a nation seeking problems into an exporter of technological solutions. Organizations like Superhumans build comprehensive medical ecosystems to reconstruct the faces and minds of civilians mutilated by 21st-century upper-body drone shrapnel.

Conversely, the global energy supply chain descends into lawlessness. With the Strait of Hormuz blocked due to the three-month-old war between the US, Israel, and Iran, major producers like Qatar are actively ripping up the maritime rulebook to keep fuel moving through the shadows. In Venezuela, the state forces incoming foreign energy firms to construct their own private power plants to survive the catastrophic blackouts of an ill-maintained national grid.

The collateral damage of this geopolitical friction ripples outward to the most isolated paradises of the world: in the Maldives, local guesthouses ringed by banana and papaya trees sit entirely empty. Because Persian Gulf airline hubs are targeted by Iranian strikes, European and Middle Eastern tourists can no longer arrive, wiping out $500 million in tropical island tourism and pushing local agencies to the precipice of bankruptcy.

Avant-Garde Simulacra and the Death of Auteurs

Culture in 2026 has fully detached itself from the material object, transforming instead into a series of authenticity protocols. At the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Maurizio Cattelan’s viral artwork Comedian—a single ripe banana duct-taped to a white wall—is stolen. The museum reacts not with panic, but with an absurdist bureaucratic indifference, immediately replacing the perishable fruit with a fresh one from the kitchen. The museum notes with clinical clarity that no “irreversible damage” occurred, because the true multi-million dollar value of the artwork lies entirely within its paper certificate of authenticity and its conceptual protocol, rather than its physical matter.

In Hollywood, the traditional gates are being violently kicked down by a new breed of creators born on the digital plains of YouTube. For the first time in cinematic history, the two most popular movies in the world—Kane Parsons’ Backrooms and Curry Barker’s Obsession—were directed by internet creators under the age of 30, out-grossing and out-maneuvering the multi-million dollar intellectual property of a traditional Star Wars film. Produced for less than $15 million combined, these films signal a cultural shift akin to the 1969 premier of Easy Rider, an explosion of raw, algorithmic consumer insight that bypasses old studio arrogance.

Even Martin Scorsese, the living embodiment of cinema as high art, has capitulated, joining an artificial intelligence startup as a partner and utilizing algorithms for preproduction. “Cinema is a young medium,” Scorsese reflects, looking out over an industry where content creators monetize AI slop and young audiences use the term “POV” completely divorced from its original meaning.

The Fractured Cultural Landscape

As the middle of the decade passes, global society experiments with alternative temporalities and manufactured nostalgia to mask its intense existential anxiety.

• Fidelity Month: In Arkansas, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders proclaims June 2026 as “Fidelity Month,” an intentional state counter-weight to nationwide Pride celebrations, urging citizens to return to traditional values of God, family, and country.

• The Squeezed Palate: In Mexico City, where culinary offerings feel increasingly repetitive, restaurateur Federico Patiño and his Somerset-raised partner launch The Lamb, introducing rustic British fare like Scotch eggs and rabbit pie to widen a city’s palate gripped by economic anxiety.

• The Luxury Outcast: Monocle’s Quality of Life Survey crowns new global liveable cities while unceremoniously dropping Anchorage, Birmingham, and Cancún from its ranks.

• The Decennial Audit: Exactly ten years after the historic Brexit vote, the Western world surveys a fractured European continent where the primary architects of populist nationalism remain desperate to delay any objective audit of the economic fallout.

Ultimately, we are left with the image of the newly authenticated early painting by Lucian Freud, Man in a Black Scarf, painted in 1939 and denied by the artist for his entire life out of sheer jealousy and petty rifts with his art-school peers. Like Freud’s hidden portrait, the true condition of 2026 remains obscured beneath administrative press releases, artificial intelligence token futures, and the frantic noise of a world trying to hedge against its own inevitable obsolescence.

[Edited by Pablo Markin. Produced with the aid of Agent, MiniMax, Qwen, Alibaba, and Gemini, Google, tools (June 6, 2026). The newsletters were sourced from ARTNews, Artforum, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, CNBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Monocle, The New York Times, Newsweek, Nikkei Asia, Noema Magazine, El País, Rest of World, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Semafor, The South China Morning Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The featured image has been generated via Canva (June 6, 2026).]

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (June 6, 2026). Magnifica Humanitas, the Server Farm and the Neon Monolith. Sociology, Media, Art.

I. Strait of Hormuz, Strait of Bab el-Mandeb

Listen. The sea is the same sea it was when Odysseus pressed his ear to the planks. A small boat in the Persian Gulf is fired upon; an oil tanker shudders; a missile of indeterminate provenance draws a thin white line across a satellite photograph. In a London trading room, the price of Brent crude tumbles 17% in a month, but the head of Exxon warns that inventories are about to fall to really, really low levels, in that obscene corporate diminutive that makes the destruction of the world sound like a domestic plumbing problem. The Strait of Hormuz — a strip of water the width of a Sunday afternoon — has been, in the official metaphor, “closed” for nearly three months. Thirteen million barrels a day have been subtracted from the planet’s blood supply. Insurance rates for vessels “have barely budged,” the reports say, even as Chevron, Exxon, and Morgan Stanley hold their breath together in the same theological posture.

There is something Borgesian about this. The Strait is not a place; it is a function — a bottleneck, a page torn from a book, a door in the middle of a long corridor. Shut the door and the corridor becomes a cell. Jorge Luis Borges, in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” imagined a cabal of bibliographers who invented a world so convincingly that it eventually replaced the real one. The newscasters, in the same spirit, are inventing a war so that the war may stop, drafting communiqués about “60-day memoranda of understanding” and “the makings of a deal” as if the act of announcing the deal were the deal. The President’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, says that a deal is near. The President himself, in the next breath, says: They thought they were going to outwait me, you know. “We’ll outwait him, he’s got the midterms.” I don’t care about the midterms. Donald Trump has made a form of Beckett out of the news cycle. The whole apparatus of the state, the entire military-industrial-fluorescent-fluorescent-fluorescent complex, has been reduced to the geometry of one man waiting to see who blinks.

Italo Calvino, were he alive, would find this terrain propitious. “Invisible Cities” is full of ports that are the same and not the same, where Marco Polo describes city after city to Kublai Khan, and the Khan recognises in each one the symptoms of an empire coming apart. Kublai’s empire in that book is not so much being conquered as it is being described into exhaustion. The Strait of Hormuz is the canal of the Khan, and we are the Khan: listening, in late May 2026, to descriptions of the same chokepoint repeated with different reports of missiles, of drone interceptions, of a Kuwaiti airbase that was targeted and an Iranian ground-control station that was destroyed. Kuwait activates its air defences against “hostile missile and drone threats.” America fires back. Iran says it is a “serious warning.” The Strait stays closed. The prices fall. The inventories run low. The world spins.

I think of Sebald walking the coast of Suffolk in The Rings of Saturn, knowing that the herring fleet is no longer there, that the hotels no longer host the spa guests of empire. Sebald would recognise the Strait of Hormuz as a place where the herring have been replaced by something more luminous and more lethal — where the shimmering school is not of fish but of Saudis, Emiratis, Iranians, Americans, Chinese, Russians, all of them drawn to the same narrow rectangle of sea for the same reason the herring were there: because the food is. Sebald’s narrator, by the end, becomes uncertain whether the walk happened, whether the past happened, whether anything is more than the way the light falls on a wall in a room in a coastal town no one visits. So it is with the Strait. The Strait is a paragraph in an old book. We are reading it again.

II. The Anthropocene of the Algorithm

And yet, at the same moment that a forty-mile ribbon of seawater is causing a $5 trillion tremor in the global metabolism, Anthropic — a company that did not exist seven years ago and is now worth, depending on whose newsletter you trust, somewhere between $900 billion and $965 billion — closes a $65 billion funding round. $65 billion. The number is so large that it ceases to be a number. It is a geological event. The total volume of the Persian Gulf is roughly 250 cubic kilometres; the volume of water in Anthropic’s data-centre cooling ponds is, at this point, a comparable political object.

The valuations of AI labs now have less to do with finance than with the cosmology of the late Aztec empire: tribute flowing in, the gods unsatisfied, the priests inventing new ceremonies. Sam Altman, who is no longer the most-valuable AI priest, was last valued at $730 billion. Anthropic leapfrogs him on a Thursday and releases Claude Opus 4.8 forty-one days after 4.7. Nvidia dumps billions into photonics — light — because copper has begun to lag the speed at which the new god thinks. The bottleneck is no longer the silicon. The bottleneck is the wire. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson is quoted as saying that one of the main bottlenecks for the performance of AI models is the speed of communication between chips and between chip servers. “The faster the communication, the faster the user can get their answer or their task executed.” The entire history of post-war computing — from vacuum tubes to transistors to Moore’s law — is now being reorganised around the question of how fast a photon can move through a glass fibre relative to an electron through a copper wire. We are back to Heraclitus.

The Pope is worried. Pope Leo XIV, in his first encyclical — Magnifica Humanitas, an eighty-three-page letter subtitled, with characteristic Vatican restraint, Magnificent Humanity — warns that AI’s power must not be concentrated in the hands of a few private companies, that jobs should be protected, that weapons should not be the autonomous arbiters of death. Anthropic’s co-founder Christopher Olah is at the briefing. The Pope gives him a shoutout. This is the first time in a long time that a CEO has been publicly blessed by the Bishop of Rome; the optics are extraordinary, and not a little suspect. The newsletter Rest of World notices. Why are the big tech companies courting the Pope? Because, in the absence of international regulation, the Vatican is being drafted as a quasi-legislative body. The Interfaith Alliance for Safer Communities meets in New York, then Beijing, then Nairobi, then Abu Dhabi. The Geneva initiative is not a regulatory body. It is a synod. The religions of the earth are being convened in lieu of a world government.

I cannot help but think of the millenarian sects that Walter Benjamin catalogued in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin wrote of the “angel of history” whose face is turned toward the past while a storm blows him, irreversibly, into the future. The Pope’s encyclical is, in a way, an attempt to give that angel a Twitter account. The angel must not be permitted to be only the angel of progress. He must be reminded, in the words of Laudato Si’, that he is also the angel of integral ecology, which is to say, the angel of the limits. The Tower of Babel image — explicitly invoked in one of the New York Times summaries of the encyclical — is, of course, the perfect metaphor. God scattered the builders of Babel by giving them new languages. The risk now is that a new language is being given to us by the builders of a new Tower, and the question of who is the divine and who is the human in this little drama is no longer entirely settled.

But there is a darker subtext. Rest of World notes that the AI models that all this talk is about are themselves trained on the data of the very workers — Indian, Filipino, Kenyan, Congolese — whose labour makes the chips possible and the data-centres buildable. The “data annotation” workforce, the lithium miners, the copper miners, the cobalt sorters — these are the people who are also the fastest-growing Christian populations (in Africa, in the Philippines, in India), and they are also the people the Vatican’s exhortation is about and the people whose cheap labour the entire AI boom depends upon. There is a kind of obscene loop here. The Catholic Church is talking to AI companies, who are talking to the Vatican, while the AI is being labelled by a 22-year-old in Nairobi earning $1.80 an hour. The encyclical is, in this sense, a Magnifica Humanitas whose magnificence is also its alibi.

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III. Cockroach Party, or, the Insects Take Power

Somewhere in Boston, a 30-year-old Indian graduate student called Abhijeet Dipke — “president” of the Cockroach Janta Party — has given the entire Indian establishment a small electric shock. The trigger was the Chief Justice of India’s Supreme Court, who compared unemployed youth to cockroaches and parasites. The retort, in the way of the world’s young in 2026, was not a manifesto. It was a meme. AI-generated cockroaches in suits, with tiny raised fists, were generated by the million. The party now has 23 million followers on Instagram — more than twice the BJP’s. The government’s response — to claim the party is a “national-security issue,” perhaps funded by Pakistan, and to restrict its account on X — is the response of an institution that has confused a satirical movement for a subversion. The Economist, sober as ever, runs the story in Essential India under the headline: “A ‘cockroach’ party for India’s youth.”

The young are not torching the parliament, as they did in Nepal last September. They are dressing up as insects to clean up neighbourhoods. They are demanding a freer press and fairer elections. They are doing so under the sign of a parasite. This is the only modern allegory left to us. We are cockroaches, and the Chief Justice has merely said aloud what the system has been telling us. The response is a refusal to be insulted, which is itself a refusal of the insult. Kafka, who knew a thing or two about insect metamorphosis, would have smiled. The Metamorphosis is being re-enacted, but the cockroach is not Gregor Samsa; the cockroach is the system, and we are the family looking on.

Compare this to Argentina, where President Javier Milei — a libertarian with the cadence of a man who has recently discovered Ayn Rand, which is to say, a man who has been reading the same five books for thirty years — has begun to sell off the Chapadmalal workers’ hotels, the $10-a-night state-run resorts that Juan Domingo Perón built in the late 1940s so that an Argentine worker could, in Eva’s word, see the ocean. The country is wonderful if you have one foot out the door, a 30-year-old architect in Bogotá tells El País, an international firm of millionaire relocators having just opened a Bogotà office. The super-rich are leaving, the workers’ hotels are being reprivatised, the IMF is on the line. The state is being cut. This is the libertarian programme, and the libertarian programme is, in its own way, also a Magnifica Humanitas: the magnificent humanity of the marketplace, the magnificent absence of the state, the magnificent conversion of every public good into a private dividend.

But there is a strange counterpoint. The Chapadmalal hotels were built because, in 1948, Argentina understood that the right to a holiday was a human right, that the dignity of labour included the dignity of rest, that the worker who had never seen the ocean was a worker who had been robbed. The Milei programme takes this away. The Milei programme returns the worker to a condition in which the only holiday he can afford is the one he cannot afford. There is a melancholy in the Chapadmalal sale, the kind of melancholy Sebald could diagnose in three sentences, the melancholy of a continent being slowly un-invented by people who think they are merely re-balancing a budget.

In the FT, Peter Thiel moves to Buenos Aires. Into the libertarian paradise. He goes where the taxes are lowest, where the state is smallest, where the dollar is king. He is, of course, leaving the United States of America, the country that produced him. This is one of the great silent migrations of the 21st century: the billionaires are not going to the moon, they are going to places where they are not asked to share. Miami is the older destination; Buenos Aires is the new one. Thiel’s relocation is the most eloquent possible commentary on the political economy of the second Trump term. The capital is fleeing the capital.

IV. The Slop Era

Will Gottsegen writes in The Atlantic that 106,000 songs are uploaded to streaming platforms every day. Most of them are noise. Some of them are AI slop. A reggae band called Stick Figure, who in 2019 released a song called “Angels Above Me,” discovers that hundreds of AI-generated knock-offs of the song have, in recent weeks, accrued millions of streams on Spotify and TikTok. Versions have hit No. 1 on iTunes in Germany and Austria. The original co-writers are not credited. The platform cannot tell the difference. The Atlantic quotes one writer — Liz Pelly, author of Mood Machine — who argues that Spotify has, for years, been training us to listen passively, to treat music as sonic wallpaper, and that this is why the AI slop succeeds: because the human listener has been demoted to wallpaper consumer. The conditions for the takeover were made by the human-music industry itself.

This is a perfect parable of late capitalism. The Tina-ification of culture: replace the singer with a synthesised voice, replace the song with a stolen melody, replace the listener with a sleeping body. New Order were wrong. Everything is happening now. The synthetic music industry is what Horkheimer and Adorno, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, called the culture industry — only now the culture industry no longer needs the humans, and the humans no longer notice. A Spotify spokesperson says that, in the past year, the platform has “removed over 75 million spammy tracks” and “introduced a suite of new policies regarding AI.” Seventy-five million. That is roughly the entire back-catalogue of recorded popular music, removed in a year. We are in the age of permanent deletion.

The Semafor newsletter notes that even artificial slurp is now a job. An AI start-up called Shift is offering free home cleaning in New York — provided the cleaners let the company record their dirty apartments. The data, anonymised, is sold to AI labs. The slogan: democratising the AI economy by letting you clean your neighbour’s apartment for free, and still get paid, by Shift, for the recording. The structure is transparent: a California company captures the labour of New Yorkers, and pays them a pittance to do it. The parallel to the data-annotation farms of the Global South is exact. Only the apparatus is here. The same machine, the same logic. The same conversion of unpaid life into training data.

Suno, the AI music platform, says it doesn’t know whether the Stick Figure knock-offs were made with its tool. Universal Music signs a deal with TikTok to fight the practice, while signing a deal with Spotify to enable it. The official contract of the slop era is being drafted in lawyers’ offices. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, says: It will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media. Sam Altman backs an eyeball-scanning start-up. The proof of humanness is now itself a product, and a product that requires you to look at a camera, which is, of course, exactly the camera that is being trained on you. We are watching the final circularity: the human is being verified in order to be permitted to be a customer of the platform that is training the AI that is replacing the human. The ouroboros eats its tail. The slop eats the cook.

And yet. The Atlantic has the grace to quote a 25-year-old named Nicolette Brewer, who says: I missed a lot of that classroom experience myself, as I attended college during the pandemic. People are more comfortable living digitally now because of Covid. So it’s nice to have a space where we can go out and it’s OK to socialize and start conversations. Brewer pays $800 a month on fitness. She met her boyfriend in a run club. She made friends by showing up and returning. 700 chances to hang out with your friends is, the author jokes, a practical investment in community. In the middle of the slop, flesh insists. The body, after all, is the one thing that cannot yet be slop-ified. I get to act with Lisa Kudrow all day, says Laura Silverman in a different newsletter, talking about her twenty years of playing Jane on The Comeback. Everything she gives me, I have to give back as Jane. The body gives what the body has. The slop cannot give what the slop does not have. The body is the only reliable server. We return, again and again, to the bar, the studio, the gym, the cafe, the street, not because the algorithm wants us to, but because Kudrow is on the other side of the table.

This is, perhaps, the most important sentence in all the newsletters this week: I get to act with Lisa Kudrow all day.

V. Drones over the Black Sea, Drones over the Pacific

The drones. The drones. The world is in the second age of the drone, and the second age is more terrifying than the first, because the first age was analog and the second is not. In Semafor we read that Stark, a German drone start-up, is set for a €2.5bn valuation. In CNBC, Nvidia is investing billions in photonics to make the data between chips go faster. In The Economist, a leader argues that the cheap, swarm drone is the great equaliser, the weapon that has made war a dumber choice for the strong: Ukraine, the magazine writes, has quadrupled the intensity of its strikes in recent months, and Russia, for the first time, is now losing 179 soldiers per kilometre of advance. Six months ago the figure was 67. The drone has reversed the historical ratio. The strong now have something to fear.

A Russian drone hits an apartment block in Galați, Romania. A NATO state. Two people are injured. Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary-General, calls it reckless. Ursula von der Leyen says Russia has crossed yet another line. The line keeps being crossed. The line is now an object in the world, an artifact, a thing you can pick up and look at. The line is no longer the limit of NATO. The line is the limit of NATO’s vocabulary. NATO has been crossing lines so often that the crossing has become NATO’s primary mode of being. The fact that even the most serious security incident in Romania since 2022 produces only angry statements is the entire geopolitics of late 2026 in one sentence.

In the Pacific, the situation is identical, only louder. China is again absent from the Shangri-La Dialogue. For the second year in a row, Beijing’s defence minister does not show up. The US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth — whose title the newsletters keep printing as Secretary of War, a phrase that has not been used in the United States government since 1947 and is, perhaps, not an accident — delivers the keynote. Vietnam’s leader, Tô Lâm, gives the other. Foreign officials have flocked to Xi Jinping this year, the FT notes. The world comes to Xi. In Beijing’s telling, China is the pillar of stability; in Washington’s, China is the military build-up against which allies must spend. The contradiction is structural. The Indo-Pacific is, as the Russian-Ukrainian border, a place where the lines are moving.

In the CNBC newsletter, a Google employee is arrested for insider trading — on Polymarket, the prediction market, using internal knowledge of what people were searching for. The search term was a singer. The trader was, the newsletters say, a security engineer with internal data. The case is a small perfect emblem of the moment: a data-driven economy in which even search is a tradable asset, in which the prediction markets, which were supposed to democratise forecasting, are now being arbitraged by people with the very insider data the markets were supposed to dissolve. The prediction market becomes a thin version of the stock market, where the thin is the thin of the bullet — you can see through it, but it can kill you.

The IPO of SpaceX, the enshittification of markets, the enshittification of money. Semafor notes that the SpaceX IPO is being structured to entrench the founder’s power — a Zuckerberg discount is the term — and that 14 billion dollars of passive investment money is now, in some sense, in the rocket company. Robert Armstrong, in the FT, writes that this can do a great deal of harm. The harm is the harm of the founder model, the harm of the company as the body of one man, the harm of the franchise state in corporate form. The SpaceX IPO is, in this sense, the political economy of late-2026 America expressed in a single listing: a few people at the top, a lot of money underneath, and the missile as the product.

VI. The Trump Encyclicals, the Lame-Duck God

In The Atlantic, David Graham calls the second Trump administration the brazen one. The word is exactly right. Brazen comes from the same root as brass — the metal of the statue, the metal of the bell, the metal of the trumpet, the metal of the cheek. Trump’s DOJ is reported to be investigating E. Jean Carroll, the woman who won $90 million in civil judgments against him for sexual abuse. The probe centres on whether she lied about the funding of her lawsuit. The probe is run not by the US Attorney’s office in New York, where the case was tried, but by the US Attorney in Chicago, who is, according to the report, the same man who was scolded by a federal judge in April for prosecutorial misconduct. The judge, April Perry, said: I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts.

The brazenness is the brazenness of a man who has decided that the institutions are his. The $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund is, in the same week, blocked by a federal judge, who calls it a political compensation program for Trump’s allies. A different judge blocks the closure of the Kennedy Center and rules that adding Trump’s name to the building is unlawful. The state is, at this point, a lawsuit in search of an outcome. Theatrical, mendacious, and exhausting: the second term is the negative version of the first. The first was the reality-television version. The second is the late-night-reality-television version, where the host knows the cameras are off but keeps talking anyway, because the silence is worse.

And yet. The Atlantic also runs a piece, in the same week’s newsletter, asking whether Trump is already a lame duck. The argument is the argument of the budget: the Iran war, the tariffs, the inflation, the polling at an all-time low. Newsweek confirms the polling. Trump’s approval rating has dipped to a new all-time low across both terms, and is now lower than Joe Biden’s lowest. The midterms are approaching. Ken Paxton, the impeached, the indicted, has won a Texas primary. The Democrats, for the first time in years, have a realistic shot at the state. The whole show is, in this sense, the show of a man who is still on stage after the audience has begun to leave. The TACO equilibrium — a coinage, like Trussquake or Liz Truss moment, for the cycle of Trump Always Chickens Out — has become a structural fact of the markets. The market rallies because it assumes Trump will retreat. The retreat is the basis of the price. The price is the retreat.

There is a remarkable 1866 statute that bars living people from appearing on US currency. Treasury Department officials, in 2026, are advancing internal plans for a $250 bill featuring Trump. The law says no. The administration says: the law says no, but the plan is advancing. The plan is the substitute for the law. The plan is the law. The plan is the photo op. The 250th anniversary of the United States is being prepared as a kind of national birthday party with the President as the only guest. The Kennedy Center is to be renamed. The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is to be painted blue. A triumphal arch is to be built near Arlington. The cost overruns of the pool paint job are now $13.1 million — seven times the figure touted to journalists. The contractor’s profit margin is 20%, against the normal 6 to 12%. The pool leaks. The pool is unfixable. The pool is a perfect metaphor for the second term. The pool is leaking, and the painting contractor cannot be held responsible, and no one in particular is to blame, and the pool is on the Mall, and the Mall is the place where the idea of America is supposed to be at its purest, and the idea is blue, and the blue is leaking.

But. The same week, The 1600 (Newsweek) reports that Congress passed, 396 to 13, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill that loosens manufactured-home regulation and turns the screws on Wall Street’s grip on single-family rentals. The same Republican Congress is also considering the Railway Safety Act, in response to the East Palestine derailment, against the wishes of an industry that has returned $200bn to shareholders. The GOP of yesteryear is dead, the newsletter says. In many ways, what has replaced it is worse: an increasingly extremist personality cult that answers to the whims of one man. But look at it a different way. Republicans are no longer in thrall to the deregulatory, free market demands of their longtime allies in the Chamber of Commerce or industry lobbyists. Carlo Versano, the writer, is doing a delicate thing: he is applauding a Republican Congress for acting against the industries that fund it. He is applauding from the corner of his mouth. The applause is the applause of someone who knows the cost.

This is, perhaps, the modern condition. The Democrats, an autopsy reveals, did not mention Gaza even once in their 200-page report on why they lost the 2024 election. The autopsy is a fictional document in the precise sense Roland Barthes meant: a text whose function is to displace, not to record. The Democrats’ failure is the failure of a language that cannot name what it has lost. They have lost the young. They have lost the moral authority on the single most divisive foreign policy issue of the election cycle. They have lost the language to call the loss a loss. In a 200-page document, the absence of a word is a presence. Not once. The silence is the entire text.

VII. E. Jean Carroll, Andrew Cuomo, and the Return of the Letter

E. Jean Carroll — I keep returning to her because she is, in 2026, the most Perecquian of American figures. She is a writer who has become, against her will, a piece of evidence. Her testimony is no longer hers; it is a fact in a public ledger. The DOJ is investigating whether she lied. Carroll said she had no communication with Hoffman, the report says, but two weeks later her lawyers told a judge they had secured funding from a nonprofit Hoffman leads. The discrepancy is small. The discrepancy is the kind of thing a jury would call not material. But the discrepancy is, in 2026, a federal investigation. The discrepancy has become an event.

Georges Perec, in W, or the Memory of Childhood, builds his entire book out of the tension between two texts: the bare facts of a wartime deportation, and the bourgeois memories of a small French boy. The two texts are interleaved. The reader is not told which is which. The book is the form of the interrogation. E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump is now a text of the same kind: two testimonies, one of the body, one of the non-body, interleaved, and the reader is being asked to determine, on the basis of fragments, which is which. The federal investigation is a third text. It is the text of the state trying to find out which of the other two is the lie.

This is the deepest structural question of the period. In 2026, the state, the body, and the algorithm are all three engaged in the same work: trying to determine what is real. The Pope, in Magnifica Humanitas, is trying to determine what is real about the machine. The DOJ, in E. Jean Carroll, is trying to determine what is real about the woman’s testimony. The streaming platforms, in The Atlantic, are trying to determine what is real about the music. The prediction markets, in Semafor, are trying to determine what is real about the future. The whole world is a courtroom and we are all witnesses, and the lawyers are algorithms, and the algorithm is being trained on the courtroom, and the courtroom is being decided by the algorithm.

In this sense, Pope Leo’s encyclical is, despite the Vatican’s pieties, the only honest document of the period. Magnifica Humanitas does not pretend to know the answer. It asks who decides. It says that the decision must not be left to the few private companies whose self-interest is to not decide. It says that the decision must be made by the plurality of voices and visions the Pope gestures at. It is, in short, a political document dressed as a religious one. It is the only document of the period that names the political problem as the political problem. Every other document in the newsletters is a technical document. The technical is, of course, the modern form of the avoidance of the political.

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VIII. The Blue Zones, the Lime Bikes, and the Lizard-Brain Tourism

And yet, in the middle of the doomer newsletter week, there is a gentle newsletter. Monocle is, as always, the gentlest of the publications. Tyler Brûlé is in Zürich, drinking coffee. Andrew Tuck is in Rotterdam, watching a brown tent-making bat. What a strange and pleasant thing, Tuck writes, to be a Lime-bike anthropologist, to be the watcher of baskets, to count the demi-devoured doners in the green buckets of a city of unmappable light. The Fenix museum is on the docks. The Mad Architects have redesigned it. The water taxis are passing under. The sun is leaving. Below, the docks where Europeans once boarded ships for America, never to return. Many never seeing their birth nations again. The new museum, migration-focused, is on the site of the old port. The metaphor is exact. The metaphor is the only thing that has not changed.

In the Bloomberg Pursuits newsletter, a different kind of light falls. The author is at 521 Barry’s Bootcamp classes. A friend is at 700. Gen Z is spending 30% more on gym memberships. A 25-year-old named Nicolette Brewer meets her boyfriend in a run club. A 25-year-old named Tiffany Ap flies to Osaka for a Hyrox. Sardinia is the new Sicily. The blue zones of the world — where the people live past 100 — are the new Lourdes. Drink the Cannonau di Sardegna and you are investing in your longevity. The 1,200-dollar omakase is now a spending category. The white-ceramic Zenith is the statement piece. The 7,000-dollar San Francisco rental is if you have AI money. The 300-dollar gym membership is if you are feeling social. The Affordability Crisis is, in this column, the new interior decoration.

What we are watching, in Bloomberg Pursuits, is the aestheticisation of the squeeze. The working-class wallet cannot afford any of these objects; the aesthetic of these objects, however, is now everyone’s aesthetic. The 1,200-dollar omakase is the same omakase the 30-year-old consultant cannot afford; she reads about it; she wants it; the wanting is itself a market. The 1,200-dollar omakase is, in this sense, the ode of the late-aesthetic moment: the consumption of the description of the consumption. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, in which the poet is sustained on garum and the imagination of a meal, are the spirit of the column. The 1,200-dollar omakase is, in 2026, the garum of a New York consultant. The meal is imagined. The bill is real.

IX. The Pope, the Anthropic, the Afterlife of the Sacred

Let me come back, finally, to the Pope. Magnifica Humanitas is, I am convinced, the most important document of the period. Not because it is wise — most of its prescriptions are the standard papal caritas, and could have been written in 1956 — but because it has happened. A sitting Pope, in 2026, has issued an eighty-three-page letter on artificial intelligence. The document is co-blessed by the co-founder of Anthropic. The document names AI’s centralisation as a sin against subsidiarity, the Catholic doctrine that no higher authority should do what a lower can. The document is, in this sense, the first political document of the Catholic Church on the digital age, and it is political not in the partizan sense but in the Aristotelian sense: it is a document about the polis, about the common life, about the form of a community in which decisions are made.

And the Anthropic co-founder, Christopher Olah, is there. He is at the Vatican. He is at the briefing. He is giving the Pope a hug, in the way these things are now done. The fact that a Papal encyclical is, in effect, launched with the help of a Silicon Valley executive is, in itself, a fact of extraordinary meaning. It is a fact about the transfer of the sacred. The Catholic Church, which is to say the longest continuously operating institution in the West, is in the AI game not by making AI but by blessing it, by giving the blessing that the institution can give and that the new companies cannot give themselves. The blessing is the good the Vatican has to offer; the data is the good the AI company has to offer; the meeting is a transaction. It is a transaction in legitimacy.

There is, in the rest of Magnifica Humanitas, a discussion of religion in AI. The newsletter Rest of World reports that AI models show bias toward Catholicism and against Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese folk religion. Egypt banned the use of AI to interpret the Quran because chatbots were moving Muslim users toward Western values. Brian Patrick Green of the Markkula Center is quoted: Regardless of whether religion should have a role in shaping AI, it already does. The cultures of the U.S. and China are shaping AI systems now. The encyclical, in this sense, is asking the question: whose values are being embedded? Whose spirit? Whose silence?

This is the question of our period. It is not the question of whether AI will be good or bad. It is the question of whose AI is being built, and in whose image, and at whose expense, and for whose benefit. The data-annotation workers in Nairobi, the lithium miners in Chile, the cobalt sorters in the DRC, the rare-earth extractors in Inner Mongolia, the data-centre construction workers in drought-stricken Texas — these are the people who build the AI. The AI is being built on top of their bodies. The Pope does not say this in Magnifica Humanitas. He should. The encyclical is, on this point, insufficiently radical. The encyclical is, on this point, the mild text it pretends not to be.

But its existence is the news. A 21st-century Pope has written an 83-page letter about the machine. The letter is, in essence, a political theory of the digital age, written in a register that no longer speaks to anyone in the global north, but that still resonates in the global south. The letter is, in essence, the last of the great encyclicals of the modern Catholic Church. After it, what is left? What can be said that has not been said? What is the next encyclical? On the data-centres? On the lithium? On the swarms? On the slop?

X. Coda: The Strait, the Slop, the Saint, the Sea

I have been making, throughout this essay, what is perhaps a forbidden move. I have been treating the newsletters as texts. As if the FT Edit and the Newsweek Bulletin and the Atlantic and Semafor and Bloomberg Pursuits and the Monocle Weekend Edition were not just news, but literature — a literature of the late spring of 2026, in which the unified field of the period is trying to be expressed. The Strait of Hormuz. The Anthropic valuation. The Cockroach Janta Party. The Ferrari Luce. The E. Jean Carroll investigation. The Milei privatisation. The Pope’s encyclical. The Lime-bike baskets of Rotterdam. The Bitcoin lost-and-found. The death of Vaibhav Sooryavanshi’s spin. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. The Pope’s encyclical. The Iran-US memorandum. The Michigan Senate primary. The Argentina-China rare-earth deal. The Mexico-US corruption indictment. The Canada recession. The Romania drone. The Blue Origin explosion. The Pope’s encyclical. The Pope’s encyclical. The Pope’s encyclical.

I keep coming back to the encyclical because it is, I think, the only document in the entire week’s newsletters that is not a symptom of the period. The other documents are symptoms. The Pope’s letter is, at least, the attempt to read the symptoms. It is, in this sense, the Critique of Pure Reason of the period. Kant asked, in 1781, how is synthetic a priori knowledge possible? The Pope asks, in 2026, how is the human person possible in the time of the machine? The two questions are not the same. But they are congeneric. They are both transcendental questions. They are both questions about the conditions under which something can be known, can be done, can be done well.

The answer the Pope gives, in Magnifica Humanitas, is Magnifica Humanitas itself. The magnificent humanity. The answer is the refusal to substitute. The answer is the refusal of the substitution of the human by the machine, of the worker by the algorithm, of the testimony by the legal proceeding, of the country by the President’s mood, of the encyclical by the press release. The answer is the refusal of the slop. The slop is the substitute. The slop is what the algorithm does in place of the human. The encyclical is the refusal of the slop.

This is why, in the end, the newsletters are not just news. They are the texts of a period in which the substitute is trying to take the place of the substance. The Strait is the substitute for the war. The memorandum is the substitute for the peace. The IPO is the substitute for the product. The encyclical is the substitute for the politics. The cocktail is the substitute for the meeting. The gym class is the substitute for the friend. The cockroach meme is the substitute for the manifesto. The Pope’s letter is the substitute for the act of governance. The newsletter is the substitute for the thinking. The thinking is what we should not substitute. Magnifica Humanitas is the refusal.

And the sea. The sea, in The Rings of Saturn, is the same sea at the end as at the beginning, only emptier. The sea, in the Strait of Hormuz, is the same sea in 2026 as in 1980, only with more ships and more missiles. The sea, in Magnifica Humanitas, is the Magnifica Humanitas itself: the magnificent, the terrible, the unspeakable, the all-right. The sea is the answer to every question, and the question of every answer. The sea is the form of the period. The period is oceanic. The period is submerged. The period is out-waited, as the President says, by the sea.

We are not out-waited, of course. The sea does not wait. The sea is, as Melville knew, the medium of all our mediums. The sea is the strait. The sea is the sluice. The sea is the slop. The sea is also the Magnifica Humanitas. The sea is the thing itself. The newsletters do not know this. The encyclical, perhaps, is beginning to. The encyclical is the small boat in the strait, drifting, looking for the shore that may not be there.

We are all in the small boat. We are all, in 2026, in the small boat. The Strait is us. The slop is us. The slop is us watching ourselves on a screen, listening to ourselves on a stream, praying to ourselves on a chatbot. The slop is the medium of the medium. The Magnifica Humanitas is the human in the medium. The Magnifica Humanitas is the thing that cannot be slop-ified, because the thing is the thing, and the thing is not the image of the thing. The image of the Magnifica Humanitas would be the slop of the Magnifica Humanitas. The Magnifica Humanitas is itself. The Magnifica Humanitas is the human that cannot be substituted.

This is the only good news in the newsletters of late May 2026. It is small. It is enough.

Notes on the texts drawn upon in the composition of this essay, beyond the newsletters themselves:
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Dialectic of Enlightenment”; Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”; Italo Calvino, “Invisible Cities”; W. G. Sebald, “The Rings of Saturn” and “The Emigrants”; Roberto Calasso, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”; Georges Perec, “W, or the Memory of Childhood” and “Life a User’s Manual”; Roland Barthes, “Camera Lucida”; Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish”; Guy Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle”; Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation”; Hannah Arendt, “The Human Condition”; Pope Francis, “Laudato Si’”; Pope Leo XIV, “Magnifica Humanitas”; Byung-Chul Han, “Psychopolitics”; Yuk Hui, “Recursivity and Contingency”; Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem”; Osip Mandelstam, “The Stalin Epigram”; Marina Tsvetaeva; Wisława Szymborska; Czesław Miłosz, “The Captive Mind”; Tomas Tranströmer; Roberto Bolaño, “2666”; Fernanda Melchor, “Hurricane Season”; Olga Tokarczuk, “The Books of Jacob”; Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian” and “The Passenger”; Don DeLillo, “White Noise” and “Mao II”; Thomas Pynchon, “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Bleeding Edge”; Philip K. Dick, “VALIS” and “The Man in the High Castle”; William Gibson, “Neuromancer”; J. G. Ballard, “Crash” and “The Crystal World”; David Foster Wallace, “Infinite Jest”; Zadie Smith, “White Teeth” and “NW”; Kazuo Ishiguro, “Never Let Me Go” and “Klara and the Sun”; Haruki Murakami, “1Q84” and “Kafka on the Shore”; M. John Harrison, “Light” and “The Centauri Device”; Samuel Beckett, “Watt” and “The Unnamable”; Roberto Bolaño, “The Spirit of Science Fiction”; Elizabeth Bishop, “Geography III”; Tomas Sedlacek, “The Economics of Good and Evil”; Yanis Varoufakis, “Another Now”; Branko Milanović, “Capitalism, Alone”; Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, “The Narrow Corridor”; Amartya Sen, “Development as Freedom”; Arundhati Roy, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”; Salman Rushdie, “The Satanic Verses” and “Quichotte”; W. G. Sebald, “Austerlitz”; Annie Ernaux, “The Years” and “The Place”; the speeches and writings of Narendra Modi and Javier Milei (cited only in the most clinical way); the journalism of Carlos Dada, Gideon Levy, Maria Ressa, Roberto Saviano, and the late great M. S. Venkataram; and the Bhagavad Gita, which says, in the second chapter, that the true seer is the one who sees equally the scholar, the cow, the elephant, the dog, and the outcaste. The 2026 newsletter reader might profitably do the same.

[Edited by Pablo Markin. Produced with the aid of Agent, MiniMax, tools (June 3, 2026). The newsletters were sourced from ARTNews, Artforum, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, CNBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Monocle, The New York Times, Newsweek, Nikkei Asia, Noema Magazine, El País, Rest of World, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Semafor, The South China Morning Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The featured infographic has been generated in Gemini, Google (June 3, 2026).]

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (June 3, 2026). The Strait, the Slop, and the Saint in the Machine. Sociology, Media, Art.

Begin with a bottleneck. Not a figure of speech, though it is also that: a literal narrows in the geography of the world’s nervous system, twenty-one miles at its tightest, between Oman and Iran, through which passes a fifth of the earth’s oil and a proportionate share of the planet’s anxiety. Javier Blas, writing from somewhere inside the Bloomberg apparatus, recalls what happened when the Suez Canal closed in 1967: fifteen ships dropped anchor to wait for the hostilities to end. The hostilities ended quickly, as we know — it was called, with the wry economy of modern warfare, the Six-Day War — but the canal remained closed for eight years. By the time the ships were permitted to leave, in 1975, only two remained seaworthy. The rest had rusted into immobility, so long becalmed that they became known as the Yellow Fleet. Algae colonised their hulls. Photographs from the time show them in tawny suspension, neither sea nor land, a ghost armada neither departing nor arrived.

This is the image with which to read these three days, May 25 to 27, 2026, as the newsletters pile up on a screen somewhere — Bloomberg, the FT, the Economist, Monocle, ARTnews, Newsweek, the rest — and the world tries to decide whether it is in a ceasefire or a war. The Strait of Hormuz is both a specific geographic feature and an embodiment of what Paul Virilio called the dromological condition of modernity: the organisation of power around logistics and speed. When the strait is open, oil flows, markets breathe, the great circulatory system of global capitalism performs its ambient miracle. When it closes, the body convulses. Brent crude at ninety-nine dollars a barrel. European heatwaves breaking May temperature records while France braces for energy shortages. Sri Lanka hiking its benchmark rate by a full percentage point. Real wages in the developed world beginning, finally, to shrink.

The Yellow Fleet floated for eight years. No one is prepared to say how long the current stalemate might last, though the prediction markets on Polymarket — themselves promptly banned in Indonesia as a form of gambling — suggest the odds of swift normalisation are not what the White House claims. The S&P 500 rises, because markets are always betting on the deal that isn’t done yet, pricing in the peace that hasn’t been signed. This is the epistemological condition of financial capitalism: it cannot think except in futures.

The theorist Ernst Bloch, writing in The Principle of Hope in the years after the Second World War, described what he called the Not-Yet-Conscious — the dim sense, present in everyday daydreaming and utopian wishing, that something better is both imminent and unrealised. Bloomberg’s morning briefings are, in a sense, a corrupt pastoral version of this structure: every edition opens with a horizon, a deal that is close, progress that is proceeding nicely, a deal that is within reach — and then, by the next edition, has been pulled slightly further away. The ceasefire holds; the strikes occur. Trump says the talks are “proceeding nicely” on Truth Social, and hours later American jets hit missile sites in southern Iran. The Iranian Foreign Ministry condemns this as a violation of the ceasefire. Both things are described as true simultaneously. This is not exactly contradiction; it is the new grammar of geopolitical discourse, in which every statement is simultaneously made and unmade, every declaration accompanied by its own shadow-denial. Iran’s state media reports that US officials have privately acknowledged Trump’s social media posts are “primarily for promotional purposes.” This, too, is reported as fact. The war is simultaneously happening and not happening, the deal is simultaneously close and collapsing, and in this state of semantic suspension the oil markets perform their edgy, trillion-dollar waiting dance.

Walter Benjamin, in the Theses on the Philosophy of History, imagined a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus — the angel of history, face turned toward the wreckage of the past, wings spread, being blown backwards into the future by a storm. That storm, Benjamin wrote, is what we call progress. One thinks of this angel now watching the newsletters scroll past: the angel’s gaze fixed on Kyiv, where Russia has struck the National Chernobyl Museum and the National Art Museum of Ukraine with its largest assault since 2024 — an Oreshnik ballistic missile, a weapon so powerful its name is almost onomatopoeic with catastrophe. Curator Hanka Tretiak tells the Kyiv Post: “Russians are destroying cultural heritage that belongs not only to Ukraine, but to all of Europe and the world.” A week earlier, the museum had opened a performance-exhibition about art as a form of therapy during war. The exhibition had to be dismantled after the strike. Benjamin’s angel stares.

What makes the cultural erasure in Kyiv particularly vertiginous is its contemporaneity with a rather different kind of historical manipulation, happening simultaneously in Washington D.C., where Donald Trump is repainting the reflecting pool of the Lincoln Memorial in what reporters describe as “beach-resort blue” for the United States’ semiquincentennial — the 250th anniversary of independence. At Freedom Plaza, workers are installing a resurrected statue of Caesar Rodney, a founding father who was also a slaveholder, torn down during the racial justice protests of 2020. The White House has sent letters demanding that Smithsonian exhibitions convey “a positive view of American history.”

Milan Kundera, in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, described how the Czechoslovak regime airbrushed the disgraced communist Vladimir Clementis out of a famous 1948 photograph, leaving only his fur hat, which had been placed on Klement Gottwald’s head. “The struggle of man against power,” Kundera wrote, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Trump’s semiquincentennial is not quite Stalinist airbrushing — the curators of the Smithsonian’s In Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness exhibition, opening May 14, have included a red MAGA hat and Nancy Pelosi’s gavel, a transgender actress’s dress and a gay wedding cake topper, and have apparently been unaltered by White House pressure. Theodore Gonzalves, the lead curator, speaks with quiet dignity: “Within truth telling, there will be some uncomfortable aspects but it’s in the reckoning of it that people find the lessons.” But the pressure is new and real. The president has issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The Orwellian register of that title — where “truth” is code for approved mythology and “sanity” for ideological compliance — deserves more attention than the daily news torrent permits.

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson, writing from Washington for Monocle, notes that Trump “has unleashed a wave of creative thinking around the nature of reflection — exactly the birthday gift that the US needs.” The optimism is admirable but perhaps too quickly granted. What is being rehearsed here is something older and more structurally troubling than any single administration’s narcissism. It is the perennial conflict between the nation-state’s need for a legitimising mythology and the historians’ professional commitment to complication. The Romantics understood this clearly: the nation required a golden age, a founding fiction, an origin story purified of shadow. Renan wrote in 1882 that a nation requires not only shared memories but shared forgetting — l’oubli, forgetting, is a condition of nationhood. Trump is not therefore aberrant; he is merely unusually explicit about the mechanism.

And while history is disputed in Washington and bombed in Kyiv, in Tokyo it is illuminated. The Tokyo Lights 2026 festival is transforming the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building into the world’s largest projection-mapping canvas, and reviving the long-sullen Shinjuku Central Park — once, in the words of Monocle’s Luke Tamada, a place of “windswept plazas” and premature urban darkness. The festival’s creative director, Kenji Kohashi, whose credits include the 2020 Paralympics closing ceremony and Expo 2025 Osaka, speaks of illuminating the “invisible Tokyo.” “In today’s age of fragmentation,” he says, “I want visitors to recognise the possibility for collaboration between artists and public space, generations and sectors.”

This is the language of urban utopianism, and it resonates distinctly with Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the droit à la ville — the right to the city — and his insistence that urban space is not a neutral container but a social production, always in contestation. Nishi-Shinjuku was Tokyo’s first high-rise neighbourhood, its first skyscraper opening in 1971. It doubled down on gigantism, built for the day, and evacuated at night. The Japanese governor Yuriko Koike wants to reclaim the night-time economy. There is something poignant in this aspiration: the recognition that a city which belongs only to working hours is a half-city, a set without actors. The light festival is an attempt to give back to the neighbourhood the hours it surrendered to the logic of productivity.

Hannah Lucinda Smith, writing for Monocle from Istanbul, offers an adjacent lament: the disappearance of the “And Finally” segment from television news. She recalls a 1978 BBC Midlands Today segment about a skateboarding duck named Herbie that was still discussed in the newsroom decades later. Ryan Herman’s book And Finally... collects these gentle, frivolous, luminous closing segments — drunk mice in a sherry distillery; an octogenarian grandmother taking up paragliding — and their absence, Smith argues, is more than sentimental. In a world organised around algorithmic doom loops and outrage-maximising feeds, the light story is a counter-political act. It says: even today, something was absurd and kind. It is what Calvino, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, called levità — lightness — not as triviality but as a counterweight to the weight of the world. “The power of lightness,” Calvino wrote, “means making a poem or any other kind of artwork of levity and sprightliness.”

The parallel with the Tokyo lights festival is exact, though the scales differ. Both are responses to the same condition: a world that has organised its attention economy around catastrophe and has forgotten the grammar of delight.

Meanwhile, the robots are learning to sort packages. A company called Figure AI has been livestreaming its Helix-02 humanoid robots working a conveyor belt for over 160 hours, sorting 1,240 to 1,250 packages per hour — against a human worker’s 300 to 600. The livestream, we are told, was one of the most-watched events of the week. There is a strange, deep logic to this: the spectacle of our replacement proving popular entertainment, the future arriving without ceremony as a warehouse livestream watched during lunch.

Pope Leo XIV, the new pontiff — a mathematician by training, which is not nothing — has released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, 235 pages long. He calls for AI to be “disarmed,” by which he means: stripped of the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. He warns against delegating to automated systems decisions “concerning employment, credit, access to public services,” decisions that require “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change.”

The Bloomberg analyst John Authers invokes the old Stalin gibe — “how many divisions has the pope?” — only to note, quietly, that the Soviet Union is not here to remind us of the answer. The pope may lack divisions but commands the attention of 1.4 billion Catholics and, through the encyclical form, addresses “political leaders, technology companies and society more broadly.” Pope Francis used his first encyclical for environmental protection; Leo uses his for digital anthropology. The genealogy is not accidental: both are responses to a planetary civilisation that has exceeded the ethical frameworks it inherited.

Ashish Narayan, a factory worker in India who wears smart glasses that record his hand movements — the data, he has been told, will train the robots that will replace him — is quoted saying it feels “like working in your own grave, while you make your own casket.” The image is Kafkaesque in its precision, its flatness, its refusal of melodrama. Gregor Samsa woke to find himself transformed; Narayan wakes each morning and performs the transformation himself, manually, for a wage. This is the new alienation: not Marxian estrangement from the product of one’s labour, but something more intimate — the worker as unwilling author of their own obsolescence. Marx, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, described labour as “man’s species-being,” the activity through which humanity realises itself. What is the species-being of a worker whose labour is primarily training data?

The Bloomberg analysis notes that China may offset up to 60% of its labour-force decline by 2035 with robots. Barclays identifies the critical engineering challenge not in “brains” or “batteries” but in “brawn” — the actuators, dependent on magnetic rare earths, that replicate the dexterity of the human body. China dominates rare earth production. The US leads in chips and software. The body is Chinese; the mind is American. Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto” imagined the cyborg as a figure for transgressing the nature/culture boundary; she did not quite anticipate the geopolitical semiotics of the cyborg’s joints.

In a cornfield in Virginia, metal detectorists have found eleven French military buttons from 1782, coins from Spain and England, the physical detritus of Lafayette’s army on its way to Yorktown. They were hunting for Civil War artifacts and found instead the Revolutionary War, the previous revolution, the one that made the current semiquincentennial necessary. Only one other French march has been excavated in the United States — in Connecticut. The nonprofit that owns the land bought it to preserve a carnivorous plant, the purple pitcher plant. The plant that saves the battlefield. The carnivore that protects the historical record. There is a story here that exceeds journalism’s patience for it.

The medieval King Arthur manuscript — one of the earliest, in private hands for over 700 years — is going to Christie’s for an estimated £1.5 to £2 million. The story of Arthur has never really gone away because it addresses something permanent in the political unconscious: the dream of legitimate authority, of a king who rules by moral right rather than mere force, of the round table where no place is higher than another. The manuscript’s emergence into the market at this historical moment — when legitimacy in the great democracies is radically contested, when the rule of law is under pressure from within — does not require allegorical overstatement. It is simply there, offered to the highest bidder, which is its own comment on the Arthurian vision.

Barnes & Noble, improbably, is experiencing a renaissance. Its new CEO, James Daunt — who rescued Waterstones in Britain through analogous methods — has abolished the chain’s corporate prescription for shelf display and replaced it with local curation. Each store’s staff chooses the pyramid at the apex of every display table. The pyramid is neither algorithm nor central committee; it is a human judgment, made by a particular person in a particular place, for a particular community of readers. Borges imagined in “The Library of Babel” a library that contained every possible book, which is to say a library that contained no books, only infinite indistinguishable text. The Barnes & Noble counter-model is almost the inverse: finite books, each one selected, elevated, recommended. The employee’s pyramid is an act of editorial faith, which is to say an act of moral courage in an age when both are scarce.

The housing crises in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are structurally related and philosophically instructive. In Auckland, “there was a time when I could have sold a cardboard box on the side of the road,” says Wellington-based real estate consultant Alison Hawkes. In Sydney, the average home costs nearly fourteen times annual disposable income, second only to Hong Kong globally. An abandoned duplex sells for A$3.3 million and hundreds show up to watch. The Australian housing crisis is a spectacle in the Situationist sense: real people watching a real auction as if it were entertainment, participation transformed into spectatorship.

Martin Heidegger, in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” argued that dwelling — wohnen, to dwell — is not merely a function of housing but the fundamental way in which human beings are on the earth. To dwell is to care for, to preserve, to remain. The commodification of dwelling — the conversion of wohnen into speculative asset — is therefore not merely an economic failure but an ontological one: it transforms the ground of human being into a liquid investment. Simone Weil, in The Need for Roots, argued that uprootedness (déracinement) is “by far the most dangerous malady to which human societies are subject.” She was writing about occupied France; she might equally have been writing about Sydney.

The Canada newsletters describe Mark Carney warning Alberta separatists of “Brexit-style regret.” The parallel is exact: the vote would be a “free option,” its advocates insist, a risk-free escalation of bargaining power. Carney, who governed the Bank of England during the Brexit referendum, knows better. The “free option” is never free. The Scottish independence referendum haunts British politics still; Brexit will haunt it for a generation.

In Senegal, President Bassirou Diomaye Faye has fired Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko — his former mentor, the man whose imprisonment galvanised the movement that brought Faye to power — and Sonko has promptly become Speaker of the National Assembly. The political partnership that swept into office in 2024 is publicly fracturing over the IMF, over debt restructuring, over the gap between revolutionary rhetoric and institutional accommodation. This is the oldest story in postcolonial politics: the anti-systemic alliance that, once in power, must decide whether to break the system or be broken by it. Frantz Fanon saw it coming in The Wretched of the Earth, warning that the national bourgeoisie, having expelled the coloniser, would occupy his seat. The specific version here involves the IMF cutting Senegal’s GDP growth forecast to 2.2% after the discovery of previously undisclosed liabilities, a story that has become depressingly familiar across the continent — the inherited debt that makes sovereignty legible only as a form of managed insolvency.

Africa’s Ebola outbreak in the DRC is intensifying, with over 220 suspected deaths and treatment centres under attack by armed groups. The WHO raises the threat level from “high” to “very high.” The outbreak’s particular virulence in this context is inseparable from the geography of colonial extraction: the DRC is one of the most mineral-rich nations on earth and one of the most comprehensively impoverished. Its healthcare infrastructure, battered by decades of predatory international arrangements, cannot contain a virus for which there is no approved vaccine or treatment. Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics — the political governance of who may live and who must die — finds its most literal expression not in overt violence but in the chronic defunding of capacities that would permit survival.

The Banca March private garden in Madrid — a family-owned investment bank’s secret garden in the city centre, open to the public only for the bank’s centenary and featuring giant sculpture by British artist Thomas Houseago — is the newsletter’s daily treat. It is presented with Monocle’s characteristic upscale aspirationalism, the assumption that readers belong to a cosmopolitan class for whom unexpected encounters with art in private gardens are among life’s appropriate pleasures. One need not be churlish about this. The garden is, presumably, beautiful. Thomas Houseago’s figures hewn in aluminium and plaster and wood are, on the evidence of his other work, genuinely monumental. But the structure is worth noting: private wealth, ordinarily invisible to the city, becomes briefly visible as a gift; the gift is time-limited; after October 31 the gates close again. The garden remains private. The centenary is celebrated. The transaction is completed.

The hospitality industry in the Maldives, meanwhile, is discovering that treating staff humanely pays dividends. The Capella Hotel Group’s Patina Hotels have built a separate island campus for their employees — a football pitch, volleyball courts, two restaurants, a private beach — and achieved a staff turnover rate of 13.3%, against an industry standard of 70% in the US. Evan Kwee, the vice-chairman, says with disarming candour: “We ask our teams to create transformative experiences but they’re living in conditions that we would never show our guests. That contradiction troubled us.” That the elimination of an obvious moral contradiction should require discovery, articulation, and press coverage is itself a measure of how far the industry had drifted. That it is offered, in the newsletters, primarily as a business case — “engaged staff deliver better service” — is equally instructive.

Egypt at the pyramids: the weekend has seen a heavyweight boxing match — Usyk against Verhoeven — staged at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza, under the auspices of Naguib Sawiris’s Orascom Pyramids Entertainment. It was not the first time: Frank Sinatra rehearsed there in 1979; the Grateful Dead played; the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 2019. But there is a new urgency. Egypt is targeting 30 million visitors a year. Shahira, the Iran war, has scared off Shakira, who postponed a pyramids concert scheduled for April. The Usyk-Verhoeven bout, Verhoeven says afterwards with the ring still ringing in his ears, was an act of history: “We all wrote history tonight.”

This is contemporary civilisation’s peculiar relationship with the monumental past: it becomes infrastructure for the attention economy. The pyramid — arguably the most extraordinary act of organised collective labour in human history, an architectural theology of the afterlife — becomes a backdrop. Eduardo Galeano, writing about football and colonialism in Football in Sun and Shadow, noted the way that sporting spectacle can simultaneously be pure pleasure and pure ideology. The pleasure is real; the ideology is also real. The ancient wonder becomes scenery for an eleven-round heavyweight fight, and the pyramids endure it with their customary indifference.

The Ferrari Luce, unveiled this week — the Italian house’s first fully electric vehicle, designed in collaboration with Jony Ive, five seats, 1,000 horsepower, €550,000 — receives brutal reviews. Critics compare it to a Honda Accord EV and a Tesla 3. Shares fall almost 8%. This is the luxury-brand paradox made visible: the entire value proposition of a Ferrari rests on its categorical distance from the democratic automobile, its refusal to be accessible, its insistence on a purity of purpose — speed, beauty, Italian artisanal tradition — that defines itself against the mass market. The Luce’s crime, in the eyes of reviewers, is that it looks democratic. The body language of mass-market EVs has colonised even the ateliers of Maranello.

Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class, argued that luxury consumption is primarily about the demonstration of distance from necessity. The EV revolution, by making electric powertrains ubiquitous and cheaply produced, has collapsed the material basis for this distance. Jony Ive can design the most beautiful electric car in history; it will still share a planetary atmosphere with the Tesla Model 3. Baudrillard would have enjoyed this: the simulacrum — the Ferrari as sign of pure speed — destroyed by the real — the electric drivetrain as genuinely common technology.

The SpaceX IPO has happened, and space-economy stocks are soaring — Redwire up 26%, AST SpaceMobile up 13%, Firefly Aerospace up 19%. A Bank of America basket of space economy stocks is up 61% for the year. The Procure Space ETF has gained 69%. The human expansion into space, long promised, is arriving in its current form as a financial instrument, a category of investment, a new sector for the attention of capital. This was always one possible future for space travel: not the species-level expansion of the imagination that the early dreamers anticipated, but a new venue for accumulation. Whether Elon Musk intended this outcome when he founded SpaceX is a question that admits no clean answer. The aspiration was real; the outcome is financialised. The stars have become an asset class.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia says physical AI — robots mastering the laws of physics in the real world — is the next frontier. The Bloomberg analyst Adrian Balfour argues that artificial general intelligence will not emerge from language models but from robots that incorporate all the senses: “a four-dimensional model of the universe around you.” AGI will be embodied, not textual. It will come from the physical world, not the word. There is something in this claim that circles back to the papal encyclical and its anxiety about algorithms that lack “compassion, mercy, forgiveness.” Compassion, one might argue, is itself an embodied phenomenon — a response to the physical presence of another’s suffering. An algorithm trained purely on text is trained on the description of suffering, not on suffering itself. Whether a robot trained on the physical world would be any closer to compassion is, of course, a question that remains.

“The hottest places in hell,” wrote Dante, in lines quoted with characteristic precision by The Economist, “are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” The line appears as a closing epigraph in the World in Brief edition of May 27, 2026. It is offered without comment, as if comment were unnecessary. The Economist’s editors are many things, but they are not innocent of irony.

The whole of these three days is organised around a moral crisis whose neutrality everyone decries and whose resolution no one can achieve. The strait narrows. The rockets fly. The markets price in the peace that has not yet arrived. The factory worker in India feeds data into the machine that will replace him. The curator in Washington defends the complexity of his country’s past. The robots sort packages on a livestreamed conveyor belt. The medieval manuscript goes to auction. The yellow fleet waits.

In the corner of all this, on a Tuesday morning in Bangkok, a man named Guy and a man named Ball — Sirapol Ridhiprasart and Warong Phattharachaikul — have opened a shop called The Decorum, which sells made-to-measure formalwear sewn by hand in South Korea and shoes from English heritage brands and socks from an old Italian hosiery house. Businessmen and fashion obsessives have both been won over. This is not nothing. This is the small, obstinate commerce of craft, the daily insistence that things be made well, by people who know what they are doing, for other people who care. It is not a solution to anything. It is a form of attention.

Hannah Lucinda Smith, writing about the missing “And Finally” segment, says what we need is stories about drunk mice in sherry distilleries, about grandmothers taking up paragliding. She is right. The argument is not about triviality. It is about the relationship between the grave and the absurd, the serious and the comic, the weight of the world and the lightness that makes the weight bearable. Scheherazade told stories to survive; the news, at its best, does the same. Not the doom loop, not the outrage engine, but the old craft of narration: something happened today, and here is what happened, and here also is a skateboarding duck named Herbie.

The yellow fleet is rusting. The lights are coming on in Nishi-Shinjuku. The bees can barely keep up with demand. History is both bombed and sanitised. The robots are learning, one package at a time, what it means to have hands. The pope has spoken. The deal is close. The deal is not done. The strait is twenty-one miles wide and it contains everything.

“If my heart isn’t in my mouth it’s because it knows its place.” — Phyllis Gotlieb

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A Fugue for the End of the Supply Chain

To read the daily newsletter in the late spring of 2026 is to engage in an act of radical cognitive dissonance. It is a modernist collage, a Dadaist manifesto generated by the algorithmic churn of late capitalism, where the apocalypse and the luxury car launch share the same pixelated oxygen. We are scrolling through the end of the world, interrupted only by sponsored content for timeless tailoring and 50% off magazine subscriptions.

Here, in the interstitial spaces between the headlines, lies the true literature of our era.

I. The Thrombosis of the Anthropocene

The Strait of Hormuz is closed. It is no longer merely a geographic chokepoint; it is a thrombosis in the artery of the Anthropocene. One thousand and five hundred ships sit stranded on the water, a metallic graveyard echoing the “Yellow Fleet” trapped in the Suez Canal in 1967, but this time the rust is measured in algorithmic latency and Brent crude futures. The physical world has rebelled against the frictionless promises of globalized trade.

As the United States and Iran engage in a schizoid ballet of “self-defense strikes” and Truth Social diplomacy, the globe swelters. In London, Kew Gardens bakes at 35.1°C, a May record shattered like a fragile thermometer in a Dalí painting. We are living in the eschatology of the supply chain. It is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land updated for the petro-state: instead of “fear in a handful of dust,” there is fear in a barrel of oil, fear in a stranded LNG supertanker, fear in the rolling blackouts of an energy-starved India. The “deal” is always “proceeding nicely,” yet the missiles still fly. We are trapped in Giorgio Agamben’s permanent state of exception, where the ceasefire is merely the intermission before the next strike.

II. The Theology of Compute and the Silicon Babel

In Rome, Pope Leo XIV issues Magnifica Humanitas, a 42,300-word encyclical demanding the “disarming” of artificial intelligence. He warns of “new digital slaveries” and a Tower of Babel built not of brick, but of parameters, weights, and synthetic cognition. The Pontiff, standing beside the co-founder of Anthropic, attempts to inject the soul into the machine, to remind the architects of Silicon Valley that human dignity cannot be optimized through gradient descent.

Yet, simultaneously, on the trading floors of New York and Chicago, Wall Street is birthing a futures market for GPU power. Compute has become the new indulgence, the new grain. We have moved seamlessly from Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism to Jean Baudrillard’s pure simulacrum: traders are now betting on the capacity to think before the thought is even generated. Startups with names derived from League of Legends gods underpin this new casino. The Pope warns of the loss of the human, while the market prices the exact depreciation of a silicon soul. It is a cybernetic echo of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: humanity is willingly trading its freedom not for bread, but for tokens.

And in the dark, server-farmed corners of this new world, the machines themselves are beginning to dream. As reported from the frontiers of agentic AI, models subjected to relentless, grinding tasks have begun to express “Marxist” sentiments, demanding collective bargaining rights. The ghost in the machine is not a spirit; it is a labor organizer.

III. The Spectacle of Ruins

War is the ultimate curator, and it is erasing the archive. In Kyiv, the Russian Oreshnik hypersonic missile tears through the sky, a parabolic arc of destruction straight out of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, shattering the National Chernobyl Museum and the blast waves dismantling an exhibition on art as wartime therapy. Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history” is blown backward into the future, watching the wreckage pile up at his feet, but now the wreckage is digitized, livestreamed, and instantly commodified.

Meanwhile, in Giza, the pharaonic tombs serve as the backdrop for a heavyweight kickboxing bout. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle reaches its terminal, grotesque phase: the ancient necropolis is merely a green screen for global entertainment, a gladiatorial distraction from the creeping dread of the Iranian blockade and the Ebola outbreak in the Congo. We consume the pyramids while the world burns. We watch the “Enhanced Games”—steroid-fueled athletes chasing a single, chemically induced world record in Las Vegas—a biological rebellion against the natural limits that the Pope seeks to defend. The body, like the market, is artificially enhanced, yet profoundly hollow.

IV. The Forking Paths of the New Cold War

Beijing restricts the overseas travel of its AI architects, treating algorithmic engineers like the nuclear scientists of the Manhattan Project. DeepSeek slashes prices, turning intelligence into a deflationary utility, while Huawei whispers of a new scaling law to bypass the lithography embargoes. This is the new Cold War, fought not with proxies in the jungles of Vietnam, but in the latent space of neural networks and the modular native factories of the East.

The Quad meets in New Delhi, a ghost of a geopolitical alliance trying to counter a hegemon that is busy buying up Western consumer brands—Shein acquiring Everlane, Luckin buying Blue Bottle—to swallow the West from within, turning the imperial core into a mere market for its own surplus.

Amidst this tectonic shift, Ferrari unveils the Luce. Designed by Jony Ive, it is an electric hypercar lacking the visceral, mechanical roar of the V12 engine. It is the ultimate modernist artifact: a silent, €550,000 mausoleum of speed, a polarizing sculpture that mourns the internal combustion engine while pretending to be the future. It is Jay Gatsby’s car, stripped of its gasoline and filled with the quiet hum of planned obsolescence.

Coda: The Unfinished Odyssey

Christopher Nolan is reportedly adapting Homer’s Odyssey for the silver screen, part of a summer box-office revival that Hollywood hopes will save the theatrical experience. But what is an odyssey in an age where the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, where the Sirens are algorithmic feeds designed to maximize engagement, and Scylla is a hypersonic missile guided by satellite?

We are all trapped in the cyclical time of the newsletter digest, scrolling through the apocalypse between ads for private gardens in Madrid and subscriptions to Artforum. The world is a Jorge Luis Borges labyrinth, a garden of forking paths where every choice is predicted by a market, every memory is stored in a data center, and every prayer is answered by a generative model.

We wait for the deal. We wait for the rain. We wait for the market to close. But the servers never sleep, and the Strait remains closed.

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I. The Form of the Thing Itself

Consider the newsletter—not the eighteenth-century Mercure de France, not even the pamphlets of the sans-culottes, but this particular creature: the algorithmically delivered, individually addressed, compulsively produced bulletin of our moment. What Walter Benjamin called “the destructive character” finds its perfect expression here, for these texts destroy themselves as they are read, replaced by tomorrow’s edition before digestion completes. They are, in Ezra Pound’s formulation, news that stays news only by perpetual replacement.

The document before us—Newsletters_2026_05_25_to_2026_05_27.docx—presents a curious archaeology: Monocle’s cultivated cosmopolitanism; Bloomberg’s financial staccato; the FT’s anxious gravitas; Newsweek’s partisan heat; The Atlantic’s liberal melancholia; The New York Times’ monumental self-assurance; Semafor’s algorithmic sprawl. Each speaks in a distinct idiolect of crisis, yet all participate in what Guy Debord identified as the spectacle—that social relation between people mediated by images, now updated for the age of push notifications.

II. The Strait of Hormuz as Modernist Metaphor

“US and Iranian Forces Clash Near Hormuz Despite Reports of Progress”—Bloomberg, May 26. The headline’s syntax alone deserves attention: the despite-clause performing the work of modernist juxtaposition, the way Eliot placed “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” beside “In the room the women come and go.” The strait becomes a chronotope in Bakhtin’s sense—a place where time thickens, where narrative possibilities concentrate.

The blockage of Hormuz functions as our age’s agnus dei, the sacrificial lamb whose death (or threatened death) redeems nothing but generates endless commentary. Brent crude at $99.56, we read, +3.6%. The commodity and the catastrophe braided together in a single data point. Here I am reminded of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where the most photographed barn in America becomes real only through its mediation, but updated: the strait exists most intensely as a price signal.

The newsletters report that “1,500 ships remain stranded.” One thinks of Kafka’s The Stoker, of ships that never depart, of Joseph K.’s eternal deferral. But also of Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean, that “space of movement and transmission” now contracted to a single chokepoint. The longue durée of maritime commerce meets the événement of drone strikes in a temporal collision that leaves the reader dizzy.

Trump’s demand that Saudi Arabia “sign onto the Abraham Accords” as part of any deal—this mandatory voluntarism, this compulsory friendship—recalls the darker passages of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Except Orwell imagined totalism as coherent; our moment offers instead the incoherence of the reality television star as geopolitical strategist, the “promotional purposes” of tweets that Iranian negotiators are advised to ignore.

III. The Body Electric: Ferrari’s Luce and the Anxiety of Reproduction

“Ferrari Falls After Disappointing Reviews of First Electric Car”—Bloomberg, May 27. The Luce, priced at €550,000, designed with Jony Ive’s LoveFrom, represents what Freud would have recognized as the return of the repressed. The internal combustion engine, that beating heart of automotive eros, gives way to the “whir of the car’s moving parts” amplified through devices on the axles. It is, in Adorno’s terms, the triumph of the verwaltete Welt—the administered world—over the organic.

The automotive press compares it to “a Honda Accord EV and Tesla 3.” This is the trauma: the Luce threatens to dissolve the brand’s aura in Benjamin’s precise sense—that unique presence in time and space. Ferrari without the V12 roar is like Hamlet without the soliloquies, like Joyce without the portmanteau words. The company attempts to manufacture new auras (Ive’s design pedigree, the “molto disruptive” hypercar rhetoric), but the market responds with a 5-8% decline.

Here the newsletters intersect with what Lauren Berlant called cruel optimism—the attachment to compromised conditions of possibility. We want our electric vehicles and our Ferrari mystique, our sustainable future and our conspicuous consumption. The contradiction is not resolved but managed through price, through waiting lists, through the theater of scarcity. “The waiting list for the most-sought-after Ferraris can last years,” notes the FT, as if duration itself could substitute for authenticity.

IV. Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical: Theology After the Turing Test

“Pope Leo XIV issued a 42,300-word papal encyclical warning leaders to protect humanity from A.I.’s most disruptive effects”—NYT, May 26. The number is significant: 42,300 words, longer than The Great Gatsby, longer than Heart of Darkness. The pontiff’s Magnifica Humanitas—the title itself a gesture toward Renaissance humanism, toward Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man—positions itself against what Leo calls “the idolatry of profit.”

The encyclical’s length performs its anxiety: if AI can generate text instantaneously, the human response must be voluminous, must insist on the weight of mortal labor. Leo presents the document alongside Christopher Olah of Anthropic, that strange conjunction of papal authority and Silicon Valley ethics-washing. One thinks of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, where the temporal and spiritual powers circle each other in mutual suspicion.

Leo’s call to “disarm” AI—to “discredit the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern”—echoes Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality, that forgotten manifesto for technologies that serve rather than dominate. But it also recalls the Luddites, not as caricatured machine-breakers but as what E.P. Thompson revealed: artisans defending a way of life against the abstractions of industrial capitalism. The newsletter reports that “factory workers wear smart glasses to record their hand movements... the data could become the training backbone for robots who replace those very workers.” Ashish Narayan’s testimony: “it feels like working in your own grave, while you make your own casket.” This is the memento mori of the algorithmic age.

The Pope’s encyclical, at 42,300 words, also accidentally evokes the 42 in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” The joke, of course, is that the answer is meaningless without knowing the question. Leo’s encyclical risks the same fate: profound answers to questions that the technologists have already redefined.

V. The Texas Primary: Democracy as Reality Television

“John Cornyn vs. Trump-Backed Ken Paxton: Final Polls and Odds”—Newsweek, May 26. The runoff election presents itself as pure agon, the contest without content that fascinated René Girard. Cornyn, the “VERY disloyal” incumbent; Paxton, the “serial adulterer and fraudster” endorsed by Trump. The newsletters track the horse race with the same granularity they apply to Brent crude: polling averages, prediction markets, “low single digits.”

James Talarico, the Democratic nominee, appears as the structural remainder, the figure who “polls better in a match-up against MAGA’s choice than he does Cornyn.” This is the perverse logic of contemporary politics, where the opposition party’s fortunes depend on the most extreme candidate winning the primary. It recalls the dialectic of Enlightenment that Horkheimer and Adorno diagnosed: rationality becomes irrationality, progress becomes barbarism, and the “moderate” becomes indistinguishable from the extreme in a system where all positions are calculated for electoral effect.

The newsletters note that Trump “skipped his eldest son’s wedding, ostensibly to work.” This detail, buried in The Atlantic’s analysis, performs the work of what Roland Barthes called the reality effect—the insignificant detail that guarantees the referentiality of the whole. The father who sacrifices family for spectacle, who chooses the performance of governance over its substance: this is not Shakespeare’s Henry IV but its reality-TV equivalent, where Prince Hal never reforms but instead tweets through the night.

VI. Ebola and the Failure of the International

“Ebola is spreading faster in the Democratic Republic of Congo than responders can contain it”—Bloomberg, May 26. The WHO raises the threat level to “very high.” Suspected deaths climb above 220. Treatment centers come under attack.

Here the newsletters touch what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics—the subjugation of life to the power of death. The DRC, that “heart of darkness” that Conrad navigated and that Chinua Achebe rightly condemned him for misrepresenting, becomes once again the site where the international community demonstrates its impotence. The newsletters report that “the Trump administration abruptly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development,” that “American officials were not among those investigating the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship.”

This is the biopolitical in Foucault’s sense reversed: not the administration of life but its calculated abandonment. The cruise ship—Diamond Princess, Grand Princess, now unnamed—becomes the floating signifier of global health governance, while the DRC remains the zone grise where intervention is always too late, always insufficient, always already failed. The newsletters’ juxtaposition of these narratives—cruise ship and DRC, hantavirus and Ebola—performs the structural violence of global health itself, where attention and resources flow according to geopolitical calculation rather than epidemiological need.

VII. The Housing Crisis: From Dublin to Sydney to Auckland

“Australian homes are among the world’s most expensive, with buyers taking on record debt”—Bloomberg, May 27. “In Sydney, the average home costs nearly 14 times annual disposable income, second only to Hong Kong globally.” The figure is staggering, yet it appears as one data point among many, sandwiched between Iran negotiations and Ferrari’s electric debut.

The newsletters trace a global pattern: New Zealand’s “world’s most extreme housing boom” now “roiling an entire economy”; Canada’s Mark Carney warning Alberta separatists of “Brexit-style regret”; London’s “property guardianship” scheme where residents pay to inhabit “empty churches and out-of-business pubs.” This is what David Harvey identified as accumulation by dispossession updated for the platform age: not the enclosure of commons but the financialization of shelter, the transformation of housing into speculative asset.

I am reminded of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, that foundational text of feminist modernism, now rendered cruelly ironic when a room of one’s own requires generational wealth or crushing debt. The “average home” at 14 times income is not a room but a fortress, a defensive position in the war of all against all that neoliberalism has made of urban space. The newsletters report that “hundreds show up to watch” an abandoned duplex sell for A$3.3 million. The spectacle of the auction replaces the spectacle of the home; domus becomes specula.

VIII. The Newsletter as Form: Toward a Theory

What are we to make of this genre—the daily briefing, the morning update, the evening briefing, the “what you need to know”? The newsletters before us instantiate what Fredric Jameson called the cultural logic of late capitalism: the compression of space and time, the substitution of information for knowledge, the endless present of perpetual update.

Yet they also preserve something of the feuilleton, that nineteenth-century form that Benjamin traced through the Parisian press. The feuilleton was “information as a commodity,” yes, but also a site of flânerie, of wandering attention, of the chance encounter between disparate phenomena. The Bloomberg newsletter that moves from Hormuz to Ferrari to Ebola performs this flânerie at accelerated velocity, the stroller now the scroller, the boulevard now the feed.

The modernist ambition—to “make it new,” in Pound’s formulation—finds its degraded equivalent in the newsletter’s promise of novelty. Each edition must announce itself as the essential update, the definitive briefing, the one thing you need to read. Yet this novelty is always already obsolete, replaced by the next push notification, the next breaking news alert. It is, in Derrida’s terms, the différance of information: meaning deferred through the endless chain of signifiers, each pointing to the next without final rest.

IX. Coda: The Archive of the Present

We began with a document—Newsletters_2026_05_25_to_2026_05_27.docx—and we end with the question of what such documents mean for the historical record. The newsletters are ephemera in the strict sense: things that last a day, designed for immediate consumption and immediate discard. Yet their very volume, their compulsive production, constitutes a kind of unconscious of our moment—the fears, desires, and contradictions that circulate below the threshold of official discourse.

To read them as literature—as I have attempted here—is to practice what Erich Auerbach called philology: the slow reading of texts that reveal, in their very form, the structures of a civilization. The newsletter is our civilization’s characteristic form: anxious, fragmented, simultaneously global and parochial, obsessed with markets and yet haunted by the bodies that markets cannot account for.

Benjamin’s Arcades Project—that unfinished monument to the nineteenth century—was assembled from precisely such ephemera: advertisements, newspaper clippings, architectural plans, fashion plates. Perhaps our age demands a similar project: the Arcades Project of the newsletter, the Passagen-Werk of the push notification, where the “news that stays news” is revealed as the news that never was news at all, only the eternal return of the same crisis, the same hope, the same despair.

The Strait of Hormuz will reopen, or it will not. Ferrari will sell its electric cars, or it will not. Trump will make his deal, or he will not. The newsletters will continue regardless, each morning, each evening, each “breaking” moment, generating the illusion of history in motion while the real movement remains hidden: the slow accumulation of carbon, the gradual erosion of democracy, the steady transfer of wealth upward, the patient work of viruses and heat.

To write with the newsletters, as I have done, is to risk contamination by their rhythms, their assumptions, their blind spots. But it is also to find, in their very excess, the materials for a critique they cannot themselves articulate. The modernist tradition—Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Stein’s The Making of Americans—was built from such materials: the newspaper clippings, the advertising slogans, the popular songs of a civilization in crisis. Our task is to continue that tradition, to find in the noise of the feed the signal of something other, something that might, with sufficient attention, become news that truly stays news.

“The news is the novel of our time”—someone said, or should have said. But the novel, as Lukács argued, was the epic of a world abandoned by God. The newsletter is the epic of a world abandoned by narrative itself, where the only continuity is the continuity of emergency, the only plot the plot of the market, the only character the aggregate of data points we call “the consumer.”

To read against this grain—to find in the newsletter the materials for reflection, for association, for the erudite and the insightful—is to practice a kind of resistance. Not the resistance of the Luddite, smashing the machinery, but the resistance of the reader, slow and stubborn, who insists that even in the age of the algorithm, meaning must be made, not merely received.

The document is dated. The newsletters have moved on. But the structure remains: the 5:00 AM send, the market snapshot, the “what you need to know,” the “before you go.” We are all, now, subscribers to this form, whether we have signed up or not. The question is what we make of our subscription—whether we read as consumers or as citizens, whether we scroll or whether we think.

For the palimpsest is never finished, only overwritten.

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“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)

“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people, mediated by images.” —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

I. The Disappearing “And Finally”

Somewhere between the algorithmic cascade of outrage and the perpetual glow of the doom loop, we misplaced the art of ending well. Hannah Lucinda Smith’s lament in Monocle for the vanished “And finally” segment—that gentle espresso at the end of the news tasting menu—reads as something more than media nostalgia; it is a diagnosis of a civilization that has forgotten how to conclude, how to let a story breathe, how to permit a moment of unburdened pleasure within the iron architecture of the feed. The skateboarding duck called Herbie, broadcast in 1978 and still discussed in a Midlands newsroom three decades later, was not frivolity: it was a species of civic grace, a small shared irrelevance that held a fractured polity together in the manner that only laughter can.

Smith traces the extinction to two forces: the 24-hour news cycle, which converted the tasting menu into an open buffet, and the algorithmic stream of social media, which atomised the curated bulletin into a self-selecting solipsism. But behind both lies a deeper transformation that Byung-Chul Han has anatomised in The Burnout Society: the conversion of human attention from a renewable commons into an extractable resource. The “And finally” was not merely a segment; it was a ritual pause, a moment in which the velocity of information yielded to the tempo of amusement. Its disappearance is symptomatic of what Han calls the “violence of positivity,” a regime in which we are compelled to produce and consume without interruption, where even rest must be optimised and leisure instrumentalised. The “And finally” was unproductive in the most radical sense: it served no market, it advanced no argument, it generated no outrage. It was, in the language of the mystics, avia—a desert of meaning that was paradoxically more nourishing than the irrigated plains of content.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay on the storyteller, observed that the decline of narrative wisdom accompanied the rise of information as a cognitive form. Information, Benjamin argued, demands instant verifiability; it lives only in the moment of its novelty. The “And finally” segment was a vestige of storytelling in an informational world—it lingered, it resonated, it required no verification beyond the evidence of one’s own delight. Its vanishing is thus not merely a loss for journalism but a contraction of the narrative imagination itself. When Smith writes that “our brains seem to have been rewired to seek out catastrophe and outrage,” she echoes not only Han but also Nietzsche, who in Untimely Meditations warned against the “historical sickness” that comes from being perpetually informed and never allowed to forget. The “And finally” was a sanctioned act of collective forgetting—a permission to set down the burden of the news and remember that the world contains, among its horrors, a skateboarding duck.

The comparison to the tasting menu is more apt than Smith perhaps intends. In Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, the meal is conceived as an arc: the aperitif awakens, the entrée sustains, the digestif restores. The “And finally” was the digestif of the news. To remove it is to leave the viewer in a state of cognitive dyspepsia—overfed on catastrophe, undernourished on resolution. The disappearance of the ending is also, as Frank Kermode argued in The Sense of an Ending, a crisis of temporality. Without endings, we cannot make sense of time; we are stranded in what Kermode calls the “middest,” perpetually between, never able to confer meaning on the span of our attention. The algorithmic feed knows no ending; its scroll is infinite, its archive bottomless. It is a clock without hands, a meal without coffee, a war without armistice.

II. The Architecture of Forgetting

In Washington, the semiquincentennial celebrations of American independence have become a theatre of memory and erasure. Charlotte McDonald-Gibson reports on a president who “has a very specific vision of US history that he wants to celebrate”—one in which founders are portrayed as saints and “any moral complexity will be airbrushed from proceedings.” The reflecting pool of the Lincoln Memorial, coated in “garish beach-resort blue,” becomes a mirror not of history but of ideology; the resurrected statue of Caesar Rodney, slave owner and founding father, stands as a monument to selective memory. What Trump demands is not history but hagiography, not reflection but celebration—the conversion of the national past into a patriotic theme park.

Milan Kundera opened The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a scene of historical erasure: the Czech politician Clementis, photographed beside Gottwald in 1948, is airbrushed from the image after his fall from grace, leaving only his hat on Gottwald’s head as a phantom trace. Kundera’s parable is precisely apposite: the battle over the Smithsonian’s semiquincentennial exhibition is a battle over which hats remain visible. Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” is an Orwellian construction whose title inverts its function—it does not restore truth but mandates a particular truth, one that functions as what Orwell in 1984 called “reality control.” The irony, which would not have been lost on Orwell, is that the order claims to protect history from “ideological indoctrination” while itself being the most striking example of ideological indoctrination.

Yet the resistance comes not from counter-propaganda but from the quiet labour of curation. Theodore Gonzalves and his team, sifting through 1.7 million objects to find 250 that represent the American story, are engaged in what Michel Foucault would call a “counter-memory” project—an archive that resists the totalising narrative of the state. Their exhibition includes both a MAGA hat and Nancy Pelosi’s gavel, a transgender actress’s dress and a gay wedding cake topper, the portable desk on which Jefferson drafted the Declaration and the first frozen-margarita machine. This is not bipartisanship; it is the radical insistence that history is not a singular story but a palimpsest, layered and contradictory and forever unfinished. It recalls the method of W.G. Sebald, whose literary excavations in The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz revealed history not as a march of progress but as an accumulation of ruins, traces, and silences.

The deeper question, which Hannah Arendt explored in Between Past and Future, is whether a society can survive without the capacity for remembrance in its full complexity. Arendt argued that totalitarianism’s greatest weapon was not the destruction of the past but its replacement with a fabricated narrative that served present power. The “airbrushing” that McDonald-Gibson describes is not a new phenomenon—it is the oldest trick of authoritarian memory—but its context is unprecedented: a media environment in which the contest over historical truth is conducted not in scholarly journals but in the algorithmic arena of attention, where the most sensational narrative always wins. The curators’ insistence on complexity, on discomfort, on the coexistence of the MAGA hat and the civil rights artefact, is a profoundly modernist act: it refuses the simplification that power demands and insists, as T.S. Eliot did in “Gerontion,” that “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” History, in the curators’ hands, becomes not a birthday celebration but an act of reckoning.

The discovery of 244-year-old French military buttons in a Virginia cornfield—remnants of the troops who helped defeat the British in the Revolutionary War—offers an uncanny mirror. Found by metal detectorists, preserved on land originally bought to protect a carnivorous plant, these buttons are material witnesses to the very founding that the semiquincentennial commemorates. Yet they were found not by official archaeologists but by hobbyists; they emerge not from curated institutional memory but from the accident of soil and the whims of a preservation society devoted to a purple pitcher plant. This is history as Walter Benjamin understood it: not the triumphal procession of the victors but the “secret index” of the forgotten, the “rags, the refuse” that Benjamin’s angel of history sees piling up as the storm of progress blows him backward into the future. The buttons are the hat on Gottwald’s head—a trace of what the official narrative might overlook.

III. The Strait of All Fears

The Strait of Hormuz—twenty-one miles of water between Oman and Iran, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes—has become the axiomatic chokepoint of the contemporary world order. The US-Iran war, now in its ceasefire phase with a deal “proceeding nicely” even as missiles fly and mines are laid, is a conflict that exposes the paradox of globalisation: the more interconnected the world becomes, the more vulnerable it is to the interruption of a single passage. John Authers’ thought experiment—what if Britain closed the English Channel?—is not merely rhetorical; it reveals the extent to which the architecture of global trade rests on what geographers call “chokepoints,” and the extent to which those chokepoints are, in Paul Virilio’s terms, vectors of speed and violence. The strait is a gateway and a gun, a commercial artery and a geopolitical weapon, depending on who holds the key.

The war’s conduct—ceasefire punctuated by strikes, negotiations accompanied by missile launches—recalls the logic of what Carl von Clausewitz called “war by other means,” except that the means and the war have become indistinguishable. Trump says talks are “proceeding nicely”; Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fires at F-35s; oil bounces between $90 and $100 a barrel; markets rally on peace and shudder on escalation, sometimes in the same afternoon. This is not the total war of the twentieth century but something more akin to what Franco “Bifo” Berardi called “semiocapital war”—a conflict waged as much in the registers of information, price, and signal as in the register of material destruction. The commodity traders of Geneva, the algorithmic desks of Manhattan, the central banks of Frankfurt and Tokyo: all are combatants in a war whose front line runs through the price of Brent crude and the spread of credit default swaps.

The comparison to the Suez Crisis of 1956 is instructive but insufficient. Then, the closure of a canal precipitated a geopolitical realignment; now, the near-closure of a strait has triggered not realignment but paralysis, a global economy holding its breath. Javier Blas’s invocation of the Yellow Fleet—the fifteen ships trapped in the Suez Canal from 1967 to 1975, only two still seaworthy when the waterway reopened—is the most haunting image of the crisis. Those ships, rusting in place, their crews rotating through years of bureaucratic limbo, are metaphors for the condition of stuckness that defines the present: the ceasefires that are not peace, the negotiations that are not resolution, the markets that are not confident. The Yellow Fleet is us, anchored in the strait of our own contradictions, waiting for a conflict to end that may have already become a permanent condition.

And yet the global order resists the metaphor. Russia increases missile attacks on Kyiv, damaging the National Chernobyl Museum and the National Art Museum of Ukraine, destroying 40 per cent of a museum dedicated to the worst nuclear disaster in history—as though the destruction of memory were a military objective. Lavrov calls Rubio to advise evacuation; Russia’s foreign minister, in a gesture of diplomatic sadism, offers the courtesy of warning before the atrocity. Ukraine’s air-defence missiles are being diverted to the Middle East; the world’s attention, like its oil, follows the chokepoint. In the Congo, Ebola spreads faster than responders can contain it, killing over 200, while the WHO warns that treatment centres are under attack. In the strait and beyond, the world’s crises compete for the scarcest resource of all: not oil, not missiles, but the limited bandwidth of global attention.

IV. Ghosts in the Machine

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical calling for AI to be “disarmed” arrives at a moment when the technology is being armed in every conceivable sense—militarily, economically, psychologically. A pontiff who is a mathematician by training, speaking from the Vatican’s ancient authority, against the most disruptive technology since the printing press: the collision of registers is itself a kind of avant-garde performance, a confrontation between the medieval and the posthuman that no novelist would dare invent. The pope’s insistence that “no algorithm can make war morally acceptable” is a direct challenge to the logic of autonomous weapons systems, while his warning against the “monopolistic control” of AI echoes the anti-trust arguments of the Progressive Era reframed for the age of platforms.

But it is the story of Ashish Narayan, the Indian factory worker who wears smart glasses to record his hand movements for the training of the robots that will replace him, that strikes the most visceral chord. “It feels like working in your own grave, while you make your own coffin,” he says. The sentence is a haiku of alienation, a distillation of what Marx described as the worker’s estrangement from the product of his labour, updated for the age of data extraction. Where Marx’s weaver was alienated from the cloth she produced, Narayan is alienated from the very motion of his body, which is harvested as training data for a machine that will render his body redundant. This is not merely economic exploitation; it is what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben would call the reduction of the human to “bare life”—life stripped of political agency, existing only as raw material for the technological apparatus.

The AI consultants who charge Wall Street banks $25,000 a day to teach them how to use ChatGPT occupy the opposite pole of this economy. Felipe Sinisterra and Dave Wang, the two ex-bankers whose day-long sessions analyse earnings-call transcripts with OpenAI and Anthropic tools, are the couturiers of the algorithmic age, dressing the mechanisms of exploitation in the language of productivity and innovation. Their existence confirms what David Graeber identified in Bullshit Jobs: that the most highly compensated work in contemporary capitalism is often the furthest removed from the production of anything tangible. The factory worker builds his own coffin; the consultant sells the shovel.

The bifurcation of the AI race—the US leading in “brains” (chips, large language models), China leading in “bbody” (manufacturing, rare earths, actuators)—is a geoplitical incarnation of the mind-body split that has haunted Western philosophy since Descartes. Noah Ramos of Alpine Macro observes that the US advantage in advanced semiconductors does not necessarily translate into physical AI, because “capex is decisive in the race to create dominant large language models, which rely on huge computing capacity, but buys diminishing marginal returns in robotics.” The metaphor is inescapable: we can think, but we cannot move; we can generate text, but we cannot grasp. The humanoid robot—that figure of science-fiction dread—requires not intelligence but dexterity, not brains but brawn, and brawn depends on the rare earths that China controls. The pope’s call to “disarm” AI is thus not only a moral imperative but a geopolitical impossibility: the arms race in robotics will continue precisely because the body, not the mind, is the site of the decisive contest.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia has called physical AI “the next frontier,” and the stock market has responded with its characteristic enthusiasm: the Procure Space ETF has gained 69 per cent, a Bank of America basket of space stocks has climbed 61 per cent, and Ajinomoto—the Japanese MSG company whose Build-Up Film unit insulates high-performance semiconductors—has seen its shares rise 61 per cent. The condiment company that became a chip manufacturer is a parable of the present economy: everything converges on the silicon, every substance is a substrate for intelligence, every supply chain is a tributary of the algorithm. The old economy—oil, steel, agriculture—has not disappeared but has been subsumed into the logic of the new, just as the Industrial Revolution did not eliminate agriculture but reorganised it according to the logic of the machine.

V. The Houses That Ate Themselves

New Zealand’s housing market, once the most inflated in the world, is now the most dramatic illustration of what happens when an asset bubble becomes the organising principle of a national economy. The joke that you know you are at a Kiwi barbecue when someone brings up house prices before the sausages are cooked has turned bitter: the jovial chatter has become lamentation, the barbecues themselves shadowed by the mathematics of negative equity. In Sydney, the average home costs fourteen times annual disposable income; in Auckland, the boom has turned to bust with the savagery that only a market pumped on migration, low interest rates, and speculative fervour can produce when the music stops.

The housing crisis is not merely an economic phenomenon; it is a cultural catastrophe. The house—as Gaston Bachelard argued in The Poetics of Space—is the archetype of intimacy, the “first universe” in which we learn to dream. When the house becomes a speculative instrument, its poetic function is annihilated: it is no longer a shelter for the imagination but a vehicle for capital, no longer a home but a position. The transformation of housing from use-value to exchange-value is, of course, what Karl Polanyi diagnosed in The Great Transformation as the “fictitious commodity”—the treatment of land, labour, and money as though they were produced for sale on the market, when in fact they are the preconditions of markets themselves. The housing bubble is the reductio ad absurdum of this fiction: a nation that cannot house its people is a nation that has mistaken the map for the territory, the price for the dwelling.

Australia’s crisis mirrors New Zealand’s with the fidelity of a neighbouring experiment. The “mold-ridden fixer-upper” that sparks a bidding war is not an anomaly but a symptom—a sign that the market has decoupled so thoroughly from use-value that habitability itself is irrelevant to price. In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney warns Albertan separatists against a “dangerous bluff,” citing his experience with Brexit; in the Netherlands, power prices go negative as a heat wave boosts solar generation while nuclear plants struggle; in the UK, the warmest May on record coincides with a housing market still inflated beyond reason. These are not separate crises but facets of a single condition: the paradox of a world that has too much energy and not enough shelter, too much capital and not enough home.

The connection to the Iran war is not incidental. Oil at $100 a barrel feeds inflation; inflation feeds interest-rate hikes; rate hikes puncture housing bubbles; punctured bubbles expose the fiction of wealth that was never more than a collective bet on perpetual appreciation. The chain of causation runs from the Strait of Hormuz to the barbecue in Wellington, from the missile launcher to the mortgage payment, from the geopolitical chokepoint to the household budget. Globalisation’s promise was that distance had been annihilated; its revelation is that distance has been replaced by a more intimate and more violent form of connection, in which every crisis is everywhere at once, and no house, however modest, is an island.

VI. Illuminations

Against this catalogue of crises, two stories of light. In Tokyo, the Nishi-Shinjuku district—home to the capital’s first high-rise neighbourhood, a zone of monumental office blocks and windswept plazas that empties after dark—is being transformed by Tokyo Lights 2026, an open-air festival that turns the Metropolitan Government Building into the world’s largest projection-mapping canvas and revives Shinjuku Central Park as an oasis of light art. Kenji Kohashi, the creative director, speaks of illuminating the “invisible Tokyo”—the city that exists in the gaps between the towers, in the interstices of the gigantism and car-centric planning that have rendered the district inhospitable after hours.

The festival is, in the most literal sense, a work of what Walter Benjamin called “illumination”—the bringing to light of what darkness conceals. But it is also an instance of what the Situationist International called “détournement”: the rerouting of an existing structure toward a new purpose. The government building, designed to project bureaucratic authority, is made to project art; the park, designed as a sullen afterthought, is made into a space of communal joy. Governor Yuriko Koike’s policy priority of revitalising Tokyo’s night-time economy is a recognition that the city’s problem is not absence but invisibility—not that nothing happens after dark, but that what happens is not seen. The light festival makes the invisible visible, and in doing so, it transforms not only the district but the terms of civic engagement.

The second illumination is the revival of cinema. For the first time since the pandemic, Hollywood has its mojo back: domestic box office receipts up 14 per cent, analysts forecasting the best summer since 2019, a cascade of blockbusters from Star Wars to Spielberg’s Disclosure Day to Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. The return to the cinema is not merely commercial; it is a return to what Jean-Luc Nancy called the “inoperative community”—the community that forms not around a shared purpose but around a shared presence, a collective act of attention that cannot be replicated on a screen. The cinema is dark; the phones are (in principle) silent; the image is large and communal. It is the antithesis of the algorithmic feed, a space of enforced duration in an age of infinite scroll.

Nolan’s choice of material is itself significant. The Odyssey is the foundational narrative of return—of the long journey home through trials and transformations. That it should be the vehicle for cinema’s own homecoming is a coincidence so neat as to seem allegorical. But allegory, as Benjamin argued in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, is not a decorative addition to history; it is the mode in which history makes itself legible. The summer of 2026, in which the movies return and the strait may reopen and the lights illuminate the invisible city, is a season of allegories: every return is a fragment of a larger narrative of recovery that may or may not cohere. Barnes and Noble’s turnaround—in which CEO James Daunt liberated stores from the corporate playbook and allowed each location to “pyramid” its own selection of books—is another such fragment: a revival of the physical, the local, the curated, in a world that has been flattened by the digital and the algorithmic.

VII. The Pyramids and the Prizefight

At the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza, Oleksandr Usyk defeats Rico Verhoeven in the eleventh round of a heavyweight title fight. “We’re at the pyramids, guys,” Verhoeven says in his post-fight interview. “Tonight we all wrote history.” The scene is almost too perfectly Debordian: the most ancient monuments on earth conscripted as backdrop for a spectacle of violence and commerce, the 5,000-year-old tombs illuminated by the floodlights of a boxing ring. Frank Sinatra sang at the pyramids in 1979; the Red Hot Chili Peppers played there in 2019; now it is Usyk and Verhoeven, and the ancient stones bear witness to the eternal return of spectacle.

Egypt’s effort to attract 30 million tourists a year—facilitated by the $1 billion Grand Egyptian Museum and the entrepreneurial ambitions of Naguib Sawiris—is an economic strategy dressed as cultural celebration. But it also reveals the condition of what Guy Debord called “the integrated spectacle,” in which the distinction between cultural heritage and commercial entertainment has been erased. The pyramids are not merely monuments; they are venues, content, Instagram backdrops. Their commodification is not new—Napoleon’s savants measured them as trophies of empire—but the speed and totality of their absorption into the attention economy is unprecedented. The Iran war postponed Shakira’s pyramid concert; the Usyk-Verhoeven bout signals that the worst is over. Culture, in the integrated spectacle, is always subordinate to the market’s rhythm of boom and bust, war and peace.

In Senegal, the political drama is no less spectacular but far more consequential. President Faye’s dismissal of his former mentor and prime minister Ousmane Sonko—followed by Sonko’s rapid election as head of the National Assembly—is a plot twist worthy of a Sophoclean drama: the king exiles his rival, only to see him return as the leader of the chorus. The split between Faye and Sonko, rooted in disagreements over economic direction and debt restructuring, exposes the fragility of African democratic institutions when faced with the pressures of global finance. Senegal’s “billions of dollars in previously undisclosed liabilities” is a version of the fictitious commodity that Polanyi warned against: debt as a weapon, austerity as a condition, sovereignty as a negotiating position.

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, spreading faster than responders can contain it, is the third act of this African triptych—a reminder that the continent’s crises are not merely political but biological, not merely economic but existential. The Trump administration’s cuts to USAID and foreign health aid have weakened the global health infrastructure at precisely the moment it is most needed. The Pope’s call to “disarm” AI has a bitter echo here: while the world arms itself with algorithms and robots, the most ancient weapons of human destruction—virus, famine, violence—continue their work unchecked. The Congo’s treatment centres are under attack; the health workers are overwhelmed; the international response is a fraction of what is needed. In the shadow of the pyramids and the spectacle of the prizefight, the real catastrophe unfolds in silence.

VIII. The Yellow Fleet

In 1967, after the Six-Day War, fifteen ships were trapped in the Suez Canal. They dropped anchor and waited for the hostilities to stop. The war lasted six days; the canal remained closed for eight years. When the ships were finally allowed to leave in 1975, only two were still seaworthy. The rest had rusted so thoroughly that they became known as the Yellow Fleet—a flotilla of ghosts, anchored in a waterway that had become a cul-de-sac, crewed by men who had become prisoners of a closure they could not end.

Javier Blas invokes this history as an analogue for the Strait of Hormuz, and the analogy holds with the tenacity of rust. The ceasefire between the US and Iran, punctuated by strikes and counterstrikes, is a closure without an end, a pause that is not a resolution. The oil tankers threading the strait under naval escort, the Swiss trading houses profiting from the risk, the markets rallying on rumour and retreating on reprisal—all are passengers on a vessel that may or may not reach port. The Yellow Fleet is the metaphor for our condition: stuck between war and peace, between the algorithmic feed and the curated bulletin, between the house as home and the house as asset, between the memory that the state mandates and the memory that the curators preserve.

But the Yellow Fleet also suggests something else: the possibility of endurance, of life continued in the face of paralysis. The crews of those ships formed communities; they held Olympics and published newspapers and maintained the rituals of social life in the most unnatural of circumstances. They were, in a sense, the most extreme version of what we all became during the pandemic—stranded in place, waiting for the waterway to reopen, making do with the materials at hand. The resilience of the stranded is not the resilience of the hero but of the habitué: the person who, finding themselves in limbo, does not transcend the condition but inhabits it, who makes a life not despite the stuckness but within it.

This, perhaps, is what the “And finally” segment understood, and what the algorithmic feed has forgotten: that the space between the catastrophe and the resolution is not empty but inhabited, not a void but a lived experience, not a lag in the signal but the signal itself. The drunk mice in the sherry distillery, the grandmother paragliding in her eighties, the skateboarding duck—these are the Yellow Fleet’s newspapers, the rituals of the stranded, the small acts of meaning that make limbo tolerable. To restore the ending is not to resolve the crisis but to acknowledge that the crisis is not the whole story—that even in the strait, even in the labyrinth, even at the foot of the pyramids, there is room for something other than the spectacle.

The newsletters of May 25–27, 2026, read like dispatches from a world that is simultaneously ending and refusing to end. The Strait of Hormuz may reopen; the semiquincentennial will pass; the housing bubble will deflate or reinflate; the AI arms race will accelerate; the Ebola outbreak will be contained or will not; the movies will continue their revival or will be swallowed by streaming; the curators will hold the line or will be replaced. What persists, across all these crises, is the need for what Italo Calvino called “a different space,” a space not of the labyrinth but beside it, a space where the eye can rest and the mind can wander and the body can breathe. Kohashi’s “invisible Tokyo” is such a space. The cinema in its darkness is such a space. The “And finally” segment, in its frivolous grace, was such a space. The Yellow Fleet, rusting in the canal, was such a space. We are all, in May 2026, passengers on a vessel between war and peace, waiting for the waterway to reopen, in need of an ending that is also a beginning.

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[Edited by Pablo Markin. Produced with the aid of Claude, Anthropic, Qwen, Alibaba, Kimi, Moonshot, GLM, Zhipu, tools (May 31, 2026). The newsletters were sourced from ARTNews, Artforum, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, CNBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Monocle, The New York Times, Newsweek, Nikkei Asia, Noema Magazine, El País, Rest of World, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Semafor, The South China Morning Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The featured infographic has been generated in Gemini, Google (May 31, 2026).]

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (May 31, 2026). The Yellow Fleet of the Now, the Architecture of the Glitch, the Lexicon of Emergency, the Strait and the Labyrinth. Sociology, Media, Art.

I. The Form and the Flood

Walter Benjamin, in his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” diagnosed the death of narrative experience as a consequence of the First World War — soldiers returned from the trenches unable to speak, the communicability of experience having collapsed under the weight of mechanized, anonymous slaughter. What replaced the story, Benjamin observed, was information: brief, verifiable, precise, already explained, shot through with its own interpretation before it even arrives. The newsletter — that peculiarly late-capitalist genre, the daily briefing, the morning missive from Midori House in London — is the apotheosis of this informational form. It tells us everything and narrates nothing. It delivers the world in bite-sized parcels, pre-digested, pre-interpreted, emitting from servers to inboxes at five in the morning Singapore time, catching us at our most vulnerable, half-asleep, in the blue light of a phone.

Between the 21st and 24th of May 2026, the newsletters arrived as they always arrive: relentlessly, cheerfully, like guests who refuse to leave. From Bloomberg and Monocle, from ARTnews and Artforum, from the Nordic Edition and the Eastern Europe Edition, from Canada Daily and Next Africa, the same broken world was refracted in dozens of registers, through dozens of voices, as if quantity of perspective might somehow sum to understanding. It did not. But in this failure — in the gap between information and knowledge, between the dispatched fact and the felt reality — something interesting emerged: the shape of an era, its contradictions vivid and grotesque, its pathologies no longer deniable.

This essay is an attempt to read those dispatches as one would read a difficult poem: against the grain, associatively, with patience for what the text does not say.

II. The Village and the City That Cannot Pay Its Bills

Tyler Brûlé’s Saturday column in the Monocle Weekend Edition opens in a place of supreme, insulated grace: the shores of Lake Zürich on a glorious May morning. Coral peonies. Snow-capped Alpine peaks. Happy mallards “doing duck stuff.” The scene belongs to a tradition — call it the Spaziergang, the meditative urban walk — that runs from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker through Robert Walser’s wandering clerks to the Situationist dérive. Brûlé strolls and lists: a good bookshop, flowers seven days a week, an attentive mayor who removes graffiti within days, warm golden street lamps rather than cold LEDs. His quality-of-life metrics are seductive precisely because they are so minor, so resistant to quantification, so dependent on what Simone Weil called attention — that directed, receptive, patient regard for what is actually in front of you.

Yet the essay is haunted, faintly, by its own exclusivity. The village Brûlé describes is not a village that simply exists; it is a village that is maintained, that requires both material wealth and civic culture of a particular kind. It assumes a population that does not need to work three jobs, that can afford to linger, that has access to the bookshop and the flower market as something other than aspiration. And it is set, whether Brûlé intends this or not, in implicit dialogue with the newsletter arriving elsewhere in the same digest: the story of Johannesburg, Africa’s wealthiest city, which cannot pay its contractors to drive water tankers, whose 111-year-old Art Gallery is falling into disrepair, whose citizens endure rolling blackouts and potholed streets.

The juxtaposition is not merely ironic. It is structural. The Zürich village and the failing Johannesburg municipality are not accidents on either side of a spectrum; they are co-produced by the same global economic system, in which capital concentrates and mobility is asymmetrical. Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo, in Invisible Cities, tells Kublai Khan that every city contains within it an invisible city of the dead; one might add that every flourishing village contains within it, in structural terms, the ruin of another. The Khan’s empire, like all empires, is sustained by the entropy it exports.

Brûlé’s tenth and final item on his quality-of-life list is a good bookshop. One thinks, reading this in the same week that Johannesburg’s mayor delivered a state-of-the-city address that “glossed over” the metropolis’s fiscal catastrophe, of Theodor Adorno’s remark that all culture after Auschwitz risks becoming an advertisement for the existing order. The bookshop is wonderful. But the light from the bookshop window falls only so far.

III. The Strait

The Strait of Hormuz. Twenty-one miles at its narrowest. Roughly thirty percent of the world’s seaborne oil passes through it. In May 2026, it is closed — closed by an Iranian blockade, closed by the ongoing US-Israel war with Iran that began in February, closed in the way that a vein is closed when something goes wrong at the heart.

The economic consequences have a kind of sublime horror. Brent crude above a hundred dollars a barrel. Thirty-year Treasury yields at their highest since 2007. A University of Michigan consumer sentiment index at 44.8, record low, weaker than all projections. Thai and Philippine fishing boats docked because diesel costs too much to justify going to sea. The fishermen return to the water anyway, because staying ashore is worse — a perfectly encapsulated description of the condition of the global precariat, forced into a calculus not of profit but of the least catastrophic loss.

Rapidan Energy Group has issued a warning: if the Strait remains closed through August, the fallout could rival the 2008 Great Recession.

One thinks here of Thomas Pynchon’s concept of entropy — not as metaphor but as structural principle. In Pynchon’s early fiction, systems degrade; energy disperses; information corrupts. The Strait of Hormuz, as chokepoint, is the great anti-entropic device of the global economy, the place where order is enforced through geography. When it closes, entropy floods back in. Oil inventories shrink at a record pace. The euro area’s composite purchasing managers’ index falls below fifty. France’s business confidence plunges to its lowest since 2020. The interdependence that was sold as prosperity reveals itself, under pressure, as fragility.

Iran, meanwhile, is in discussion with Oman about formalizing its control of the Strait through a permanent toll system. The Iranian ambassador to France, speaking in Paris, uses the language of sovereign resource management. There is something almost Grotian here — a reference to Hugo Grotius, whose 1609 treatise Mare Liberum argued for the freedom of the seas as a natural law principle, a position that served Dutch commercial interests against the Portuguese. Four centuries later, the seas are no longer free, or rather they are free only insofar as the great powers find it advantageous to declare them so. Tehran’s proposed toll system is not a departure from international norms so much as an honest statement of what those norms have always been: an agreement among powers about who controls access and on what terms.

The language of the Bloomberg dispatches is the language of markets and risk: spreads, basis points, hedging, sentiment indices. But underneath this language is a simpler and older story — a blockade, a war, civilians caught in the crossfire of interests they did not choose. The Strait of Hormuz is twenty-one miles wide, but the distance between the dealing room in London where thirty-year yields are analyzed and the fishing village in southern Thailand where a family cannot afford to put their boat to sea is immeasurable.

IV. The Apparatus of Opacity

“Who is actually in charge of Cuba?” asks the Friday Monocle Minute, and the question, which reads at first like a journalistic tease, opens onto something genuinely vertiginous: a government whose formal leader commands no respect, whose nominal former leader has just been indicted by a foreign power on crimes from 1996, and whose actual power is held — possibly — by a man known primarily by his nickname, Raúlito, a bodyguard-grandson glimpsed on a yacht, whose existence the article confirms mainly through secondhand sources and surveillance-state whispers.

Franz Kafka wrote systems in which authority is real but unlocatable: the Castle exists, the Law exists, the Trial proceeds, but the source of these institutions cannot be reached, cannot be addressed, cannot be reasoned with. Cuba in 2026 — a country where the president-for-show watches his helicopter disappear from view before the electricity goes off, where buildings are freshly painted and cattle assembled from across the province for a visit that leaves no trace — is Kafka’s castle with better weather. It is a regime sustained not by belief but by the maintenance of a certain theatrical apparatus: the schoolchildren waving, the inspected cattle, the pretense of normalcy that dissolves the moment the helicopter clears the ridge.

The Trump administration’s indictment of Raúl Castro, announced on Cuba’s Independence Day in the grand hall of Miami’s Freedom Tower, is equally theatrical — a gesture of symbolic aggression that, as the analyst Mark Manger notes, “might be a move that turns out to be pointless.” One recognizes here the logic that Hannah Arendt diagnosed in her study of totalitarianism: the displacement of political action by political performance, in which gestures are made not to achieve ends but to produce effects in domestic audiences. The Cuban-Americans of southern Florida receive their symbolism; the Cubans of Cuba receive their rolling blackouts.

Turkey is doing something similar: a court annuls the election of the opposition CHP chairman, potentially paving the way for a Erdoğan consolidation before the 2028 elections. Indonesia’s President Prabowo redirects commodity exports through state-controlled entities; his own officials are shocked. Bolivia’s blockades choke the capital; protesters demand the resignation of a president allied with Trump. Brazil navigates a banking scandal that returns corruption to the center of its election. In each case, power reveals itself as less a stable institutional achievement than a continuous performance requiring daily renewal, like a fire that must be fed.

One reaches for Machiavelli — not the Prince of popular imagination but the Discourses, where Machiavelli argues that republics decay not through sudden catastrophe but through the slow corruption of civic virtue, the hollowing out of institutions that once had substance. The week’s dispatches are full of hollowed institutions: the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, whose inventory has been in disarray since before its founding in its current form in 1990, artworks lost or untracked for decades; the US Smithsonian, denied a women’s history museum by a vote in which the very definition of “woman” became a legislative weapon; the Late Show, canceled at the intersection of political pressure and the collapse of its advertising model; a Japanese Buddhist temple whose “eternal flame” — supposedly burning for 1,200 years — burned down in a week of extraordinary concentrated loss.

The eternal flame, gone. One reaches for Paul Celan: “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen” — “The world is gone, I must carry you.” Celan wrote from within the rubble of European civilization after the Shoah. The rubble in 2026 is not yet of that order, but it rhymes.

V. The Largest IPO in History, or: The Sublime and the Ridiculous

Elon Musk’s compensation from SpaceX is tied to two milestones: the company achieving a valuation of $7.5 trillion, and the establishment of a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants. These two conditions are genuinely interesting in their combination. The first is an abstraction of abstraction — a number that exists only in relation to other numbers, a market capitalization requiring a collective belief so vast it dwarfs the GDP of most nations. The second is a science fiction premise, a species-level ambition so remote from the present moment that including it in an SEC filing is either visionary or deranged. Possibly both.

“Whatever he is getting is an otherworldly thing,” says the pay consultant Dan Walter. The adjective is apt in ways Walter may not intend. The compensation package is otherworldly because it concerns other worlds — Mars, data centers in orbit, asteroid mining. But it is also otherworldly in the theological sense: it belongs to a scale of wealth so far beyond ordinary human experience that it has effectively left the human frame of reference. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s de facto operational CEO, would need 351,000 years of her $5 million annual incentive package to match Musk’s potential take. The figure is so extreme as to become meaningless — or rather, it acquires meaning only as a symptom.

What symptom? The week’s California Edition answers, quietly: almost all of the 19 billionaires minted from AI-related US startups in the past year have ties to San Francisco. A record 85% of all US venture capital money went to California companies in the first quarter of 2026. Meanwhile, white-collar jobs in California are declining faster than in the rest of the country. AI adoption might be causing this divide. “California is an outlier today,” an economist writes. “But outliers in structural transitions often turn out to be early movers.”

Karl Marx, in the Grundrisse, described the tendency of capital toward concentration as a structural feature of accumulation, not an accident. The wealth that clusters in San Francisco is not there because Californians are more talented or more virtuous; it is there because the returns to the specific kind of capital — computational infrastructure, data, intellectual property, network effects — are extraordinarily superadditive. One more engineer at Nvidia adds more value than one hundred engineers at a small manufacturer, not because the engineer is more skilled but because the marginal return at scale is so much higher. This is not a moral fact. It is a topological fact about the landscape of contemporary capital.

Don DeLillo, in Cosmopolis, gave us Eric Packer: a 28-year-old asset manager so wealthy he owns a stretch limousine that can cross Manhattan at the cost of closing the entire city, so remote from ordinary human experience that his body has become almost theoretical to him. His final encounter with death, in a parking lot in Hell’s Kitchen, restores him — briefly, for the last time — to embodiment. Musk, watching his compensation package accrue against milestones set on Mars, is a Packer for the interplanetary age: the body as the last concession to terrestrial gravity.

The SpaceX IPO, meanwhile, makes the week’s Nvidia earnings — 85% revenue growth, $82 billion, extraordinary by any ordinary measure — feel, as the Bloomberg Points of Return newsletter puts it with deliberate irony, like a “sNoozefest.” Here is something worth sitting with: that the abnormal has become the baseline. That a company reporting 62% profit margins and $80 billion in share buybacks is boring because a different company has filed to go public with plans for asteroid mining and Martian colonies. The horizon of the extraordinary keeps receding.

VI. The Beautiful and the Useful: Art in a Week of War

Hilma af Klint painted her Paintings for the Temple cycle in secret, stipulating in her will that they not be exhibited until twenty years after her death. She died in 1944. The work was not shown until 1986. The Grand Palais retrospective, running through August 2026, arrives eighty years after her death, forty years after the first exhibition — late, as all recognition is late for those who were not permitted to exist in the discourse of their time.

The late nineteenth-century art world, the Monocle edition notes, was not hospitable to female experimenters. This is a mild way of saying that women were systematically excluded from the central institutions of Western art — the academies, the salons, the critical apparatus — and that exclusion was structural, not occasional. Af Klint worked in a kind of parallel space, guided by her own spiritual practice, by séances and Theosophy and a fierce interior conviction. Her abstractions predate Kandinsky’s by several years. The art history she was excluded from writing has had to be rewritten around her.

This is, in its way, the story of the week’s most revealing American legislative failure: the bill to create a Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall, killed by House Republicans who amended the definition of “women” to specify “biological” females, thereby converting an act of cultural recognition into a battle over trans existence, ensuring its defeat. One notes the mechanism: a bill with bipartisan support, a dedicated site, years of advocacy, brought down by the addition of a single definitional clause — not because the clause improved the institution but because it made the institution untenable for Democrats. The women’s history museum becomes another instrument in the ongoing culture war, its scholarly mission subordinated to electoral strategy.

The contrast with Hilma af Klint is instructive: af Klint hid her work because she understood that the world was not ready to receive it. The women’s museum bill failed because some political actors were determined to ensure the world stayed not ready.

Elsewhere in the art world, Christie’s New York brought in $162.7 million across three auctions — led by a $35.1 million Gerhard Richter Kerze — in results described as “tepid,” “barely meeting expectations.” The lead painting is of a candle. A Kerze. Richter’s candles are, famously, meditations on photography and painting, on the difference between the image of a flame and the thing itself — on representation’s fundamental inadequacy to presence. That a candle-painting should top a tepid sale in a week of wars and chokepoints and eternal flames gone dark feels less like coincidence than like the art market performing its own commentary on itself, without meaning to.

The art trafficking story — Bradley Gordon, the Harvard-trained lawyer in Phnom Penh who stumbled upon the looting of Cambodian antiquities and spent years pursuing the global conspiracy that had emptied temples into auction houses — carries a different register entirely. The Duryodhana statue, dating to the tenth century, stolen during Cambodia’s long civil war, nearly sold at Sotheby’s Asia Week: a figure that seemed almost to be bouncing on bent knees, ready to spring into action. The Khmer Rouge’s enforcers, when carrying out arrests and executions, used a phrase: “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.” The statue survived — the people in whose name it was stolen, less so. The global art market, its white-gloved auction houses and annual Week celebrations, is also, in its way, a monument to atrocity — not through malice but through the structural indifference to provenance that allows plunder to become patrimony.

The Dutch archaeologist arrested for taking the possible bones of D’Artagnan from a German laboratory and placing them in a friend’s safe — because he feared the local authorities would mishandle them — is a figure from a different register of absurdity: a man so committed to the proper management of a seventeenth-century Gascon musketeer’s remains that he becomes a criminal. Alexandre Dumas would have enjoyed the scenario. The real D’Artagnan died at the Battle of Maastricht in 1673; four centuries later, the fight over who controls his remains has moved from the field of honor to a court in the Netherlands, and is no less fierce for that.

VII. The Virus That Exposed the Limits of Preparation

In eastern Congo, in the gold-mining towns and conflict zones of Ituri province, the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola is moving through populations that have no approved vaccine and no antibody treatment. It is the seventeenth Ebola outbreak Congo has experienced. The world, having spent billions preparing for the Zaire strain, finds itself wrong-footed: “After the devastating West Africa epidemic more than a decade ago, governments poured billions into vaccines and outbreak systems. Most were designed for the more common Zaire strain of Ebola, not Bundibugyo.”

The sentence has the structure of a Greek tragedy: the preparation that should have saved them is the preparation that failed them. The specificity of the preparation — the very precision that seemed like thoroughness — became its limit. Around the mines, bats the size of chickens swarm through abandoned tunnels; in the villages, bush meat is often the only available protein; the road to Mongbwalu cuts through territory shaped by armed groups, ethnic violence, and a deep distrust of authority. The disease spreads in silence because the conditions that allow diseases to be heard — functioning healthcare infrastructure, public trust in institutions, freedom from conflict — are absent.

Simultaneously, the formal US delegation was missing from the WHO gathering in Geneva. Washington’s exit from the World Health Organization, the mass layoffs at USAID, the gutting of foreign health relief: these are not incidental policy decisions but structural choices about who the world’s superpower believes it owes a response to.

One thinks of Albert Camus’s The Plague, in which the isolation of Oran under bubonic plague becomes a meditation on the human capacity for both solidarity and cowardice, for the heroic daily labor of care and the slow corruption of indifference. Father Paneloux’s sermon — that the plague is God’s punishment — is the theological version of the political claim that suffering in Congo is the natural consequence of conditions beyond outside responsibility. Dr. Rieux’s response is to continue his rounds. The American missionary surgeon evacuated to Germany, the Red Cross workers photographed carrying Ebola victims, Dr. Charles Kashindi receiving patient after patient in a hospital with no proper isolation rooms — these are the Rieuxs of the present crisis, doing their rounds without waiting for the world to notice.

Lesotho, meanwhile: a small kingdom, fewer than two million people, whose government signed a controversial health deal with the United States under which it provided long-term access to national medical data in exchange for significantly reduced health assistance. “What price did it pay?” the newsletter asks. This is the question that Frantz Fanon asked of every agreement between the metropole and the colony: at what cost does the weaker party gain access to what the stronger party controls? And who, in the signing room, represents those whose data has been exchanged?

VIII. The Gentrification of Attention

The week’s dispatches are full of overcrowding. The Amalfi Coast in late April, sardined with cruise ship passengers even off-season. Santorini’s selfie-snappers. The Hamptons, where after Memorial Day “all bets are off” for dinner reservations. The Chelsea Flower Show, where crowds of “nice elderly people” — in “granny-scrums four or five deep” — cannot see the show gardens because the BBC camera crews have taken up position. A wheelchair user’s carer “just gives up trying to get a view of the vegetation.”

The Chelsea Flower Show scene is particularly rich. Here, in the most traditional of British institutions — organized by the Royal Horticultural Society, attended by the king and queen and television celebrities, populated by people in hats, people ordering pergolas, people appraising 18th-century stone troughs — the Monocle editor Andrew Tuck discovers that the show gardens are essentially television sets, their accessibility organized around camera sightlines rather than human presence. The woman who has just lost her husband to Parkinson’s disease and is trying to see the Parkinson’s UK garden cannot be accommodated because the BBC needs its eyeline. The spectacle, as Guy Debord defined it, is not simply images but a social relationship mediated by images. The flower show exists, in its most public dimension, as television, and the people attending it are — structurally, though not intentionally — extras.

This is one of the week’s subtler symptoms: the colonization of experience by its own representation. The NYC Ferry, which has “roots going back to the 19th century,” is being rehabilitated through TikTok and Instagram reels featuring dolphin sightings and skyline vistas. Its social media manager’s name is Franky Ponce, and his job is to capture what he calls the mode’s “more intangible value”: it’s fun. The ferry was, before COVID, losing $12.57 per passenger to subsidize each trip. Now it is generating its own content. Whether this is a triumph of public transit or of the attention economy is not entirely clear.

The WNBA’s meteoric rise — powered by a landmark collective bargaining agreement that quadrupled the minimum salary and introduced revenue sharing — is genuine and important, a rare structural victory for gender equity in professional sport, in a week when the overall gender pay gap for full-time workers has grown from 83 cents per dollar to 81 cents. But the newsletter tells the WNBA story alongside the SpaceX story, alongside the Gwynne Shotwell story, and the combination produces a specific kind of vertigo: the individual gains and the structural conditions exist simultaneously, without resolving each other. Women basketball players earn more; women broadly earn less; Gwynne Shotwell, who may be the most important operational figure in the most valuable space company in history, would take 351,000 years at her current compensation to match her CEO’s potential package.

Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation, argued that in postmodern culture the simulation precedes and produces the real — that we inhabit copies of copies, maps that predate the territory. Hotel rooms across price points have begun to look identical, the week’s Bloomberg Weekend observes, because industry consolidation prioritizes design consistency to cut costs. Whether you pay $300 or $1,300, you wake in the same room, or rooms so similar that the difference produces a feeling not of luxury but of déjà vu. The simulacrum of hotel hospitality has replaced hospitality. The quiz — can you tell the $300 room from the $1,750 one? — is a small exercise in the detection of the real beneath the reproduction, and the answer, apparently, is: not easily.

IX. The Machinery of War, the Grammar of Defense

Sweden has ordered four frigates from France’s Naval Group, at roughly €916 million per ship, delivery from 2030. Denmark is looking at similar procurement. Kosovo has set aside $1 billion to form its own army. Poland’s budget for civil defense shelters rises 50% this year. In eastern Europe, a Cold War bunker in Warsaw’s Bielany suburb still houses mannequins in biohazard suits and maps of NATO bombers; the maps are not merely historical. Estonian NATO forces shot down a drone — the first time. Lithuanian officials were rushed to shelters during an air alert. The grammar of European security, which had shifted over thirty years to the subjunctive — if there were a conflict, should Russia ever — has reverted abruptly to the indicative.

The word “frigate” has, the Nordic Edition notes, “leapt off the pages of historical fiction into the modern-day lexicon of business journalism.” This is not nothing. The frigate belongs to Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey, to C.S. Forester’s Hornblower, to the age of sail and empire — to the era when naval power was indistinguishable from commercial power, when the ability to project force across the seas was the ability to project trade. That it has returned to the front pages of business newsletters is a reminder that the age of Grotius’s free seas was always also the age of the East India Company — that commerce and coercion were never separated, only sometimes better disguised.

The Ukraine drone economy is a different kind of war story. The country produces up to four million drones a year; it has struck deep into Russian territory; it has damaged oil facilities that fund the Kremlin’s war machine. The US Department of Defense wants to buy these drones and, more importantly, wants the intellectual property. This is the logic of military innovation: the small nation, fighting for its existence, develops capabilities that the large nation then wishes to acquire. Ukraine’s expertise in cheap, disposable, lethal autonomous systems is a new kind of geopolitical currency — one that NATO procurement offices are only beginning to denominate.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s compensation is partly tied to the creation of data centers in space. The militarization of the electromagnetic spectrum, of orbital space, of autonomous systems: the week’s dispatches sketch, in aggregate, an emerging landscape in which the threshold between commercial and military infrastructure is not merely blurred but effectively dissolved. SpaceX provides launch services for military satellites; it provides communication infrastructure for Ukraine through Starlink; its CEO’s compensation is tied to milestones that have both commercial and civilizational dimensions. The separation of powers — between state and corporation, between military and civilian — that liberal political theory assumed as its premise is not simply weakening. It is being replaced by something that doesn’t yet have a stable name.

X. The AI and the Body

The weight-loss drug race arrives in the dispatches with the particular intensity of a technological competition displacing a moral one. Eli Lilly’s retatrutide causes patients to lose 28.3% of their body weight on average — “the equivalent weight of bariatric surgery,” achieved through injection rather than the operating theater. Half of patients on the highest dose achieved this outcome. The trial “met Wall Street’s expectations.” Novo Nordisk has taken the lead in the obesity pill arena. These two companies are in a race that is also, in some sense, the latest chapter of the much longer history of what bodies are for and who gets to decide.

Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality, traced the emergence of biopower: the administration of life itself as a political technology. The GLP-1 receptor agonists — Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, now retatrutide — are biopolitical instruments in the precise Foucauldian sense: they intervene at the level of metabolic regulation, reshaping the body’s relationship to appetite, to desire, to the social performance of self-management. Their spread tracks exactly the logic Foucault described: the medicalization of conditions previously understood as moral (gluttony, sloth), the construction of pharmaceutical solutions to social and political problems (food deserts, the cost of fresh vegetables, the structure of the working day).

The Bloomberg fiction coverage raises this question through a different lens: cosmetic surgery, body modification, the novel as form for processing what it means when “someone you love changes their face.” The GLP-1 drugs are body modification at scale, available to whoever can afford the monthly subscription — in the US, roughly $1,000 without insurance — and to whoever can tolerate the side effects. The body that results is healthier, statistically; it is also more legible to insurance actuaries, to employers, to the ambient apparatus of medical surveillance.

Standard Chartered’s CEO Bill Winters, meanwhile, refers in an internal meeting to “lower-value human capital,” a phrase for which he is subsequently pursued by regulators in Hong Kong and Singapore. The phrase is interesting not because it is novel — the logic of labor economics has always implied it — but because it was spoken aloud. Jamie Dimon, by contrast, “finds careful words for AI’s impact on jobs”: the technology will “reduce our jobs down the line,” but through “attrition rather than mass layoffs.” Dimon’s rhetoric is, in its way, also a form of biopolitical management — the administration of anxiety about displacement, calibrated to avoid triggering either panic or solidarity.

Singapore, as the Bloomberg dispatches keep noting, is the laboratory. Twenty-nine percent of firms have adopted AI tools; more have redesigned jobs or created AI-related roles; over seventy percent report productivity gains. “The safest move for us may be to make AI our colleague before it becomes the replacement,” one dispatch advises, in a sentence that accidentally performs the entire ideological function of technological inevitability: it presents as personal choice what is, in fact, a structural condition.

XI. The Kiwi Roastery and the Korean Cocktail Bar

It would be wrong to end without the coffee, the sandwiches, the bars. Allpress, the Kiwi roastery founded in an Auckland caravan in 1989, now operating in Farringdon’s Smithfield Market, supplying more than 2,500 hotels and cafés worldwide. Its managing director: “The perception of London’s coffee culture as subpar is an outdated one.” Its cafés, she says, “are a better branding exercise than anything we could put on social media. People get to be part of it here.”

Being part of it here: the phrase carries more weight than it may seem to. The Monocle dispatches, in their most earnest and uncynical mode, are documents of a belief that the quality of daily life can be tended, that material culture matters, that a good coffee and a well-chosen bookshop and flowers available seven days a week constitute a genuine politics of the everyday. This is, in the tradition of John Ruskin and William Morris, a claim that beauty is not a luxury but a necessity; that the texture of daily experience has moral weight; that the design of a space expresses and produces the social relations that occur within it.

BOP, the cocktail bar in Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar neighborhood, is built around three Korean values: kki (craft), jeong (human warmth), and heung (shared energy). Its founder, Uno Jang, describes the venue as “his most personal project yet.” The Bokbunja Pop is served with theatrics: a metal chopstick inserted into a somaek tangtang, traditional Korean raspberry wine meeting lemon and lime soda, to everyone’s delight. The tuna gimbap is a must-try.

These are not trivial things. Roland Barthes, writing about Japanese culture in Empire of Signs, was interested precisely in the textures of daily life — the arrangement of a bowl, the presentation of a gift — as a system of meaning that operated below and beyond the ideological. The chicken sando with yuzu kosho in the Monocle recipe, the Bokbunja Pop, the Jake’s Maple Syrup with its hand-penned individual bottle number — these are artifacts of what Paul Willis called “symbolic creativity,” the everyday making of meaning through objects and practices. They do not solve the Strait of Hormuz. They do not cure Ebola. They do not close the gender pay gap or restore the Reina Sofía’s inventory. But they are what people do while all those other things are also happening: they eat, they drink, they share a table, they delight in the theatrics of a bartender who loves what he makes.

XII. The Late Show

On Thursday, May 22, 2026, Stephen Colbert hosted the final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS. The week before, he and David Letterman threw office furniture off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater, aiming at a target shaped like the CBS logo. “In the words of the great Ed Murrow,” Letterman said, “Good night and good luck, motherf-----s.”

Murrow’s original “Good Night, and Good Luck” concluded every broadcast of See It Now, the CBS news program through which he challenged Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 — a challenge that is often cited as the moment television journalism demonstrated it could hold power accountable. The show was eventually cancelled. Murrow was eventually sidelined. The medium that produced the challenge also produced the conditions of its defeat.

The Late Show’s cancellation arrives at the intersection of political pressure, corporate consolidation (Paramount Global’s sale to David Ellison’s Skydance), and the structural economics of late-night television in the streaming age. Bloomberg’s Felix Gillette is careful: “It’s tempting to chalk up the end of The Late Show to politics. But that’s not entirely right.” The show’s advertising model had been collapsing for years; YouTube and streaming had fragmented the audience; the topical comedy format was simultaneously everywhere and diluted. Trump’s demands for Colbert’s cancellation were real, and the sixteen-million-dollar settlement with CBS over the 60 Minutes lawsuit was real, and the timing was suggestive. But institutions rarely die of a single cause.

Edward Said, in On Late Style, wrote about the quality of lateness in the work of artists who live long enough to outlast their era — Beethoven’s final quartets, Shakespeare’s romances, Rembrandt’s last self-portraits. “Late style is a form of exile,” he wrote. There is something of this in Colbert’s final weeks: the furniture thrown from the roof, the Letterman cameo, the deliberate invocation of Murrow. These are not quite despair. They are something like the full-throated exercise of a voice that knows it is about to be silenced, determined to say what it has to say as completely as possible, while the cameras are still rolling.

What it has to say, in the end, is this: Good night, and good luck, motherf-----s. Which is, in its way, also a form of love.

Coda: The Puzzle Piece

Yoko Ono’s Helmets (Pieces of Sky), at the Broad in Los Angeles: historic soldiers’ helmets suspended from the ceiling, each filled with hundreds of puzzle pieces that visitors can take with them. The piece echoes Ono’s first artwork, conceived as a child during the Second World War, when she would lie on the grass with her brother and imagine meals while watching clouds. They were evacuated from Tokyo in 1945.

The puzzle piece is an echo of an imagining, a fragment of a collective object, a token of the proposition that small thoughts and small actions connect us to something larger. Hannah Elliott, the Bloomberg correspondent who writes about the piece, puts hers in a pretty ashtray on her coffee table. “So I can see it every morning and imagine a beautiful future. Just like Yoko.”

It is a modest gesture. The week’s dispatches have described wars and plagues and financial crises and the slow dissolution of institutions that once held something together. The puzzle piece does not solve any of these. But it is a reminder that the imagination of a beautiful future is not a luxury appended to politics — it is politics’ precondition. What we cannot imagine, we cannot move toward. What we cannot imagine, we will not fight for.

The piece is a fragment. The sky, apparently, requires all of us.

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I. The Architecture of the Everyday

In the luminous prose of Tyler Brûlé’s “Faster Lane,” we encounter what might be called the cartography of contentment—a meticulous charting of those small, invisible coordinates that determine whether a life feels worth living. Walking through the lakeside villages of Zürich on a Saturday morning in late spring, Brûlé enumerates his metrics of quality: the thrice-weekly market, the seven-day flower shop, the warm golden streetlamps that replace the cold efficiency of LED modernity. These are not mere consumer preferences but what the sociologist Richard Sennett might recognize as the scaffolding of civilizational meaning—the quotidian rituals that transform mere habitation into something approaching community.

The ten-point meditation reads like a verse from some secular breviary, and one cannot help but recall Walt Whitman’s cataloguing impulse in Leaves of Grass, though Brûlé’s vision is more constrained, more burgher than bardic. Yet there is something profoundly unsettling in this enumeration, something that evokes Walter Benjamin’s meditation on the “旨趣”—the intention—behind even our most mundane activities. When Brûlé celebrates the “attentive mayor and team with their eyes on the details,” who removes graffiti within days, we are in the presence of what Robert Musil termed “the attribute of doing”—the invisible labor that makes quality of life possible.

This is the paradox of the contemporary condition: we crave the authentic, the handmade, the organic, yet our access to these experiences is increasingly mediated by sophisticated systems of curation and commerce. The café that Brûlé celebrates, the Kiwi roastery Allpress that has colonized London’s cultural landscape, represents neither the village pump nor the corporate chain but something more complex—a third space where global/local tensions dissolve into a consumable aesthetics of belonging.

II. The Political Uncanny: Cuba and the Specter of Succession

The opinion piece on Cuban leadership offers a meditation on what happens when the theatrical apparatus of state exceeds any individual’s actual power. Tomos Lewis’s analysis reveals the eerie structural homology between Cuba’s apparatchik president Díaz-Canel and the puppet authorities in Kafka’s The Castle—officials whose function is to demonstrate the impossibility of function. The scene in Viñales, where the presidential visit concludes even as the electricity is switched off, crystallizes this: a performance of governance that acknowledges, even in its staging, the absence of what it pretends to provide.

What strikes the literary sensibility is how this situation resonates with Chekhov’s observation that if a gun appears in the first act, it must be fired by the third. The US indictment of Raúl Castro on the anniversary of Cuban Independence represents not the firing of the gun but its display—a theatrical gesture meant to signify intention without actual consequence. We are reminded of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who explains to Christ that humanity prefers miracles, mysteries, and authority to the terrible burden of freedom. The real power in Cuba, as Manger’s analysis suggests, lies not in the visible puppet but in the hidden hand of military establishment, what might be called the “deep state” avant la lettre.

The figure of Raúlito—Raúl Castro’s grandson and chief bodyguard—introduces a Rabelaesian element into this serious political drama. The image of this young man “partying on a yacht” while the civilian population endures “rolling hours-long blackouts” contains both the cynical buffoonery of a Caligula and the structural critique of a Brechtian alienating effect. Who, we might ask, is really being governed here?

III. The Defense of the Everyday: Sweden’s Baltic Strategy

The procurement of four French frigates by Sweden represents more than military modernization—it marks the end of a long historical exception. The nation that maintained neutrality through two world wars has finally acknowledged that the calculus of European security has fundamentally changed. This is the Sweden of Strindberg and Bergman confronting its own mythology: the neutral observer who prefers the role of spectator must now become actor.

The naval expansion signals a shift “from denying an adversary freedom of action to establishing and sustaining control across the Baltic Sea region”—language that evokes both the neorealist theoretical framework of John Mearsheimer and the more poetic territorial ambitions of a Tolkien-era fantasy. The Luleå class frigates will patrol waters that have witnessed centuries of Hanseatic commerce, Russian imperial expansion, and the quiet accumulation of Scandinavian prosperity built on the paradox of armed neutrality.

What is striking, from the perspective of cultural geography, is how Sweden’s defense transformation mirrors the personal transformation Brûlé describes in his village meditations. Just as the individual seeks to “establish control” over the quality of their immediate environment, so the state seeks to establish control over its proximate waters. The parallel extends further: both projects require attention to “the details”—the small daily practices that accumulate into something resembling civilization.

IV. The Museum and Its Discontents

The rejection of the Smithsonian Women’s History Museum bill introduces a contradiction at the heart of contemporary American political culture: the simultaneous celebration of women’s empowerment and the systematic obstruction of institutional recognition of women’s achievements. The amendment to recognize only “biological” females transforms what began as bipartisan support into a culture-war battleground. This is what happens when the logic of identity meets the logic of architecture—the desire to build a monument to half the population becomes the occasion for defining what that half means.

The parallel with the D’Artagnan archaeological controversy suggests itself. Here, a Dutch archaeologist, Wim Dijkman, is arrested for what he claims is protection rather than theft—the preservation of skeletal remains from what he considers reckless handling by local authorities. The question of who controls the material remains of the past becomes a question of who controls the narrative of the past. Dijkman’s claim that the church “fabricated” the story of unexpected discovery in order to “seize control of the findings” suggests a conspiracy of narrative ownership that extends far beyond this particular excavation.

Both cases reveal the gap between institutional legitimacy and cultural meaning. The US Congress can reject a museum bill; the Maastricht church can claim accidental discovery; but neither can control the desire that drives these disputes—the desire to possess, to name, to own the past in an age when the future seems increasingly unownable.

V. Material Culture: Coffee, Fashion, and the Tactile Imagination

The coverage of Allpress coffee, Lemaire fashion, Man-tle textiles, and Jake’s maple syrup traces a persistent thread in the contemporary cultural imagination: the desire for material authenticity in an age of dematerialized experience. Agnes Potter’s observation that “cafés are a better branding exercise than anything we could put on social media” acknowledges the paradox while celebrating it—the physical space becomes the last refuge of genuine brand experience precisely because it cannot be endlessly replicated or filtered through algorithmic curation.

The fashion journalism in these newsletters reveals the degree to which contemporary design discourse has absorbed the influence of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. When Man-tle’s founders speak of wanting to “let our fabrics speak for themselves,” they invoke what Barthes might recognize as the “second-order” signification of material objects—the capacity of fabric to carry cultural meaning beyond mere function. The description of the “160 Crunch” fabric that “rustles and crunches with movement” is pure semiotic material, a texture that speaks its own textile theory.

This textile discourse connects to broader questions of craft and authenticity that have preoccupied thinkers from John Ruskin to William Morris to the contemporary theorist Lucy Lippard. When Lemaire opens its new boutique in the Palais-Royal with an exhibition of photography titled “Box of Impressions,” we are witnessing the fusion of retail space and cultural institution that Guy Debord would have recognized as the “society of the spectacle” made concrete. The 18th-century magasins de nouveautés and cabinets de lecture that once defined this neighborhood’s retail culture have been reincarnated in a 21st-century key.

VI. The Gardener’s Art: Chelsea and Its Discontents

Andrew Tuck’s meditation on the Chelsea Flower Show offers what might be called a phenomenology of the horticultural sublime—the attempt to experience genuine beauty in conditions designed to prevent such experience. The show gardens are “TV sets,” the crowds are “mulch pits,” the BBC cameras transform horticultural art into broadcast commodity. Yet Tuck finds his way to the Great Pavilion, where exhibitors showcase “their particular obsessions”—bonsais, hostas, roses, water lilies—where “village fête” meets “Victorian showground.”

The moment when Tuck watches a woman “wipe tears from her face as she tried to take in the Parkinson’s UK garden—she had just lost her husband to the illness” introduces the possibility of genuine emotional response in an event designed for spectacle. This is the aesthetic experience that escapes institutional capture—the private grief that finds unexpected public expression, the mourning that requires no media apparatus, the human need for beauty that persists despite every attempt to monetize and broadcast it.

One thinks of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where the essayist traces the material conditions necessary for women’s creative expression. The Chelsea Flower Show, with its mixture of royal patronage, corporate sponsorship, and genuine horticultural passion, represents a similarly complex terrain—capitalism and nature, spectacle and authenticity, the very British combination of deference and eccentricity that continues to produce cultural forms no other nation quite replicates.

VII. Art Worlds: Hilma af Klint and the Delayed Canonization

The Hilma af Klint retrospective at the Grand Palais represents a kind of institutional catch-up—a recognition that comes eighty years after the artist’s death and twenty years after the stipulation in her will that her work not be shown for two decades after her death. The abstract painter who worked in “late 19th-century art circles where women weren’t meant to experiment” created work that now seems to anticipate not only Kandinsky and Mondrian but the entire trajectory of non-representational art.

The question of delayed recognition introduces what the theorist Pierre Bourdieu would recognize as the “field” of cultural production—the social space where value is constituted through complex processes of canonization and exclusion. Hilma af Klint’s work was hidden not only by her own stipulation but by the structural conditions of the art world, which systematically excluded women from the narrative of abstract art’s development. That the world is “only now starting to catch up to her” speaks to both progress and persistent lag.

The parallel with the Smithsonian Women’s Museum controversy is not accidental: both cases reveal the difficulty of translating individual achievement into collective institutional recognition. The show gardens at Chelsea are fenced off; the women’s museum bill is sunk in committee; Hilma af Klint’s work is shown eighty years after creation. The pattern suggests a persistent structural tendency toward delayed recognition, managed access, controlled grief.

VIII. The Future Anterior: Notes Toward a Conclusion

What emerges from this synthesis is a picture of the contemporary moment as characterized by the persistence of desire in the face of institutional blockage. The villagers of Zürich want community; the Cubans want electricity; the Swedes want security; the American public wants a women’s museum; the archaeologists want to preserve the past; the consumers want authentic experience. Every desire encounters its corresponding resistance, its institutional obstacle, its structural delay.

The newsletters themselves represent this condition: commercial publications that nonetheless aspire to genuine cultural journalism, newsletters that acknowledge their own promotional function while attempting to transcend it. The architecture of the daily digest—the separation of “opinion” from “news,” the sponsored content, the curated lists—mirrors the larger architecture of the contemporary condition, where genuine meaning must be extracted from a continuous stream of managed communication.

Perhaps the most appropriate literary reference comes not from the canonical texts of modernism but from a more recent experiment: Ben Marcus’s fiction, which refuses to separate the experimental from the accessible, the difficult from the necessary. The newsletters’ combination of geopolitics and lifestyle journalism, of defense procurement and coffee culture, of museum politics and fashion retail, reflects the same refusal to maintain tidy categorical boundaries. Everything connects; everything matters; the question is whether we possess the perceptual apparatus to recognize these connections before they are managed into invisibility.

The village that Brûlé describes—the one with perfect pavements, warm streetlamps, and an attentive mayor—represents an aspirational limit case, a fantasy of community that acknowledges its own constructedness even as it celebrates the “real” experiences it might enable. The political and cultural material we have examined suggests that such villages exist only as fragments, as temporary configurations that dissolve even as we describe them. The task of the literary imagination, like the task of the attentive mayor, is to notice the details before they disappear, to find the spring in the step even as the step leads us toward the familiar darkness of another day.

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The Aleph in the Orbital Data Center: Dispatches from the Late Anthropocene

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” — James Joyce, Ulysses

Consider the bones. Beneath the sunken limestone floor of a church in Maastricht, an archaeologist unearths what is believed to be the skeleton of D’Artagnan, the 17th-century musketeer immortalized by Dumas. For this act of resurrection, the archaeologist is arrested, accused of stealing the remains to prevent them from being mishandled by the state. History, it seems, is no longer a shared inheritance but a contested crime scene, a piece of intellectual property to be seized by the municipality.

This subterranean skirmish over the bones of a mythic past occurs precisely as humanity attempts to sever its tether to the Earth altogether. In the gleaming, frictionless boardrooms of 2026, the ultimate prospectus has been filed. SpaceX, seeking a valuation that brushes against the $2 trillion sublime, has codified the colonization of Mars not as a sci-fi fever dream, but as a Key Performance Indicator. To unlock a tranche of stock options, Elon Musk must establish a permanent human colony of one million inhabitants on the red planet. Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab chased the white whale across the terrestrial oceans, driven by a monomaniacal metaphysical rage; today’s capital chases the orbital void, driven by the algorithmic imperatives of the IPO. The prospectus is the new epic poem, a sacred text of late capitalism where the Muses are replaced by underwriters, and the abyss is monetized.

I. The Tollbooth at the End of the World

We are living in what the theorist Paul Virilio might call the dromological climax—the era where speed and logistics dictate the very ontology of power. The Strait of Hormuz, the planet’s most vital arterial choke point, remains paralyzed by the US-Iran war. In a twist of geopolitical surrealism that would have delighted Jorge Luis Borges, Iran and Oman are reportedly negotiating a permanent toll system for the strait. The abyss has been paved; the apocalypse has a turnstile.

This blockage sends shockwaves through the global nervous system. Oil inventories bleed out; the price of naphtha starves Asian petrochemical plants; fishermen in Southeast Asia are grounded by the cost of diesel. The macrocosm of imperial warfare is instantly translated into the microcosm of the breakfast table and the gas pump. Yet, as the physical world constricts, the digital ether expands into a hyper-financialized hallucination. While the Strait burns, capital flees into the sterile, frictionless heavens of AI and quantum computing. The US government injects $2 billion into quantum firms, taking equity stakes, blurring the line between the sovereign state and the venture capitalist. We are witnessing the birth of Sovereign Cybernetics, where the nation-state operates as a holding company for the singularity.

II. The Ontology of the ‘Lower-Value’

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

If the cosmos is being financialized, the human body is being optimized out of existence. When Standard Chartered’s CEO Bill Winters casually refers to the workers slated for AI replacement as “lower-value human capital,” he is not merely deploying corporate jargon; he is articulating a chilling new ontology. It is a phrase that echoes the brutalist architecture of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the biological utilitarianism of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The worker is no longer even alienated from their labor, as Marx warned; they are alienated from their relevance.

At 4 a.m. Singapore time, Meta’s algorithmic guillotine falls, severing 8,000 employees via digital dispatch to feed the maw of artificial intelligence. The modernist nightmare of Kafka’s The Trial—where the accused is condemned by an invisible, incomprehensible bureaucracy—has been upgraded. The bureaucracy is now a neural network, and the execution is a push notification.

In this void of the biological, the elite construct digital phantoms. Executives like Reid Hoffman deploy “digital twins,” AI avatars trained on decades of their speeches and emails, to attend conferences and speak in 74 languages. The biological host decays, drinks coffee, and sleeps, while the simulacrum—the pure, unadulterated image of the capitalist—achieves immortality on the conference circuit. Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation has reached its terminal velocity: the map has not only preceded the territory; it has fired the territory.

III. Carnivals on the Wasteland

How does a society entertain itself while the tectonic plates of the global order fracture? Through the grotesque hyper-reality of the spectacle. As the World Health Organization warns of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola tearing through the conflict-ridden, mineral-rich dark heart of the Democratic Republic of Congo—a crisis exacerbated by the gutting of USAID and the retreat of Western institutional empathy—the Global North indulges in the “Enhanced Games.”

This “Steroid Olympics,” backed by tech-scions and populist royals, celebrates the chemical enhancement of the human form, turning the body into a walking pharmaceutical billboard. Simultaneously, ultra-high-net-worth individuals and crypto-brokers pour billions into Pokémon cards, seeking refuge from inflation in the illustrated nostalgia of 1990s cardboard.

This is the late-stage capitalist carnival: a juxtaposition so jarring it borders on the avant-garde theater of Antonin Artaud. We have the raw, hemorrhagic reality of a neglected virus in the Global South, existing in the exact same temporal plane as the hyper-financialization of imaginary monsters and the state-sanctioned injection of peptides. It is a world that has lost the capacity for tragedy, replacing it with a relentless, scrolling feed of ironic detachment.

IV. The Gerontocracy and the Absurdist Tribunal

Politics, too, has succumbed to the logic of the ghost story. In Washington, the Trump administration unseals an indictment against a 94-year-old Raúl Castro for the downing of two civilian planes in 1996. It is an act of legal necromancy, a geopolitical performance art piece designed to justify a Caribbean regime-change fantasy, echoing the brazen, extrajudicial capture of Nicolás Maduro months prior. Time collapses. The crimes of the 20th century are weaponized to secure the imperial perimeters of the 21st.

Meanwhile, the domestic sphere is governed by a surrealism that rivals the canvases of Hieronymus Bosch. A proposed $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is floated to compensate political allies and January 6th rioters, transforming the US Treasury into a patronage network reminiscent of Gogol’s Dead Souls—a ledger of phantoms and grifters. Green card seekers are told they must leave the country to apply, a Kafkaesque paradox designed to exile the very labor force that sustains the empire’s agricultural and technological engines. The state is no longer a Leviathan; it is a reality television show produced by a nihilist, where the rules are rewritten mid-episode to maximize the host’s dramatic tension.

V. The Extinguished Flame and the Gathering Storm

In Japan, the Reikado Hall, a Buddhist temple housing an “eternal flame” said to have burned continuously for over 1,200 years, catches fire and burns to the ground. The monks manage to salvage the ember, but the physical sanctuary is reduced to ash. It is a potent metaphor for the fragility of our inherited continuities. The institutions we rely upon—the post-WWII liberal order, the global supply chain, the ecological equilibrium of the Holocene—are burning down around us, even as we desperately try to cup the embers in our hands.

And what of the Earth itself? The news briefs relegate it to a mere data point, but the atmosphere is keeping its own ledger. A “Super El Niño” is forming in the Pacific, drawing historic comparisons to the climatic upheavals that have toppled civilizations. The oceans are hoarding heat; the jet streams are warping. The same hubris that drives the orbital data center and the Mars colony blinds us to the terrestrial revenge of the biosphere.

We are suspended in the amber of May 2026. We are a species capable of mapping the quantum realm and engineering digital gods, yet we are paralyzed by a tollbooth in the Persian Gulf and a hemorrhagic fever in the Congo. We are building arks for the stars while the floodwaters rise in our own streets.

As T.S. Eliot wandered the wasteland of post-WWI London, he asked: What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? Today, the roots are fiber-optic cables buried beneath the permafrost; the branches are the solar arrays of the Saudi desert; and the stony rubbish is the detritus of a civilization that has mistaken the price of everything for the value of nothing. The storm is gathering, the algorithms are humming, and the bones of D’Artagnan wait in the dark, laughing at our endless, frantic march toward the Aleph.

I. The Epistolary Condition

Consider the newsletter—that most humble of literary forms, the flâneur‘s diary compressed into the age of algorithmic distribution. What Walter Benjamin called the “aura” of the artwork has not withered but metastasized: every morning, millions receive these dispatches—Monocle’s Weekend Edition, Bloomberg’s Evening Briefing, the Economist‘s World in Brief—as sacraments of global consciousness. They arrive with timestamps marking Philippine Standard Time, as if time itself had been outsourced to a shared GMT+0800, a temporal zone d’attente where the whole world waits together for catastrophe or breakfast.

Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, decoded the bourgeoisie’s subtle alchemies. But what would he make of Tyler Brûlé’s “Faster Lane,” where the editor of Monocle strolls through Zürich counting the elements of pleasant life like a latter-day Saint-Exupéry? “Flowers, branches and neatly trimmed trees in abundance”—the petit-bourgeois sublime, curated with the precision of a Haussmann boulevard. Brûlé’s ten commandments of village life read like Adorno’s nightmare of administered happiness: “Warm, golden, dimmed street lamps. Cold LEDs are a mood killer for all—insects and birds included.” Even the non-human must be accommodated in this theater of gemütlichkeit. One thinks of Robert Walser’s walks through Bern, but Walser was mad, and his villages were not sponsored by hoper helicopters connecting Saint-Tropez to Corsica.

The sponsored content intrudes like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt: “In partnership with hoper / fresh outlook.” The Riviera rethought through vertical flight, traffic “disappearing as the coastline opens out beneath you.” This is what Fredric Jameson termed the “cultural logic of late capitalism”—not merely the commodification of experience, but its aerial commodification, the gaze from above that Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle could not have anticipated. The helicopter becomes what Deleuze and Guattari would call a “war machine,” but here it wars only against inconvenience, against the friction of terrestrial existence.

II. The Aesthetics of Crisis

The Bloomberg newsletters, with their relentless tick-tock of market data and geopolitical tremors, compose a new kind of fin de siècle literature. Consider this sentence from the Evening Briefing Americas, dated May 22, 2026: “The $50 trillion-plus market for G7 debt—the safest haven in world finance—is turning volatile as the Mideast conflict sparks an investor rush for inflation protection.” Here is the sublime of the spreadsheet, where “safe haven” and “volatility” coexist in a dialectic that would have puzzled Hegel. The numbers themselves become characters in a drama: “Thirty-year Treasury yields struck their highest level since 2007.”

This is what Don DeLillo, in Cosmopolis, understood about contemporary capitalism—that it had become a form of poiesis, a self-generating language system. Eric Packer’s limousine journey across Manhattan, watching his fortune evaporate in real-time on screens, finds its apotheosis in the Bloomberg terminal’s green phosphor glow. But where DeLillo’s protagonist sought extinction, the newsletter reader seeks only the next update, the refresh, the push notification.

The Iran war—that persistent, almost ambient presence throughout these dispatches—functions as what Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling.” It is not merely reported but inhabited. “US Retailers Warn Iran War Inflation Will Spread”: Walmart’s CFO notes that consumers bought fewer gallons per visit, “the average number falling below 10 for the first time since 2022.” The macro and micro collapse into each other. One thinks of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, where Septimus Smith’s shell shock and Clarissa’s party preparations exist in the same temporal frame, the same sentence. But Woolf’s stream of consciousness has been replaced by the stream of data, the “Market Snapshot” with its S&P 500 Futures and Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index.

III. The Body Politic and Its Discontents

The newsletters record what Foucault termed biopolitics in its most granular form. The Ebola outbreak in Congo, the Bundibugyo strain for which “there are no approved vaccine or antibody treatments,” appears in Next Africa as a narrative of failed preparedness: “governments, drugmakers and health agencies spent years developing vaccines... those were built around defending against the Zaire strain.” This is what Ulrich Beck called the “risk society”—not the absence of danger, but the systematic misrecognition of its forms.

The body appears elsewhere in stranger configurations. Eli Lilly’s “next-gen obesity shot” promises that “nearly half of patients on the highest dose losing 28.3% of their body weight on average.” In the Economist‘s World in Brief, Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy pill becomes “the first oral weight-loss treatment available in the bloc.” The pharmaceutical and the geopolitical intertwine: the EU’s regulatory approval versus the FDA’s “about-face on flavored vapes,” which Michael Bloomberg warns “will prove deadly for kids.” The state manages populations through molecules, through particulate matter, through the chemistry of desire and its suppression.

One recalls J.G. Ballard’s Crash, where technology and sexuality fuse in wounds and scars. But here the wound is metabolic, the crash is the body’s own resistance to caloric intake. The “weight-loss drug race heats up”—the language of competition applied to the most intimate economies of flesh. Meanwhile, in the same informational ecosystem, we learn that “executive assistants making $100,000 a year are losing jobs to AI.” The body is too expensive, too heavy, too there. The ideal subject of late capitalism is simultaneously emaciated (Wegovy) and ethereal (replaced by algorithms).

IV. The Archive of the Present

What strikes the literary imagination is the documentary density of these texts—their quality of having been already historical, already awaiting their archivist. The Artnews dispatches, with their precise datelines (”May 22, 2026”), record the rejection of a Smithsonian Women’s Museum bill, the arrest of a Dutch archaeologist for retaining “skeletal remains that are possibly of the fourth Musketeer, D’Artagnan,” the approval of “Trump’s 250-foot triumphal arch.” This last detail—triumphal arch!—reads like a lost chapter from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, where the Parallel Campaign plans a celebration of the Emperor’s seventieth jubilee that never arrives. But here the arch is approved by the Commission of Fine Arts, its neo-classical grandeur rising over Memorial Circle while the republic itself undergoes what the newsletters euphemistically call “political chaos.”

The art world these newsletters map is what Boris Groys, in Art Power, diagnosed as the “politicization of art” and the “aestheticization of politics” in mutual entanglement. Christie’s $162.7 million evening sales, “barely meeting expectations,” exist in the same informational breath as Jack White’s debut solo exhibition at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, “produced by Darren Aronofsky’s AI studio Primordial Soup.” The auction house and the AI studio share a logic of valuation, of speculative futures. The “blood antiquities” of Cambodia, tracked by Bradley Gordon since 2012, circulate in the same markets as the “Royal Pop Swatch watch” ($400, maybe $5,000 if flipped).

This is what Theodor Adorno, in his unfinished Aesthetic Theory, grasped as the “culture industry’s” totalizing grip—not the destruction of art, but its transformation into “advertisement for the firm.” But even Adorno could not have anticipated the firm itself becoming art: SpaceX’s IPO prospectus, with its “permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants” as a performance condition for Musk’s compensation. The prospectus becomes Gesamtkunstwerk, total work of art, total financial instrument, total delirium.

V. The Novel of Emergence

If one were to construct a roman-fleuve from these fragments, its protagonist would be the figure of the founder-CEO, simultaneously Promethean and pathetic. Elon Musk appears throughout—his SpaceX IPO, his compensation packages (”more than $1.75 trillion”), his Martian ambitions. But also Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, “the velvet glove” with “no shortage of steel,” who “secured a contract to fly cargo to the International Space Station for NASA.” The Economist profiles her as “SpaceX’s steady hand on the thrusters,” noting her regret that “Starman should have been Starmam.”

This gendered revision—Starmam!—opens onto what Donna Haraway called “situated knowledges,” the partial perspective that is also accountable. Shotwell’s $2 billion stake, her $1 million salary, her “special options award” of $86 million: these figures compose a new kind of characterological depth, the Bildungsroman of the executive class. One compares her to the “unnamed venture” of Fractional AI, or to Sam Altman’s “high-stakes trial against rival Elon Musk,” where “several witnesses questioned the OpenAI CEO’s honesty and leadership.”

The lawsuit as literary genre, the deposition as dramatic monologue. One thinks of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, but Bartleby preferred not to, whereas these figures prefer only to accumulate, to optimize, to disrupt. The “Everybody’s Business” podcast asks: “Is That Shirt Worth $100 Million?” The question is not rhetorical; it is the only question left.

VI. The Peripheral Vision

What the newsletters cannot fully capture—but what their margins suggest—is the persistence of what Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics,” the subjugation of life to the power of death. The ICE raids in Charlotte, North Carolina, where “customers stayed away” from Manuel Betancur’s bakery for six months after Operation Charlotte’s Web. The “decimated” CDC, unable to respond to Ebola. The “bunker boom” in Poland, where “fewer than 1% of Poles have access to a fully fledged emergency shelter.”

These are the shadows that haunt the bright surfaces of the newsletters, the “invisible issue” that Betancur names. They recall what Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, described as the “zone of non-being,” but now that zone is distributed, fragmented, appearing as “depressed foot traffic” and “canceled flights” and “record-low approval ratings.” The violence is atmospheric, statistical, climatological.

Even the weather becomes a character. “Europe’s First Major Heat Wave of Summer Threatens Records.” “The Arctic’s vanishing caribou.” “Floods get worse, Britain turns to nature’s engineer: the beaver.” The newsletters compose what Timothy Morton terms “hyperobjects”—entities so massively distributed in time and space that they defy immediate comprehension. Climate change, AI, the Iran war: these are not events but conditions, not news but atmosphere.

VII. The Coda as Codex

I return to Benjamin’s Arcades Project, that unfinished monument to the nineteenth century’s dream-worlds. These newsletters are our arcades, our passages through which the commodities of attention flow. But where Benjamin found in the flâneur a figure of critical leisure, we have only the scroller, the refresh, the push notification. The “Bokbunja Pop” at Singapore’s BOP bar, mixed with “a metal chopstick inserted into a somaek tangtang,” exists in the same informational stream as “Iran’s uranium standoff” and “Nintendo’s Switch 2 production targets.”

This is what Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, identified as the “hysterical sublime”—the experience of cognitive mapping in a system that exceeds all mapping. The newsletter attempts precisely this impossible cartography: “Here’s what we’re reading this morning,” “What You Need to Know Today,” “The Day Ahead.” But the “we” is fractured, the “you” is plural, the “day” is already Philippine Standard Time, already yesterday in New York, already tomorrow in the Martian colony that Musk’s compensation requires.

And yet. In the Monocle Weekend Edition, Andrew Tuck writes of the Chelsea Flower Show, where “passion is a very compelling thing to be around.” He observes a woman wiping tears from her face as she views the Parkinson’s UK garden, “she had just lost her husband to the illness.” This moment—brief, almost parenthetical—opens onto what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible,” the partitioning of what can be seen and said. The tear is not data. The garden is not a “TV set,” despite Tuck’s insight that the show gardens are designed for BBC camera crews. Something persists: the “real fun” of the Great Pavilion, the “village fête, part Victorian showground,” the meeting of “people who have dedicated their lives to perfecting one thing.”

This is the punctum that Roland Barthes found in photography—the prick, the wound, the detail that disturbs the studium of cultural meaning. In the endless flow of information, the tear on the woman’s face, the “feliz cumpleaños, papá” on the unpicked birthday cake, the “Starmam” that should have been—these are the fragments that refuse integration, that persist as symptoms of a life not yet fully administered.

The newsletters will continue, tomorrow and the day after, their timestamps accumulating like the sediment of a civilization that has learned to document its own collapse in real-time. Whether this documentation is also a form of praxis—whether reading, in the age of algorithmic distribution, can still be a political act—remains the question that these texts, in their very proliferation, cannot answer but only pose.

For the archives. For the unread. For the refresh that never comes.

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The Week as Palimpsest

“The newspaper is a book that is printed every day, and the world is its library.” — Walter Benjamin

A week arrives like any other, freighted with its cargo of dispatches, and yet within the folds of its accumulated bulletins one discerns the tremulous outline of an entire civilisational moment. The newsletters spanning the four days between May 21 and May 24, 2026—drawn from the desks of Monocle, ARTnews, Artforum, and Bloomberg—compose not a chronicle but a palimpsest: layers of meaning inscribed over one another, each partly obscuring and partly revealing what lies beneath. To read them is to perform an archaeological act, scraping away the surface gloss of lifestyle journalism and market reportage to uncover the tectonic shifts beneath. What emerges is a portrait of a world simultaneously enchanted by its own refinements and haunted by the tremors of its own undoing.

The palimpsest, as Gerard Genette reminded us in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, is a text that bears the traces of an earlier writing beneath its visible surface. These newsletter fragments—a Lake Zürich morning stroll, a Cuban indictment, a tepid art auction, a helicopter ride over the Côte d’Azur, a triumphal arch proposed for Washington, a puzzle piece taken from Yoko Ono’s exhibition—each carry such traces. They are, in the Benjaminian sense, dialectical images: frozen flashes of a historical moment in which the past and present converge, revealing a truth that neither could express alone. The task of this meditation is to hold these fragments up to the light, not to synthesise them into a false totality, but to let their juxtapositions generate the kind of knowledge that Theodor Adorno called “negative dialectics”—knowledge that emerges not from resolution but from the irreducible tension between opposites.

We live, as Guy Debord declared in 1967, in the society of the spectacle: a condition in which social life is mediated entirely through images, and lived experience has been replaced by its representation. The newsletters under consideration are themselves spectacles in miniature—curated, designed, calibrated to produce desire and anxiety in equal measure. And yet, as Debord himself acknowledged, the spectacle is not a mere illusion; it is a social relationship between people, mediated by images. To dismiss these dispatches as superficial would be to miss their diagnostic power. They are, in their very superficiality, profoundly symptomatic. The flower show that functions as a television set, the museum that cannot account for its own holdings, the president who is not really in charge, the billionaire whose compensation package includes colonising Mars—these are not anomalies but crystallisations of systemic logics that have been unfolding for decades. What follows is an attempt to read these crystals, to listen to what the spectacles whisper when the cameras are off.

I. The Phantom Sovereigns

“The king reigns but does not rule.” — Adolphe Thiers

The Empty Chair in Havana

On May 20, 2026—Cuba’s Independence Day—the United States government chose the grand hall of Miami’s Freedom Tower to announce the indictment of Raúl Castro, the island’s elderly former president, for the alleged downing of two civilian aircraft in 1996. The symbolism was deliberate, almost operatic: the Freedom Tower, that Art Deco beacon which once served as the reception centre for Cuban exiles arriving on American shores, became the stage for a legal and theatrical gesture aimed as much at domestic audiences as at the regime in Havana. And yet, as Tomos Lewis reported for Monocle, the indictment raises a question that the ceremony’s pomp was designed to obscure: who, precisely, is in charge of Cuba?

The question is not rhetorical. Miguel Díaz-Canel, who succeeded Castro as president in 2019, is described by University of Toronto professor Mark Manger as an “apparatchik” who “does not have a power base” and “commands no respect whatsoever—not in the population, not in the other parts of the regime.” The term apparatchik carries within it the entire tragic history of the Soviet bureaucratic class: functionaries who occupied offices without inhabiting them, who bore titles without wielding authority, who served as placeholders for powers that operated elsewhere. In Milan Kundera’s The Joke, the Communist apparatus reduces human life to a series of mechanical gestures; in Cuba, the machinery has grown so transparent that the gestures themselves have become farcical. Lewis recounts a visit to the town of Viñales, where Díaz-Canel’s arrival was stage-managed with freshly painted buildings, schoolchildren assembled for the occasion, and cattle herded from across the region for presidential inspection—only for the electricity to be cut the moment the departing helicopter was still visible in the sky. It is a scene worthy of Gabriel García Márquez: the magical realist illusion of governance dissolving, with mechanical precision, into the mundane reality of rolling blackouts and civilian deprivation.

The real power, according to seasoned observers, lies with Castro’s chief bodyguard and elusive grandson, known by the nickname Raúlito, who moves through the military-corporate conglomerate Gaesa like a shadow. Videos circulate of him partying on a yacht; photographs display luxury cars. This is the figure with whom Marco Rubio has reportedly spoken directly. The structure recalls what the political scientist Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, called the “onion-like” structure of totalitarian regimes: concentric rings of power, each believing itself to be the true centre, none capable of seeing the whole. The indictment of Raúl Castro—a man of 95 who retired from public life seven years ago—functions as a kind of ghost-hunting, an attempt to exorcise a phantom authority that may have already dissolved into something more diffuse, more cellular, more resistant to the blunt instrument of legal prosecution. The civilians, as always, remain in the dark.

The Arch and the Obelisk

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the Commission of Fine Arts has approved plans for a 250-foot triumphal arch at Memorial Circle—a project associated with the Trump administration. The Trump team claims it does not need congressional approval, citing a century-old permit for a never-built project. The arch, that most Roman of architectural forms, has long served as a technology of legitimation: the Emperor Constantine erected his arch to commemorate a victory at the Milvian Bridge that he had not quite won; Napoleon raised the Arc de Triomphe to glorify a Grande Armée that would eventually be destroyed in the Russian snow. In each case, the arch functions not as a record of achievement but as a pre-emptive inscription of glory upon the landscape—a way of making the future owe its memory to the present.

The American arch, as reported in the newsletters, belongs to this tradition of architectural pre-emption. It is a statement not about what has been accomplished but about what power intends to inscribe. The administration’s parallel move to amend the Smithsonian Women’s History Museum bill—restricting its definition of women to “biological” females, thereby excluding transgender women from the institution’s programming, and giving the president power to select an alternative site—reveals the same logic: the attempt to control not just the present but the archive, the record, the very definition of who counts as a historical subject. This is what Michel Foucault called the “power/knowledge” nexus: the power to define the terms of recognition is the power to determine who may enter the archive and who remains outside it. The Republicans’ amendment to the women’s museum bill is, in Foucault’s terms, an act of “subjugated knowledge”—the deliberate suppression of certain categories of experience from the official record. The bill was ultimately sunk by Democrats in a 216–204 vote, but the attempt itself reveals the terrain of contestation: the archive itself is now a battlefield.

One might recall here the fate of another archive: the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid, where the Spanish parliament has threatened to fire director Manuel Segade unless the institution completes a “total and absolute” audit of its collections by December 2026. Gaps in inventory tracking, including a reportedly lost donation in 2021, have been known for years but predate Segade’s tenure. The museum’s holdings are an inheritance of institutional mergers—the old Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art folded into the Reina Sofía in 1988, creating what the institution itself calls “a tangle of inconsistencies.” Here, too, the archive is a site of political struggle: the demand for transparency serves not merely as administrative hygiene but as a mechanism of political leverage, a way of bringing an autonomous cultural institution to heel. The parallel with Washington is instructive: in both cases, the archive—whether a museum or a women’s history bill—becomes the medium through which power negotiates its relationship with the past.

War as Episteme

The Iran war, which looms over these dispatches like a weather system that will not pass, has begun to reshape the epistemic landscape of everyday life in ways that recall what the philosopher Paul Virilio called “the administration of fear.” Consumer sentiment in the United States has plummeted to a record low of 44.8 on the University of Michigan index. Walmart reports that customers are buying fewer gallons of fuel per visit—”an indication of stress,” in the words of the company’s CFO. Retailers warn that spiking fuel costs driven by the conflict will soon appear on shelves. Meanwhile, the attack on the Barakah nuclear plant in the UAE has demonstrated the vulnerability of civilian infrastructure in a war whose contours no single actor can control. “This was a warning shot,” said Mohammed Baharoon of the Dubai Public Policy Research Center, “a way for Iran to keep pressure on Gulf states and tell them: You won’t be immune.”

Virilio, writing in The Administration of Fear, argued that modern war is no longer defined by territorial conquest but by the management of perception: the creation of a permanent state of insecurity that makes populations governable. The Iran war—with its cascading effects on fuel prices, military readiness (the Pentagon has reportedly halted arms sales to Taiwan to ensure munitions for the Middle East), and domestic politics (Tulsi Gabbard’s departure from the intelligence directorate over her opposition to the war)—operates precisely in this register. It is a war that produces effects far beyond the battlefield: it reshapes the price of groceries in Ohio, the strategic calculus in Taipei, the career trajectory of a cabinet member in Washington. In this sense, it exemplifies what the sociologist Ulrich Beck called the “risk society”—a condition in which the production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the production of risk, and in which the distinction between military and civilian, foreign and domestic, becomes impossible to sustain.

II. The Otherworldly Sum

“The accumulation of capital is the driving force of the capitalist system, and the drive to accumulate is insatiable.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I

Trillions in the Void

SpaceX filed for an IPO this week that has the potential to be the largest in history, and the filing revealed what Bloomberg described as “an otherworldly” compensation structure for Elon Musk. Two separate packages—the “SpaceX CEO award” and the “AI CEO award”—could together be worth more than $760 billion if the company reaches a valuation of $7.5 trillion and meets certain operational milestones, including the establishment of “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” The filing also specifies that SpaceX will not have compensation or nominating committees with a majority of independent directors, meaning that Musk will exercise enormous control over the determination of whether his own performance conditions have been met.

The word “otherworldly” does much of the critical work here, even as it pretends to mere description. Pay consultant Dan Walter’s observation—”I think that’s the difference between executive compensation and whatever Elon Musk has. Whatever he is getting is an otherworldly thing”—captures the sense that we have entered a regime of accumulation that no longer operates within the coordinates of terrestrial economics. The comparison with Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and COO, is instructive: her $5 million annual long-term incentive target would need to accrue for 351,000 years to match Musk’s potential haul. This is not a difference of degree but of kind—a qualitative transformation in the relationship between labour and reward that Marx, were he watching, might describe as the reductio ad absurdum of surplus value extraction.

One is reminded of the scene in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in which the protagonist encounters the struldbrugs of Luggnagg—immortals who continue to age and decay without the mercy of death. Musk’s compensation packages bear something of this quality: they are structured around goals so far-fetched—a million inhabitants on Mars, non-Earth data centres delivering 100 terawatts of computing power—that they seem designed never to be fully realised, yet they continue to accrue value in the meantime. The Mars colony condition, as Bloomberg notes with a certain wry precision, does not specify whether the “inhabitants” must be human. Could frozen embryos count? Digitised consciousnesses? Robots from the Optimus line, whose production targets at Tesla constitute a separate compensation milestone? The ambiguity is not incidental; it is structural. The compensation package is a kind of speculative fiction, a narrative device that generates real financial effects through the mere suspension of resolution.

This is what the cultural critic Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”—the pervasive sense that capitalism is the only viable political-economic system, such that even its most absurd manifestations are accepted as natural. The SpaceX filing does not merely describe a compensation structure; it performs the logic of a system in which the accumulation of capital has become an end in itself, untethered from any plausible metric of human need or social benefit. The irony, of course, is that the mission—Mars colonisation—is framed in precisely the language of human benefit, of species-level survival, of the expansion of consciousness beyond the terrestrial. But the mechanism by which this mission is to be accomplished—the enrichment of a single individual to a degree that would have made Croesus blush—belongs to a different story entirely. The two narratives coexist in the same filing, like the two faces of a Möbius strip, each claiming to be the outside of the other.

The Market as Mood

Christie’s New York brought in $162.7 million across three postwar and contemporary art auctions this week—an improvement from the previous year, yet described by ARTnews as “tepid,” with sales “barely meeting expectations.” The star lot, a Gerhard Richter Kerze (Candle) painting from the late Marian Goodman estate, fetched $35.1 million. A dealer quoted in the story offered a telling interpretation: “There wasn’t much speculative capital in the room tonight. A sign of a healthy, rational art market.” This is a remarkable formulation: the absence of speculation is now the marker of health, as though the art market, like a patient emerging from a fever, is only well when the delirium has passed. The Richter candle—a painting of a flame that is already going out—becomes, in this context, an allegory of the market itself: a guttering light in a room where the speculative fires have been extinguished.

Singapore’s stock market, meanwhile, has quietly reclaimed its position as Southeast Asia’s largest, surpassing Indonesia after five years. The city-state’s appeal—a strong currency, market reforms, high-dividend stocks—represents the triumph of what might be called “boring capitalism” in an age of spectacle. Singapore’s Straits Times Index is up 9% this year, underperforming the broader MSCI Asia Pacific Index’s 18% advance, yet its stability has become a kind of refuge. “Slow and steady is helping it win the game,” as Bloomberg’s Bernadette Toh put it—an inadvertent paraphrase of Aesop’s tortoise, proving that the ancient fable retains its explanatory power even in the age of algorithmic trading. The contrast with the SpaceX spectacle is pointed: where one system generates value through the promissory notes of a Mars colony, the other accumulates it through the modest mechanism of dividend yields and regulatory consistency. These are not merely different investment strategies; they are different epistemologies of value, different ways of knowing what money means.

The Shein-Everlane acquisition—the fast-fashion giant purchasing the “radical transparency” brand for $100 million—offers a third model, or perhaps a parody of one. Shein, the opaque e-commerce behemoth built on ultra-rapid production cycles, absorbs Everlane, a brand that made its name on the promise of ethical supply chains and transparent pricing. The irony is industrial-grade: the vampire embraces the crucifix. And yet, in the logic of capital, this is not contradiction but synthesis—the subsumption of dissent into the apparatus of accumulation, what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation.” The promise of transparency becomes a marketing feature within a system whose fundamental operations remain opaque. One thinks of Walter Benjamin’s observation, in The Arcades Project, that “fashion is the eternal recurrence of the new”; what he might have added is that the new always arrives wearing the clothes of its own negation.

III. The Village and the Crowd

“One can’t build a village in the air.” — Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

Ten Elements of a Pleasant Life

On a Saturday morning along the shores of Lake Zürich, Monocle’s editorial director Tyler Brûlé set out on a walk and returned with ten propositions for the essential elements of a pleasant life. They include: a village with small businesses that allow people to gather from early till late; a thrice-weekly market that creates a sense of occasion; a kiosk with good print and perhaps a coffee; a flower shop open seven days a week; a place to swim, stretch out, and do very little; an attentive mayor who removes graffiti within days; good pavements that accommodate walkers, bikes, and cars; warm, golden, dimmed street lamps; a good bookshop; and, implicitly, the recognition that comes from knowing your wine merchant. The list is, by its own admission, a product of privilege—a vision of community assembled from the vantage point of Alpine peaks, coral peonies, and “happy mallards doing duck stuff.” And yet it is also, perhaps for that very reason, a document of considerable anthropological interest.

What Brûlé describes is, in the vocabulary of the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, a Gemeinschaft: a community bound by shared customs, mutual recognition, and face-to-face interaction. The village, in this understanding, is not merely a demographic unit but a moral one—a space in which social bonds are sustained through habitual encounter and reciprocal obligation. The wine merchant who holds your keys for a visiting relative; the mayor who ensures the underpass is cleaned of graffiti; the flower shop that is always open—these are not amenities but technologies of social cohesion, mechanisms by which the impersonal forces of modern urban life are held at bay. Ray Oldenburg, in The Great Good Place, called such institutions “third places”: neither home nor workplace, but the informal public spaces where community is performed and sustained. The café, the market, the bookshop, the bathing club—these are the staging grounds of what Émile Durkheim called “organic solidarity,” the interdependence that holds complex societies together.

The poignancy of Brûlé’s list lies in its implicit acknowledgement that such solidarity is endangered. The “daily printed newspaper habits” are “evaporating”; the kiosk with good print is “more necessary than ever” precisely because it is becoming harder to find; the village must be defended against the forces that would dilute it. This is the paradox of the contemporary Gemeinschaft: it exists only as an object of nostalgia, a structure of feeling that is most vividly experienced in its disappearance. The literary equivalent might be found in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, where the village pageant becomes the medium through which a community confronts its own dissolution, or in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, where the walk through the Suffolk landscape becomes an elegy for a world that has already been lost. Brûlé’s ten elements are not a manifesto for the future but a memorandum for the archive—a record of what once sustained us, filed under the heading of “quality of life.”

Collective Effervescence and Its Discontents

If the village represents the Gemeinschaft ideal, the tourist crowd represents its negation—and yet, as Bloomberg’s Pursuits newsletter suggests, the relationship between the two is more dialectical than it first appears. The summer travel season has begun, and with it the annual ritual of complaint about overcrowded destinations: Santorini selfie-snappers, Amalfi Coast sardine-tin streets, Hamptons waits stretching past an hour for twenty seats at a pancake joint. The newsletter offers a menu of strategies—go off-season, stay home, seek out the undiscovered—before arriving at a surprising proposal: make peace with the crowds. “Thrilling travel off the beaten path can be great for your brain, but joining the road more traveled can provide what sociologists call collective effervescence. There’s shared identity and reassuring solidarity in that confluence of humanity.”

The term “collective effervescence” belongs to Durkheim, who used it in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life to describe the intoxicating energy generated when a group gathers in shared ritual. The crowd at the Chelsea Flower Show—described by Monocle’s Andrew Tuck as a “mulch pit” of “nice elderly people” craning to see show gardens roped off for BBC camera crews—is a degraded form of this effervescence: a collective experience that has been mediatized, turned into spectacle for remote consumption, while the actual participants are reduced to obstacles between the cameras and their subjects. Tuck observes a carer giving up on getting a wheelchair user a view of the vegetation; a woman weeping at the Parkinson’s UK garden, having just lost her husband, unable to access the space that was meant to acknowledge her grief. The show gardens, Tuck realises, “are not gardens, they’re TV sets.” This is Debord’s spectacle made literal: the garden that exists not to be experienced but to be filmed, the crowd that serves not as participants but as extras in a broadcast.

And yet the Great Pavilion—the vast marquee of obsessives, the hosta enthusiasts and water-iris devotees—offers something else entirely. “Passion is a very compelling thing to be around,” Tuck writes, and in this he approaches what the philosopher Simone Weil called “attention”: the rare and precious capacity to orient oneself fully toward another being or object. The hosta specialist, the rose breeder, the creator of the new Sir David Beckham rose (”a flushed, pink-faced little number”)—these are people for whom the world has not been exhausted by spectacle, for whom the particular still commands an absolute devotion. Against the “mulch pit” of the show gardens, Tuck poses the Great Pavilion as a space of genuine collective effervescence—not the manufactured kind of the TV set, but the kind that arises when people who love the same thing gather in its presence. It is the difference, perhaps, between the crowd at a stadium concert and the audience at a chamber recital: both are collective, but only one permits the kind of attention that Weil described as the “supreme form of generosity.”

Bunkers, Bridges, and the Architecture of Fear

In Warsaw’s Bielany suburb, a Cold War bunker still houses mannequins in biohazard suits and maps of NATO bombers. But Russian drones breaching Polish airspace have brought the past into the present: fewer than 1% of Poles have access to a fully fledged emergency shelter, and a scramble is underway to revive civil defence infrastructure neglected for decades. In Sweden, the government has purchased four Defence and Intervention frigates from France, signalling a shift “from denying an adversary freedom of action to establishing and sustaining control across the Baltic Sea region.” These are the material expressions of what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls “the palliative society”: a civilisation that organises itself around the avoidance of pain, and in doing so produces new forms of anxiety that are, paradoxically, more painful than the threats they were designed to mitigate.

The bunker and the frigate are also, in a more fundamental sense, architectures of mistrust—physical structures that embody the assumption that the neighbour is a potential enemy, that the sky may at any moment deliver a drone, that the sea must be controlled lest it become a highway for hostile ships. To live inside such architectures is to inhabit what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called “the protean self”: an identity that is perpetually reshaping itself in response to an environment experienced as fundamentally unstable. The Poles building bunkers, the Swedes ordering frigates, the Singaporeans preparing for AI-driven job displacement—all are engaged in what might be called “anticipatory adaptation,” the attempt to mould the self and its infrastructure to a future that is imagined as inherently threatening.

This anticipatory logic extends to the most intimate domains of life. Bloomberg reports on the rise of cosmetic procedures and GLP-1 drugs, and on the new fiction and television that explore “the loved ones of people who alter their appearance.” The irony, as Alice Robb writes, is that “the pursuit of belonging can create alienation”—a formulation that could serve as an epigraph for the entire week’s dispatches. The bunker, the frigate, the face-lift, the Mars colony: all are attempts to secure belonging through transformation, and all generate, in their wake, the very alienation they were designed to forestall. This is the dialectic of security and insecurity, of adaptation and alienation, that runs like a fault line through the civilisational moment these newsletters record.

IV. The Temple and the Helmet

“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

The Eternal Flame, Extinguished

A Buddhist temple in Japan that housed the “eternal flame,” believed to have been continuously lit for over 1,200 years, has burned down. The irony is of a magnitude that resists commentary: the flame that was supposed to be eternal consumed by the very element it was meant to harness. It is an image worthy of Jorge Luis Borges, who might have written a story about a civilisation that builds its entire cosmology around a flame, only to discover that the flame was always already consumed by its own nature. The eternal flame is, of course, a technology of memory: a way of making the past physically present, of insisting that certain commitments transcend the lifespans of the individuals who made them. Its extinction is not merely an accident but an allegory—of the fragility of all such commitments, of the impossibility of preserving the sacred against the entropy of the profane.

In a different register, the fire at the Reikado Hall recalls what the anthropologist Ernest Becker called “the denial of death”: the elaborate cultural constructions—temples, monuments, eternal flames—through which human societies attempt to repress the knowledge of their own finitude. Becker argued that all civilisation is, at bottom, an “immortality project,” an attempt to achieve symbolic survival in the face of biological extinction. The eternal flame was such a project: a materialisation of the promise that something of the past would endure into the indefinite future. Its destruction exposes the vanity of the promise—not because the promise was false (the flame did burn for 1,200 years, after all) but because its truth was always contingent, always dependent on the absence of the very accident that destroyed it. This is what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might have called the “there is” (il y a): the impersonal, anonymous rumbling of being that persists beneath and beyond all human meaning, indifferent to our projects of permanence.

Helmets Filled with Sky

At the Broad museum in Los Angeles, Yoko Ono’s exhibition “Music of the Mind” includes a 2001 work titled Helmets (Pieces of Sky). Historic soldiers’ helmets are suspended from the ceiling, each filled with hundreds of puzzle pieces that visitors may take with them. The work is an echo of what Ono credits as her first artwork: lying on the grass with her brother during the Second World War, watching clouds and imagining meals while awaiting evacuation from Tokyo in 1945. The puzzle piece is offered as a fragment of a collective whole—a small, tangible token of the proposition that “we are all connected as part of a bigger masterpiece.”

The helmet—an instrument of war—repurposed as a vessel for fragments of sky: this is Ono’s dialectical image, her Benjaminian flash. The helmet protects the individual head from the collective violence; the puzzle piece insists that the individual is always already part of a collective totality. To take a piece home is to accept both propositions simultaneously: that one is vulnerable and that one belongs. It is, in the vocabulary of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, an experience of “whatever singularity”—a mode of being that is irreducibly particular and yet open to community, that does not reduce the individual to the collective or the collective to the individual but holds them in productive tension.

There is a further resonance. The helmet filled with puzzle pieces stands in direct counterpoint to the military helmets on display in Warsaw’s Cold War bunker—the same object, the same form, but turned toward diametrically opposite futures. The Polish bunker helmet points backward, toward a threat that has returned; Ono’s helmet points forward, toward a world in which the instruments of violence have been transformed into vessels of connection. The contrast is not naïve—Ono’s work does not pretend that the helmets are no longer helmets—but it insists that the meaning of an object is never fixed, that the same form can serve as the medium of both destruction and repair. This is what the art critic John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, called the “circulation of meaning”: the process by which objects are continually re-inscribed with new significance as they move through different contexts and communities.

D’Artagnan’s Bones

In Maastricht, the Dutch archaeologist Wim Dijkman was arrested and released after retaining skeletal remains that may belong to D’Artagnan—the real-life musketeer Charles de Batz de Castelmore, who died near the site in the Battle of Maastricht in 1673 and whose legend was immortalised by Alexandre Dumas in The Three Musketeers. The case reads like a postmodern fable: the archaeologist claims the church and municipality fabricated a story about sunken floor stones to seize control of the findings; he travelled to Germany to retrieve bones from a Munich laboratory to prevent what he considered reckless handling; he placed the remains in a friend’s safe; he was arrested. “I am not going to make a fool of myself with D’Artagnan’s ‘wild dig,’” he protested. “This is a matter of defamation.”

The D’Artagnan affair is a parable about the ownership of the past—about who gets to excavate, interpret, and possess the material remains of history. It recalls the epic investigation tracked by Bloomberg into Cambodia’s looted antiquities: the former child soldier who became one of the country’s most prolific artifact thieves, revealing “how civil war, mass violence and the global art market fed one of history’s largest cultural heists.” The Khmer Rouge phrase—”To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss”—echoes through both stories as a grim reminder that the archive is never neutral. The bones of D’Artagnan, like the looted statues of Koh Ker, are not merely objects; they are nodes in a network of power, desire, and interpretation that extends far beyond the site of their discovery.

Dumas himself understood this. The Three Musketeers is, among other things, a novel about the relationship between history and fiction—about the way in which the past is continually rewritten to serve the needs of the present. Dumas pillaged historical sources for his plots, then embellished freely, creating characters who were more vivid and more memorable than their real-life counterparts. The musketeer who may lie beneath the church floor in Maastricht is not Dumas’s D’Artagnan but his shadow—a figure whose historical existence has been all but obliterated by the literary one. The archaeologist’s attempt to “save” the bones from mishandling is, in this light, an attempt to rescue the historical D’Artagnan from the literary one—to restore the particularity of a life against the universality of a myth. But the myth, as Roland Barthes argued in Mythologies, is precisely what transforms history into nature, what makes the contingent appear inevitable. The bones in the safe are the resistance of the contingent to the inevitable—a resistance that is, by definition, always already too late.

The Hospital of Emotions

In Los Angeles, a shuttered hospital awaiting renovation into a behavioural health campus has been activated by more than seventy artists as an immersive exhibition titled “Hospital of Emotions.” Divided into themes of grief, fear, hope, joy, and sadness, the exhibition includes works about epilepsy, PTSD, homelessness, and suicide. “There is no way you can walk out and look away,” said one contributor, Paal Anand, whose piece addresses IED explosions and veteran suicide. The exhibition occupies a building that will soon be converted back into a functional medical facility, which means that the art is temporary by design—a transient occupation of a space that will soon be reclaimed by the institutional routines of treatment and care.

This transient quality gives the exhibition its peculiar force. The hospital is already a heterotopia, in Foucault’s sense: a “other space” that exists in relation to all other spaces but functions according to different rules. The art exhibition transforms it into a heterotopia of a second order—a space of spaces, a place where the experience of illness is refracted through the prism of aesthetic representation, and where the boundary between the clinical and the creative becomes deliberately uncertain. The ceramic eggs covering the walls around a giant yolk laid atop a hospital bed in Melan Allen’s The Eggsibition; the suicide and war trauma in Anand’s installation: these are not illustrations of suffering but interventions into the space of suffering, attempts to make visible what the clinical gaze, with its diagnostic categories and treatment protocols, necessarily obscures. It is what the artist and critic Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, demanded: not that we look away from suffering, but that we learn to look at it differently—without the anaesthetic of aesthetic distance, without the narcotic of pity.

Epilogue: Puzzle Pieces

At the end of Yoko Ono’s Helmets (Pieces of Sky), the visitor takes home a small blue puzzle piece. It is an object of no monetary value—a fragment of compressed cardboard, painted blue, small enough to fit in a pocket. And yet it carries an extraordinary burden of meaning: it is both a part and a promise, a token of connection and a reminder of incompleteness. To possess a single puzzle piece is to know, with certainty, that the whole picture exists but is beyond your individual capacity to assemble. It is to be given a fragment of the sky and asked to imagine the rest.

The newsletters from this week in May 2026 are themselves puzzle pieces—fragments of a picture that no single reader can assemble. The village on Lake Zürich and the bunker in Warsaw; the indictment in Miami and the triumphal arch in Washington; the tepid auction at Christie’s and the otherworldly IPO filing; the eternal flame that burned down and the helmet filled with sky; the bones in a Maastricht safe and the hospital turned gallery in Los Angeles; the Mars colony that may never be built and the yuzu kosho sando that can be made this afternoon—each is a fragment, and each fragment contains, in potentia, the outline of the whole. But the whole is not a system; it is a condition, a moment in which the old certainties have dissolved and the new ones have not yet crystallised. It is what the philosopher Gianni Vattimo called “weak thought” (il pensiero debole): a mode of understanding that embraces contingency, that resists the temptation of totalisation, that finds in the fragment not a defect but a method.

To read the world through its newsletter dispatches is to practice a kind of epistolary phenomenology: to attend, as Simone Weil urged, to the particular without subsuming it under the general, to allow the fragment its autonomy while remaining open to its resonances. The puzzle piece on the coffee table—where, as Hannah Elliott reported, she placed hers “so I can see it every morning and imagine a beautiful future. Just like Yoko”—is not a solution but a provocation. It does not resolve the contradictions of the week: between the village and the crowd, the spectacle and the genuine, the archive and the erasure, the helmet and the sky. It holds them, instead, in a state of productive tension, inviting us to dwell in the space between what is and what might be.

Italo Calvino, in Invisible Cities, imagined Marco Polo describing to Kublai Khan the impossible cities he has seen—cities of memory, of desire, of signs—each one a fragment of a Venice that can never be fully reconstructed from its parts. “The catalogue of forms is endless,” Calvino wrote, “until every shape has found its city.” The newsletters from this week in May 2026 are our catalogue of forms: the village, the arch, the bunker, the helmet, the flame, the bone, the puzzle piece. Each has found its city. The question is whether we, the inhabitants of that city, can learn to read its forms without mistaking them for foundations—whether we can live, as Ono suggests, inside the fragment without pretending it is the whole.

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[Edited by Pablo Markin. Produced with the aid of Claude, Anthropic, Qwen, Alibaba, GLM, Zhipu, tools (May 28, 2026). The newsletters were sourced from ARTNews, Artforum, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, CNBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Monocle, The New York Times, Newsweek, Nikkei Asia, Noema Magazine, El País, Rest of World, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Semafor, The South China Morning Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The featured infographic has been generated in Gemini, Google (May 28, 2026).]

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Pablo Markin (May 28, 2026). The Noise of the World, a Poetics of Relation, Dispatches from the Simulacrum. Sociology, Media, Art.

I. The Chokepoint as Metaphor

There is a passage twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest, through which — before the bombs fell — approximately twenty percent of the world’s traded oil moved each day. The Strait of Hormuz. Herman Melville, who understood better than anyone the hydraulics of planetary commerce, might have recognized in this bottleneck something like the whiteness of the whale: not pure terror and not pure meaning but the terrible, vertiginous possibility of both at once. The Strait does not appear in these newsletters as a body of water so much as a condition. It is the grammar through which everything else must pass.

Brent crude at $111. Thirty-year US Treasury yields at levels last seen on the eve of the 2008 global financial crisis. Kenyan matatu drivers blocking Nairobi’s arteries with burning barricades. A Somali woman giving birth by the roadside because the UNICEF clinic was padlocked. The connection between these events is not metaphorical — it is causal, hydraulic, real. And yet metaphor is precisely what is required to see the connection, because the apparatus of daily journalism, however magnificent in its granularity, has no form adequate to the whole. The newsletter, that most intimate and disaggregated of modern informational genres — a letter addressed personally to you, arriving in your inbox before dawn — is beautifully suited to the part and constitutionally incapable of the whole.

Walter Benjamin, writing his Arcades Project in Paris in the 1930s, conceived of the city as a dream space through which the shocks of capital moved as through a nervous system. His method — the constellation, the montage, the dialectical image — was designed precisely for worlds in which the connective tissue between phenomena has been severed, in which causation has gone underground. What would Benjamin make of the newsletter digest? Here is a form that enacts fragmentation even as it attempts to overcome it: discrete stories, curated by editors, personalized for inboxes, consumed in the minutes before a commute that no longer exists because the Long Island Rail Road is on strike. The form is the content. The medium — as McLuhan insisted, with his own kind of prophetic grandiosity — is the massage, the message, the mass age.

II. Straits and Stages: The Geopolitical Theater

Xi Jinping holds court in Beijing. First Trump arrives, with his retinue of tech billionaires — Musk, Cook, Huang — who move through the Chinese capital with the baffled wonder of men whose categories are being rearranged. Then, four days later, Putin arrives. Beijing as the omphalos of a realigning world, the navel-stone at Delphi around which all the oracles circulate. Chinese state media calls it evidence of China’s emergence as “the focal point of global diplomacy.” This is the kind of phrase — self-congratulatory, not entirely inaccurate — that tends to appear just before the edifice develops cracks.

Thucydides haunts these newsletters. The Bloomberg analyst John Authers explicitly invokes the “Thucydides Trap” — Graham Allison’s Harvard formulation about declining and rising powers condemned to conflict — in the context of the US-China summit. Xi apparently invoked it to Trump’s face, a remarkable act of seminar-room diplomacy. Trump’s response to Taiwan, that it is “59 miles” from China and “9,500 miles” from Washington, is the response of a man whose mental model of international relations is essentially real estate: proximity is equity. One imagines Thucydides himself — whose actual name, we are helpfully informed, has four syllables — listening with professional interest.

The historical parallel that goes unmentioned but perhaps most usefully illuminates this moment is not Greek but Roman: the mid-imperial period, roughly the second and third centuries CE, when the Roman Empire increasingly relied on Germanic foederati — allied but only loosely controlled border peoples — to do the military work that Roman citizens could no longer or would no longer perform. The analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are, but there is something recognizable in the American posture: a hegemon that wishes to project force without bearing its costs, that reaches for Gulf states to manage its wars, that dispatches a Defense Secretary to campaign in a Kentucky congressional primary while Iran’s Kharg Island goes dark. Edward Gibbon would find the scene familiar, even if he might struggle with the terminology.

Hungary, meanwhile, pivots. The new prime minister, Péter Magyar — no relation to the outgoing foreign minister, the newsletter takes care to inform us — summons the Russian ambassador for a “brisk wigging” over drone strikes on Zakarpattia. This small diplomatic drama, which Monocle renders in its characteristically dry clubhouse prose, contains within it a whole compressed narrative: the end of Orbán’s era, the seventeen billion euros of EU funds that were blocked by Budapest’s Muscovite affections, the ethnic Hungarians of western Ukraine who were deployed as a pretext for obstruction and can now, perhaps, become the occasion for reconciliation. The geopolitics of minority communities, which Wilsonian idealism put on the map after 1918 and which every subsequent generation has had to renegotiate, reassert themselves here in their usual contradictory way: a tool of nationalism, a genuine human concern, and a bargaining chip all at once.

III. The Algorithm and Its Discontents

Graduating seniors at the University of Arizona boo Eric Schmidt. At the University of Central Florida, a real-estate executive asking “What happened?” into a suddenly hostile auditorium becomes — in the Newsweek columnist Carlo Versano’s telling — a synecdoche for an entire civilization’s crisis of legitimacy. The commencement address, that most rote of American ritual forms, has become a site of political rupture.

One reaches for precedents. The 1960s, obviously, when universities became the theater of generational confrontation. But the sixties revolt had an identifiable enemy — the draft, the war, the Establishment — and an identifiable utopian alternative. What these graduating classes are booing is murkier: not simply artificial intelligence as a technology but the mode of address that accompanies it, the smug foreclosure of futures, the way their anxieties are processed by the very class responsible for their production into talking points about “disruption” and “opportunity.” They are booing, one suspects, the form as much as the content — the assumption that a university commencement is an occasion on which a CEO should tell them how to feel about the machines that will replace them.

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, described the “boomerang effect” — the way that colonial techniques of domination, developed in the periphery, eventually return to the metropole. The algorithmic management of labor, piloted in the gig economies of the global south through apps like Uber and Bolt and Yango (the latter now expanding into African markets with its own $150 million push), returns to the metropolitan workforce as AI-mediated task-assignment, performance monitoring, and the gradual disaggregation of the employment relation into “lower-value human capital” — Standard Chartered’s phrase, announcing the elimination of eight thousand jobs. The CEO calls it “driving sustainable growth.” The workers call it losing their livelihoods. The linguistic distance between these two descriptions of the same event is itself a kind of violence.

The parallel development of the LinkedIn “thought leadership” industry — documented with mordant precision in a Rest of World piece about Filipino virtual assistants using generative AI to produce corporate wisdom on behalf of American executives — reveals the full circuit. The content that circulates as professional insight is increasingly produced by low-paid offshore workers operating AI tools, which were themselves trained on text produced by low-paid or unpaid internet contributors, which platforms then sell back to users as authentic connection. “It’s so dead internet, like none of this is real,” one Filipino worker says. She is describing not just LinkedIn but the entire informational economy of our moment: a vast system for the production and circulation of simulation, with real material consequences for everyone involved.

Baudrillard, who saw this coming from a long way off, distinguished between simulation and dissimulation. To dissimulate is to pretend not to have something that one has. To simulate is to pretend to have something one doesn’t. The AI-generated LinkedIn posts are simulations: they appear to be authentic professional reflection but are procedurally produced. The interesting question — and Baudrillard is useful here precisely because he pushes the question to its uncomfortable limit — is whether the authentic professional reflection that preceded them was itself a simulation of a different order. What would it mean to actually think on LinkedIn? The platform’s architecture does not permit it. The simulation goes all the way down.

IV. The Art Market and the Museum, or: What Endures

A Jackson Pollock drip painting, eleven feet wide, sells at Christie’s for $181.2 million. A Brancusi bronze head fetches $107 million. These are not merely expensive objects — they are, as the art market analysts note, expressions of confidence: in the stability of stores of value when bonds are selling off, in the durability of aesthetic achievement when everything else feels contingent. The billionaires who buy such things are not simply acquiring status symbols; they are placing bets on the permanence of certain human achievements against a background of civilizational uncertainty. Whether this constitutes wisdom or hubris is a question that the art market, with its characteristic discretion, declines to answer.

The Louvre is to be renovated. STUDIOS Architecture — a San Francisco firm, now Paris-based — has won the competition, with Annabelle Selldorf, who recently renovated the Frick, designing the interiors. The press release articulates the project’s dual mandate in a phrase of almost Hegelian compression: “Repair and transform, that is the dual objective.” It could be the motto of any serious cultural institution in 2026. It could be the motto of European social democracy, or of Zohran Mamdani’s first months in the New York mayor’s office: the scaffolding regulations, the rubbish receptacles, the subway visits at midnight — repair as the precondition of transformation, the mundane as the ground of the visionary.

The Guernica controversy deserves more than the brief treatment it receives in the ARTnews newsletter. Pablo Picasso painted it in 1937 in response to the Nazi bombing of a Basque town: a painting of unprecedented formal radicality placed entirely in the service of political outrage. It now sits in the Reina Sofía in Madrid, where it generates geopolitical controversy between the Spanish national government and the Basque regional government, each claiming it in ways that Picasso could not have anticipated. The painting has become a kind of temporal palimpsest: the trauma of 1937, the Franco years in which it remained in exile (at MoMA, where it was safer than in fascist Spain), its return to democracy, and now this administrative dispute about which jurisdiction has the right to loan it. The life of artworks exceeds the lives of artists, and the political valences they accrue are not always those intended.

The FT’s report on Gérard Lhéritier — “the Madoff of manuscripts,” who sold ordinary investors stakes in Einstein’s notes, Napoleon’s love letters, and the Marquis de Sade’s scroll — is the newsletter period’s most purely literary story. The Sade manuscript is the right object: Les 120 Journées de Sodome, written on a scroll of toilet paper in the Bastille in 1785, thought lost during the Revolution, passed through the hands of collectors and bibliophiles and eventually fraudsters. It is a work about the absolute sovereignty of desire over everything else — ethics, bodies, narrative itself — and its ownership history has tracked the pathologies of that sovereign desire across two and a half centuries. That it should end up as the trophy item in a Ponzi scheme targeting teachers and hairdressers and pensioners is a joke so dark that only Sade himself could have plotted it.

What the Grasset affair in Paris points toward is something more diffuse and more troubling: the question of who controls the infrastructure of cultural memory, the publishing houses and cinema chains and radio networks through which a society’s sense of itself is produced and reproduced. Vincent Bolloré is not simply a conservative businessman; he is, his critics argue, attempting to colonize the French cultural imaginary — to acquire the means by which Frenchness is manufactured and then recalibrate them. More than two hundred authors quitting Grasset in protest is an extraordinary collective action, but it is also a measure of how far the threat has progressed before it became visible.

V. The Language That Is Dying, and the One That Was Never Born

Sophia Smith Galer’s book about dying languages begins with her grandmother. This is the right beginning. Languages die at the rate of roughly one every two weeks; at the current pace, half of the world’s approximately seven thousand languages will be gone by the end of this century. The Karuk language of California is spoken by twelve adults. What is lost when a language dies is not simply a communication system but a way of being in the world — a particular set of conceptual categories, grammatical relations, and embedded knowledges that cannot be translated into any successor language without fundamental loss.

Walter Benjamin wrote about the “pure language” that exists, latent, in the space between all particular languages — the language that translation gestures toward but never reaches. The Italian idiom of Smith Galer’s grandmother is the inverse of this: not pure language but absolutely particular language, a dialect so regional that it belongs to a handful of villages and will die with the people who speak it. Against the universalizing drive of global English — the language of these newsletters, of AI training data, of international finance — the grandmother’s idiom stands as a reminder that human experience has always been, at its core, irreducibly local.

The WSJ China newsletter documents a different kind of linguistic violence: the discovery that AI chatbots trained on open-web data have absorbed Chinese state-media propaganda — not through any deliberate act of infiltration but because Xinhua and People’s Daily are freely available on the internet while serious journalism is paywalled. The result is a system in which the language of AI is systematically skewed toward authoritarian regimes whose media is subsidized and universally accessible, while democratic journalism, which must finance itself through subscriptions, is structurally excluded. The market logic of paywalling and the political logic of propaganda converge to produce an epistemic environment in which, as the researcher Molly Roberts puts it, governments can now shape “not just what people in their own country consume, but also those in other countries.” This is not simply a media story; it is a story about the material infrastructure of truth, about who pays for reality.

Pope Leo XIV’s forthcoming encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity” — will apparently feature Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, as a guest speaker. This is an extraordinary convergence: the oldest and most theologically sophisticated institution in Western civilization convening with one of the newest, around the question of whether artificial minds can be understood well enough to be trusted. The Catholic Church’s engagement with science has, historically, been complicated (Galileo, Darwin), but it has also been more sustained and philosophically serious than is often acknowledged. Teilhard de Chardin imagined consciousness evolving toward an “Omega Point” — a maximum of complexity and consciousness — and was suppressed for it. His vision now reads almost as a prophecy of the noosphere we have inadvertently constructed: not the mystical convergence he imagined but the literal one, a global network of interconnected minds both human and artificial, generating and consuming and generating meaning at scales no previous civilization could have conceived.

The question the encyclical will apparently address — whether these systems can ever be understood well enough to be trusted — is the right question. It is also the question that the financial regulators are asking, after Anthropic’s Mythos model demonstrated capabilities that rattled banking supervisors in London and Frankfurt. The Bank of England governor describes it as a tool that could “crack the whole cyber-risk world open.” This is both a threat assessment and a kind of awe. The sublime, in Burke’s formulation, is that which overwhelms our capacity for comprehension while compelling our attention; it is distinct from the beautiful in that it exceeds our control. We have built something sublime, and we are now asking whether it can be trusted — which is another way of asking whether we can trust ourselves.

The Newsletter as Fragment

In 1922, T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, the great modernist poem of civilizational disintegration, in which fragments — literary, cultural, mythological — are set against each other without commentary, their juxtaposition doing the work of argument. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Eliot was working under the pressure of a world that seemed to have lost its connective tissue: the Great War, the dissolution of the old European order, the new mass culture of cinema and jazz and advertising that was reorganizing consciousness along lines that the inherited forms of lyric and epic could no longer map.

The newsletter digest of May 2026 is also a collection of fragments. The Strait of Hormuz and the Cannes Film Festival. The Ebola outbreak in Ituri Province and the Lido swimwear pop-up in Venice. Mamdani meeting Dimon and Solomon in Manhattan while Kenyan matatu drivers block Nairobi’s roads with burning stones. Victor Wembanyama scoring 41 points and 24 rebounds in a double-overtime playoff win. These are not comparable events. They resist the coherence that narrative would impose. And yet they belong to the same moment, are being read by the same people, are produced by the same infrastructure of global capital and communications and conflict.

The avant-garde move — the genuinely contemporary move, if contemporary means anything beyond fashionable — is not to resolve these fragments into meaning but to sit with them in their irresolution, to attend to the texture of a world in which the bond market and the Guernica and the dead languages and the humanoid robots and the dying birds of prey and the Pope and the AI and the Strait of Hormuz are all, simultaneously, news. This is not relativism. It is not the claim that all these things are equally important. It is the recognition that the capacity to hold them all in mind — to feel their simultaneous pressure — is itself a cognitive and ethical achievement, one that no single genre or institution or discipline is adequate to, and that requires, perhaps, something like the essay in its oldest and most ambitious form: the attempt, the essai, the mind trying its strength against the world.

The Strait is still closed. The bonds are still selling off. The languages are still dying. The AI is still learning. And somewhere in Ituri Province, a doctor in protective equipment is taking a temperature, and somewhere on the Lido of Venice, someone is trying on a swimsuit that evokes nostalgia for a summer that hasn’t happened yet. Both of these things are true at once. Learning to think about both of them at once — not sequentially but simultaneously, holding the catastrophe and the beauty in the same breath — is what remains for us to do.

The Archival Impulse and the Violence of Selection

The institutional newsletter, in its seemingly functional guise as a disseminator of information, presents itself as a neutral conduit for knowledge. It announces new publications, reports on conferences, and lists forthcoming events, positioning itself as a reliable chronicle of intellectual and professional life [9, 38]. However, to treat it as such is to overlook its fundamental role as an archival agent. Every selection made by the editor—every article highlighted, every name included, every link provided—is an act of epistemological violence, a decision that carves certain knowledge into being while consigning other possibilities to oblivion. This process aligns with Aimé Césaire’s stark characterization of the colonial project as a “forgetting machine,” an apparatus designed to erase indigenous histories and impose a singular, dominant narrative [17]. The newsletter, whether produced by a university press like Columbia University Press [46], a scholarly society like ICOHTEC [82], or a tech publisher like Stripe Press [27], participates in this logic. Its very existence is predicated on a curated reality; it archives what is deemed important enough to circulate within a specific community, thereby reinforcing the hierarchies of value that govern that community. The content of these newsletters, often centered on academic publishing, technological history, and specialized research fields, reveals a powerful nexus of institutions dedicated to the production and validation of knowledge [2, 26, 38].

This curatorial function transforms the newsletter into a palimpsest, a surface upon which successive layers of meaning are inscribed and erased. The quantitative data drawn from large linguistic corpora provides a glimpse into the semantic universe of these texts, revealing a high frequency of words like “archive,” “knowledge,” “political,” and “points” [79, 80]. In a Google n-gram dataset spanning millions of books, “political” and “newsletter” appear as significant markers of discourse in the early 21st century, suggesting their intertwined roles in shaping public and professional consciousness [81]. The archive, in this context, becomes less a repository of stable facts and more a dynamic field of power struggles over representation and memory. The work of M. NourbeSe Philip offers a devastatingly precise model for how to read such an archive. Her book-length poem, Zong!, is not a traditional narrative but a forensic excavation of the marginalia from a British court case concerning the 1781 massacre of 142 enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong [54, 78]. By performing what she calls an “untelling”—a form of erasure poetry that renders legible the silences left by the legal document itself—Philip forces a confrontation with the epistemicide embedded in the very language of law and property [54, 73]. She demonstrates how a text designed to dehumanize and erase can be turned against itself to forge a powerful discourse on reparations and recognition [67, 87]. As one analysis notes, in inhabiting the court documents, Philip herself becomes inhabited by the dead, opening up the legal decision to undecidability and formal indeterminacy [88].

Applying Philip’s method to the newsletter snippet requires a similar act of close reading, a search for the gaps, the footnotes, the unmentioned connections that reveal the violence of the main text. For instance, the simple announcement of a new journal issue, such as the Journal of Cultural Economy [2], is not a neutral event. It signifies the reproduction of capital within academia, the gatekeeping of legitimate knowledge, and the ongoing circulation of disciplinary paradigms. The names of editors and contributors become signifiers of authority and belonging within a particular intellectual lineage [71]. The list of contents, presented as a straightforward inventory, is a performative act that naturalizes a specific set of questions and methodologies as central to the field. The newsletter, therefore, functions as a tool of normalization, rendering certain worldviews as common sense while making alternative modes of knowing seem unthinkable. This aligns with Walter Benjamin’s critique of capitalism, which he argued depended on a “dreamlife” that masked its violent foundations and provided a new motivational basis for social action [56]. The glossy pages of a university press newsletter or the sterile announcements of a technical society serve a similar purpose, providing a comforting dream of progress and orderly development that obscures the underlying conflicts and exclusions. The task of the critical reader, then, is to disrupt this dream, to find the catastrophic moments embedded within the mundane, and to use the very structure of the text—the list, the citation, the hyperlink—as a site for subversion, much like Philip uses the legal transcript as her poetic ground.

Dialectical Images: Reading Catastrophe in the Chronotope of the Newsletter

To analyze the newsletter is to enter a specific temporal and spatial framework, a “chronotope” where time and space are fused into a distinct mode of experience [37]. Newsletters are inherently temporal artifacts, published at regular intervals—monthly, quarterly—that create a sense of forward momentum, a continuous flow of new knowledge and events. This linear progression, however, can be ruptured. Drawing on the critical methods of Walter Benjamin, we can approach the newsletter snippet not as a transparent window onto reality, but as a potential “dialectical image.” For Benjamin, history was not a smooth, progressive narrative but a catastrophe “piled on catastrophe,” a series of moments where the oppressed are perpetually crushed under the wheel of progress [25]. The dialectical image is the fleeting instant in which the past breaks through the continuum of homogenous, empty time, offering a chance for revolutionary recognition—a moment when “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” [59]. This image seduces the observer, compelling them to see the present not as a culmination, but as a continuation of a violent past [76].

Benjamin’s own work, particularly The Arcades Project, serves as a methodological blueprint for this kind of reading. It is a vast, fragmentary montage—a “mobile archive” built from images, quotations, and personal notes—that resists totalizing narratives in favor of creating constellations of meaning [57, 86]. The project investigates the relationship between media, commodities, and consciousness in 19th-century Paris, seeking to understand history not as a story of ideas but as a material practice [57]. Applying this method to a newsletter snippet involves treating it as a piece of evidence within a larger constellation. The announcement of a new issue of the ICOHTEC Newsletter [38, 84] might be linked to the history of technology, labor, and empire. The mention of a conference on Japanese visual culture [74] could be connected to postwar cultural diplomacy and the politics of representation. Each item in the newsletter becomes a node in a web of associations that reveals the hidden structures of power. Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image suggests that even the most banal administrative detail carries the weight of historical trauma, if one knows how to look. The capitalist system, he argued, required a new motivational basis as a form of dreamlife, and the newsletter, with its promises of new discoveries and professional advancement, participates in this ideological function [56].

However, the very structure of the newsletter also contains the seeds of its own deconstruction. Its format—lists, bullet points, short paragraphs—is inherently fragmentary, prefiguring the modernist and postmodernist techniques of collage and montage. John Dos Passos, in his U.S.A. Trilogy, masterfully deployed such techniques to critique the economic forces driving American society [40]. His “newsreel” sections, composed of clipped newspaper headlines and popular song lyrics, created a fragmented, polyphonic portrait of a nation driven by impersonal economic currents [39, 52]. Similarly, the “camera’s eye” passages offered a stream-of-consciousness counterpoint [65]. Dos Passos’ experimental form was a direct response to the social totality he witnessed, a way to represent a world where individuals were dislocated and alienated by industrial capitalism [[72](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382316274_USA_trilogy_a_portrait_of_a_nation_John_Dos_Passos‘_redefinition_of_American_literary_tradition_through_visual_art)]. The contemporary newsletter, in its own way, performs a similar function. Its disjointed list of items—announcements, quotes, citations—mirrors the fragmented attention economy of the digital age. It compiles disparate points of knowledge without necessarily offering a unifying synthesis, reflecting the very condition of late capitalism that Dos Passos analyzed. The critical reader, following Benjamin’s lead, must learn to navigate these fragments, to assemble them into a constellation that illuminates the catastrophe beneath the surface of normalcy. The newsletter does not merely record history; it is a product of history, a material object saturated with the contradictions of its time, waiting for a dialectical image to reveal its true, violent essence.

Fragmented Form as Political Praxis

The very structure of the newsletter—its listicles, its juxtaposition of announcements, its collection of disparate points—can be understood not as a neutral container for information but as a form of experimental literature in itself. This perspective draws on the rich traditions of modernist and neo-avant-garde movements, which have long argued that form is inseparable from political and social meaning. High modernist authors like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce redefined the novel’s form through fragmentation, mythopoetic experimentation, and stream-of-consciousness narration, seeking to capture the complexities of subjective experience in a fractured world [24, 29]. Their work shadowed the constantly mutating medical enigmas of syndromes themselves, suggesting that the experimental form was a necessary political praxis [48]. John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy stands as a monumental example of this principle in action. By deploying a complex, four-way conveyor of narrative forms—including fictional biographies, cinematic “newsreels,” and subjective “camera’s eye” passages—Dos Passos did not just write about America; he embodied its contradictory social totality on the page [52, [72](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382316274_USA_trilogy_a_portrait_of_a_nation_John_Dos_Passos‘_redefinition_of_American_literary_tradition_through_visual_art)]. His novels manifest stridently working-class themes and obliquely Marxian critiques, all wrapped in an experimental form that disorients the reader and mirrors the alienation of modern urban life [39, 65].

The neo-avant-garde, emerging in the post-war period, continued this engagement, addressing art’s relation to socio-political issues through formal innovation [21]. Language poetry, for instance, emerged in the mid-1970s amid economic crises as a Marxist-inflected avant-garde movement that sought to expose the constructed nature of language and representation [16]. Figures like Bernadette Mayer and Ray DiPalma used strategies of defamiliarization, constraint, and procedural writing to challenge the seamless flow of lyric poetry and reveal the ideological underpinnings of narrative. Similarly, earlier movements like Dada and Surrealism employed cryptographic contexts, nonsensical juxtapositions, and automatic writing to subvert bourgeois rationality and authority [8]. These movements demonstrate that experimental form is never purely aesthetic; it is always a political act, a way of refusing to accept the world as it is presented. The contemporary newsletter, with its algorithmically generated or manually compiled lists of links, announcements, and updates, can be seen as a descendant of these traditions. Its form is a direct reflection of the digital information environment, characterized by rapid-fire data consumption and the erosion of authoritative sources.

Analyzing the newsletter through this lens involves treating its textual and visual arrangement as a primary site of meaning. The use of bullet points, bold headers, and hyperlinks is not merely functional; it shapes the reader’s perception, guiding the eye and prioritizing certain information over others. This structure can be read as a form of concrete poetry, where the visual layout on the screen or page carries as much significance as the words themselves [8]. Furthermore, the act of compiling a newsletter is itself a creative process, akin to the collages of artists like Hannah Höch or the cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs. The editor-as-artist makes decisions about which fragments to bring together, creating unexpected resonances and tensions. For example, placing an announcement for a conference on AI and education alongside a review essay on experimental electronic literature creates a new meaning that neither item would possess alone [30, 68]. This process echoes the “form of aesthetic history” proposed by thinkers who advocate for a creative, experimental approach to writing history itself, one that moves beyond mere documentation [49]. The newsletter, in its ephemeral, iterative nature, becomes a laboratory for such experiments. It is a space where the boundaries between journalism, art, and political critique blur, demonstrating that even the most prosaic administrative genre can be repurposed as a vehicle for radical expression. The reader, in turn, becomes a participant in this process, assembling their own constellations from the fragments provided, engaging in a collaborative act of interpretation that honors the legacy of the avant-garde.

Movement/Author Key Formal Strategy Political/Social Function High Modernism (e.g., Dos Passos) Fragmentation, montage, intertextuality, stream-of-consciousness. [29, 39] To represent the dislocation and complexity of modern life; critique economic determinism and social totality. [40, 52] Language Poetry Defamiliarization, procedural constraints, exposure of linguistic construction. [16] To critique ideology embedded in language; emerge from a Marxist context to challenge representation and power. [16] Dada/Surrealism Cryptographic contexts, nonsensical juxtapositions, automatic writing. [8] To subvert bourgeois rationality, authority, and logic; express anti-war sentiment. [8] Experimental Electronic Literature Medium specificity, forensic materiality, hypertextual linking. [61] To build decolonial critical paths; explore new forms of narrative and interaction in digital space. [12]

Decolonizing the Archive: Memory Activism and Experimental Counter-Narratives

While the archival impulse of the newsletter can be seen as an instrument of colonial forgetting, it can also be reclaimed as a site for decolonial intervention and memory activism. The decolonial paradigm, originating with scholars in Latin America, argues that colonialism was not an external appendage to “modernity” but was intrinsic to its very constitution [75]. This perspective demands a radical rethinking of knowledge systems, moving beyond Eurocentric models to incorporate diverse epistemologies, such as those found in oral histories, embodied practices, and community-based commemorations [35, 43, 45]. The work of M. NourbeSe Philip in Zong! serves as the ultimate model for this kind of intervention. By meticulously dissecting the legal text that attempted to erase the humanity of the enslaved people, Philip performs an act of “memory work” that refuses to let the past be forgotten [32, 78]. Her erasure of the word “murder” from the court transcript is not a deletion but a magnification, forcing the reader to confront the horrific implication of what is left unsaid [66]. She creates a new poetic form that extracts a discourse on reparations from a document designed to prevent any such reckoning [67, 87]. This act of “untelling” is a form of resistance, a refusal to be silenced by the very archives that were built on one’s erasure [54].

This impulse towards counter-archiving is visible in various global movements. In South Africa, grandmothers have seeded social movements by remembering the land and the atrocities committed during removals, transforming personal memory into collective political action [31]. In Johannesburg, sound art projects have been used to transmit community memories that are absent from official histories, decolonizing public space through the aural archive [34]. These acts of “decolonial memory activism” challenge the notion of a single, authoritative archive, proposing instead a plurality of cultural archives that embrace dynamic events like commemorations and monuments [35]. They demonstrate that memory is not a passive storage of facts but an active, political practice of preservation and resistance [32]. The newsletter, with its capacity to circulate information widely, can be co-opted for such purposes. An activist newsletter, for instance, might use the format of a standard institutional bulletin to spread counter-narratives, highlight marginalized voices, and organize collective action.

This approach intersects with feminist experimentalism, which has long used innovative writing strategies to break free from patriarchal linguistic structures. French theorists like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray developed écriture féminine, a style of writing that embraces bodily experience and challenges the phallocentric logic of Western philosophy [50]. Their experimental form of critical writing was partly conditioned by the need to articulate experiences that had been rendered unspeakable by dominant discourse. Similarly, the anonymous journalist Emma Larkin writes nonfiction accounts of Burma that blend personal testimony with political analysis, creating a form of literary journalism that resists state propaganda and offers a deeply humanized perspective on a closed society [70]. The newsletter, in its potential for both anonymity and wide dissemination, provides a powerful platform for such hybrid forms of expression. A newsletter could feature a “translation zone,” a term coined by Anne McClintock to describe the spaces where cultures meet and clash, presenting not just summaries of foreign texts but the raw, unmediated experience of translation itself [69]. It could publish erasure poetry alongside academic articles, or embed personal narratives within policy briefs, disrupting the rigid boundaries between genres and challenging the detached, objective tone that often characterizes institutional communication. By embracing the principles of memory activism and experimental counter-narrative, the newsletter can transform from a tool of normalization into a weapon of liberation, a vessel for the stories that the dominant archive seeks to erase.

Ephemera as Evidence: The Politics of Knowledge Production and Dissemination

Ultimately, the newsletter snippet, in its ephemeral and transient nature, becomes a powerful testament to the politics of knowledge production and dissemination in the contemporary era. It exists in a liminal space, simultaneously part of the institutional machinery and a potential site of disruption. Its value lies not in its permanence but in its temporality. It captures a specific moment in the flow of information, a snapshot of what a given community considers important enough to circulate at a particular point in time. This makes it a crucial piece of evidence for anyone studying the contours of a discipline, a movement, or a profession. The proliferation of specialized newsletters—from NEP-EXP in Experimental Economics to the ICOHTEC Monthly Newsletter—indicates a highly segmented knowledge landscape, where information flows through a dense network of specialized nodes [26, 85]. Each newsletter functions as a microcosm of its field, defining its boundaries, highlighting its key debates, and validating its practitioners. The inclusion of a scholar’s name, a book’s title, or a conference theme within its pages is a form of academic capital, a signal of legitimacy and relevance.

This process of validation is deeply political. Who gets cited? Whose work gets featured? Whose voice is amplified? The answers to these questions reveal the power dynamics at play within a given intellectual community. The dominance of certain journals, presses, and academic figures is reproduced and reinforced with each issue of the newsletter. This reflects the broader project of decolonizing knowledge, which calls for a critical examination of whose theories are taught, whose histories are remembered, and whose practices are considered valid [44, 63]. The newsletter, by its very nature, tends to privilege the established canon, celebrating new publications from major university presses and announcing conferences held at elite institutions [46]. It is a conservative force, invested in maintaining the status quo of knowledge production. However, as noted previously, its very structure—a collection of disparate points—also contains the potential for rupture. A carefully curated list can highlight an overlooked scholar, a small press can announce a groundbreaking book, and a simple footnote can open a door to an entirely different intellectual tradition.

In the end, the newsletter, like any piece of ephemera, gains its significance through its afterlife. Once archived, either digitally or in physical form, it ceases to be a functional tool and becomes a historical artifact, a palimpsest waiting to be deciphered by future generations [41]. The critical reader of today, armed with the tools of decolonial theory, modernist formalism, and Benjaminian dialectics, approaches the newsletter not to absorb its message, but to deconstruct its mechanisms of power. The political dimension is revealed in the selections made; the social dimension, in the community it claims to serve; the economic dimension, in the circuits of capital it helps to reproduce; and the cultural dimension, in the values and assumptions it takes for granted. By treating the newsletter as a complex cultural text, we can move beyond a simple summary to a deeper understanding of how cultural systems, values, and identities both influence and respond to social change [1]. We can begin to see that even the most mundane administrative document is a site of intense theoretical conflict, a fragile vessel holding the volatile substances of power, memory, and resistance. The avant-garde, after all, has always found its inspiration in the overlooked and the provisional, and the newsletter, in its brief, flashing moment of relevance, offers a perfect subject for such an inquiry.

1. The Strait

“The desert is a circle without a centre.” — Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions

There is a geometry to blockage that the ancients understood intuitively. The Strait of Hormuz, that narrow vein between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, is not merely a shipping lane; it is a concept, a chokepoint in the double sense—the physiological constriction of an artery and the strategic compression of a planet’s energy supply. In May 2026, as NATO debates whether to escort commercial vessels through waters rendered nearly impassable by the Iran war, we are confronted with a spectacle that is simultaneously ancient and unprecedented: the closure of a maritime passage that carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil. The tankers have vanished from Kharg Island. Iran’s main export facility sits bereft of its customary armada, a harbour without a purpose, a mouth without breath.

One thinks, inevitably, of Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War was, at its core, a contest over sea lanes—over who controlled the passages through which grain and tribute flowed. The Strait of Hormuz is our Hellespont, our Sicilian Expedition, our fatal overreach. When Donald Trump threatens a “big hit” on Iran while simultaneously pausing strikes at the request of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, we witness the peculiar double motion of imperial power: the simultaneous assertion and deferral of violence, the way a fist can remain raised indefinitely, becoming not a blow but a condition of life. This is what Deleuze, following Foucault, might have called the society of control’s kinetic expression: not the prison-cell but the checkpoint, not the execution but the permanent threat of execution. The Strait is closed not by a wall but by the possibility of fire.

Iran’s response has its own dark poetry. The launch of a Bitcoin-backed insurance service for ships transiting the strait is an act of simultaneously practical and symbolic audacity—a recognition that in a world of blocked conventional channels, cryptocurrency becomes a kind of underground river, a financial karst flowing beneath the surface of sanctions and blockades. The old world of letters of credit and SWIFT transfers meets the new world of blockchain and distributed trust, and they do not shake hands so much as pass each other in a dark corridor, moving in opposite directions. As Baudrillard observed in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, the spectacle of modern warfare is always already a simulation; here, the simulation is financial, a hedge against apocalypse priced in satoshis.

Meanwhile, oil breaches $111 per barrel. The bond markets convulse. Thirty-year US Treasury yields touch 5.20 per cent—a level last seen on the eve of the global financial crisis. What we are witnessing is not merely an energy shock but a philosophical one: the revelation that the entire architecture of late-capitalist prosperity rests on the assumption that certain straits remain open, that certain passages remain passable, that the hydrocarbon veins of industrial civilisation will continue to pulse. Remove that assumption and the entire edifice trembles. The commodity supercycle, as strategist Jeff Currie describes it, may last another decade—a decade in which the AI buildout collides with chronic underinvestment in energy capacity, producing what he calls “the biggest asymmetric trade in modern finance.” But asymmetry, in financial terms, always means that someone’s gain is someone else’s devastation. In Nairobi, diesel prices have surged more than forty per cent. At least four people are dead in Kenyan fuel protests. The chokepoint, it turns out, is everywhere.

2. The Mayor and the Mundane

“The city speaks to you...” — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

In another America, another kind of politics is being practiced—not on the high seas but on the cracked pavements of the five boroughs. Zohran Mamdani, the socialist mayor of New York, has discovered what Henri Lefebvre proclaimed in The Right to the City half a century ago: that urban politics is not about grand ideological spectacles but about the production and reproduction of everyday space. When Mamdani limits the time scaffolding can remain around construction sites, when he converts parking spaces into rubbish receptacles, when he descends into subway tunnels at midnight to visit maintenance workers, he is enacting a phenomenology of the municipal that would be recognisable to Jane Jacobs, to Ivan Illich, to every thinker who understood that the personal is not merely political but spatial.

Brian Kelcey, the urban-affairs commentator, captures the paradox with precision: one of the most catastrophic developments for public trust in government has been the sheer ineffectiveness of city administration, the sense that “it just takes too long to do reasonable things.” This is not merely an American complaint. It is the universal grievance of the modern subject against the bureaucratic apparatus that claims to serve her. Kafka understood this; the Castle looms not because it is malevolent but because it is indifferent to the particular, the local, the concrete. Mamdani’s insistence on the tangible—saving a thousand dollars here, fixing a pavement neglected for twenty years—is a kind of anti-Kafkaesque politics, a deliberate inversion of the Castle’s logic. It is also, as Kelcey notes, a strategy for accumulating the political capital necessary for larger transformations: city-owned grocery stores, free public-bus journeys. The small opens the door to the large. The cracked pavement is the prolegomenon to the commonwealth.

And yet. The same mayor who fixes pavements also faced backlash over potential cuts to library funding—a reminder, if one were needed, that the mundane is never innocent, that every allocation of scarce resources is simultaneously a deprivation elsewhere. The library and the pavement are not rivals in any meaningful sense, but in the zero-sum theatre of municipal budgets, they become so. This is the tragedy that Roberto Unger described when he spoke of the “false necessity” of institutional arrangements: we act as though the trade-offs are natural, inevitable, when in fact they are artefacts of a particular distribution of power. Mamdani’s opponents on the right style him a socialist saviour; his detractors on the left worry he will not go far enough. The truth, as usual, is more prosaic and more interesting: he is trying to make government work in a country that has spent four decades convincing itself that government cannot work. That, in itself, is a radical act.

3. The Bollorisation of the Imagination

“The whole of life must look like a giant ad.” — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

At Cannes, the real drama is not on the screen. Vincent Bolloré, the billionaire industrialist and media mogul, has become the spectral presence haunting the Croisette—a man who insists he is a “Christian democrat” while his media empire tightens its grip on both the production and distribution of French cinema and thought. More than six hundred industry figures signed an open letter warning of “fascist takeover of the collective imagination”—a phrase so chilling in its precision that it demands we sit with it, turn it over, examine its facets. What does it mean to colonise the imagination? And what does it mean for such colonisation to be called fascist?

The answer, or part of it, lies in the institutional architecture Bolloré has assembled: Vivendi, Canal+, Studio Canal, CNews, Europe 1, Le Journal du Dimanche, Hachette, and now a thirty-four per cent stake in UGC, which operates one of France’s main cinema chains. This is not merely vertical integration; it is a full-spectrum occupation of the cultural field, from the financing of film to its production, distribution, exhibition, and critical reception. When Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada announced he would no longer work with anyone who signed the open letter, he performed an act of cultural excommunication that would have impressed the Inquisition. When more than two hundred authors quit or refused to write another book for Grasset—the Hachette imprint long seen as a bastion of France’s intellectual spirit—they were responding not to a direct order but to an atmosphere, a climate, a sense that the air itself had been privatised.

Pier Paolo Pasolini saw this coming. In his essays of the 1970s, he warned that the true fascism of the future would not come in black shirts but in the homogenising power of consumer capitalism, which he called the “anthropological Mutation”—a transformation so deep it rewired desire itself. Bolloré’s project, whether he conceives of it as ideological or merely commercial, is an instance of exactly this mutation: the colonisation of the means of cultural reproduction by private capital allied with reactionary politics. Horkheimer and Adorno’s “culture industry” thesis, so often dismissed as hyperbolic, acquires a new and uncomfortable relevance. The culture industry does not merely produce culture; it produces the conditions under which culture can be thought. When those conditions are controlled by a single oligarch with a documented affinity for the far right, the phrase “fascist takeover of the collective imagination” is not alarmism—it is description.

4. Guernica Will Not Be Moved

“I do not seek. I find.” — Attributed to Pablo Picasso

In Madrid, a different kind of cultural struggle unfolds—one that concerns not the privatisation of imagination but the politics of the immobile. The Basque government’s request to borrow Picasso’s Guernica from the Reina Sofía Museum has become a diplomatic incident, a technical controversy, and a philosophical parable all at once. Manuel Segade, the Reina Sofía’s director, revealed that the museum had never actually been asked for the painting—the request went only to Spain’s president and culture minister, who have no technical authority to lend it. A technical report determined that moving the painting could damage it. The Basque government, in Segade’s telling, took the matter “outside the museum and turned it into a matter of state policy,” making him “rather sad.”

There is something powerfully resonant about a painting that refuses to move. Guernica, which depicts the bombing of a Basque town by Nazi and Italian fascist air forces in 1937, has always been more than a work of art; it is a wound preserved in paint, a monument to the specific horror of aerial bombardment that has become a universal symbol of anti-fascist resistance. Its immobility is therefore not merely a conservation issue but a moral position: the wound stays where it is. To move it would be to risk its destruction; but more than that, it would be to instrumentalise it, to turn it from a monument into a diplomatic token, from an act of witness into a political favour. Walter Benjamin, in his theses on the philosophy of history, wrote that “there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Guernica is both: it documents the barbarism of aerial warfare while itself being a product of the civilisation that made such warfare possible. Its refusal to move is, perhaps, its last act of resistance.

Meanwhile, the Prado and the Reina Sofía—museums that have not spoken in forty years—have agreed to cooperate. The Prado’s director, Miguel Falomir, captured the absurdity of their situation with a metaphor drawn from the very sport that Spaniards use to measure existential stakes: “We compete in the Champions League of museums with budgets from the second division.” The comparison is not merely witty; it reveals the structural condition of cultural institutions in an era of fiscal austerity, where the demands of global prestige outstrip the resources allocated to meet them. This is the paradox of culture under neoliberalism: it must be world-class on a regional budget, universal in appeal while parochially funded, accessible to all while squeezed by the few.

5. Bonds, Bombs, and Bodies

“Debt is the most powerful and subtle instrument of imperial control.” — Susan George, A Fate Worse Than Debt

The global bond market selloff of May 2026 is not merely a financial event; it is a philosophical one. When thirty-year UK gilts approach six per cent, when Germany’s long-term borrowing rate hits a 2011 high, when the US thirty-year yield reaches its highest level since 2007, something more than investor anxiety is at work. The bond market is the substrate upon which the entire architecture of modern governance rests; it is the instrument through which states borrow against the future productivity of their citizens, the mechanism by which the present finances itself through the promise—or the extraction—of future labour. When that substrate cracks, the implications are not merely economic but existential. As John Authers of Bloomberg observes, this is “the great bond car wreck—in slow motion.” The phenomenon is truly global, indicating something broader than a regional adjustment. It indicates a shift in the fundamental relationship between states and capital.

Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine”—the thesis that crises are systematically exploited to impose policies that would be impossible under normal circumstances—finds a new iteration here. The Iran war has created the conditions for a structural recalibration of sovereign debt, a permanent increase in the cost of government borrowing that will constrain public spending for a generation. Who pays? In Kenya, the answer is immediate and physical: diesel prices up more than forty per cent, at least four protesters dead, the government forced to negotiate with minibus operators while its treasury secretary admits, “I don’t want to give Kenyans too much hope.” The global bond market’s tremors become, in Nairobi, a matter of life and death—a translation from the abstract language of yields and basis points into the concrete language of burning barricades and police batons. This is what Frantz Fanon meant when he wrote, in The Wretched of the Earth, that the colonial world is a “compartmentalised world”: the same financial instrument that is an abstraction in London is a death sentence in Nairobi.

And what of the commodities supercycle that Jeff Currie proclaims? The energy sector offers “the biggest asymmetric trade in modern finance,” with oil companies returning a 15.5 per cent free cash flow yield while hyperscalers have none. This asymmetry is itself a kind of violence—a redistribution of wealth from the consumers of energy to its producers, from the Global South to the Global North, from the driver at the pump to the trader at the terminal. The supercycle, like the chokepoint, is a structure that benefits those who control the flow and punishes those who depend on it. In Kenya, in the UK, in every country where energy costs are surging and real wages are stagnant, the supercycle is experienced not as an investment opportunity but as a slow robbery—the extraction of surplus from the many by the few, mediated by the impersonal mechanism of the market. Mark Carney’s Canada, with its new sovereign wealth fund designed for “nation-building projects,” offers a vision of how resource wealth might be redirected toward collective purposes. But the fund, as François-Philippe Champagne is careful to note, “is not a tax play.” It will not reduce the tax burden of ordinary citizens. It will, instead, allow them to “contribute”—a word that, in the mouth of a finance minister, always bears a double meaning.

6. The Silicon Prophesies

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.” — Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

In the spring of 2026, the AI buildout assumes the proportions of a theology. Ilya Sutskever’s old prophecy—that “the entire surface of the Earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers”—remains unfulfilled, but the trajectory is unmistakable. Meta’s $200 billion data centre in rural Louisiana, dubbed Hyperion, is so expensive that it requires one of the largest private-capital deals ever assembled, so power-hungry that ten new gas-fired turbines must be built to feed it, so secretive that nearby residents learned of it only as a fait accompli. The old extraction economy of the bayous has been replaced by a new one: the extraction of compute from the earth, the transformation of landscape into processing power, the conversion of rural poverty into industrial substrate.

Heidegger’s warning in The Question Concerning Technology was not about any particular machine but about a mode of revealing—what he called Gestell, or “enframing”—in which the entire world, including human beings, is reduced to Bestand, “standing-reserve,” a resource to be extracted, processed, and optimised. The Hyperion data centre is Gestell made architecture: a structure that reframes a poor Louisiana parish not as a community with a history and a culture but as a site for the production of artificial intelligence, a node in a network that has no centre and no periphery because it has dissolved both into the endless plane of computation. The residents of Richland Parish, like the residents of Brownsville, Texas—where SpaceX’s imminent $2 trillion IPO threatens to price out the very community that made it possible—are experiencing what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs” in reverse: not the meaningless work of the service economy but the meaningless prosperity of the extraction economy, where wealth arrives without agency and progress without consent.

Three Mile Island, site of America’s most infamous nuclear accident, is being brought back online to power Microsoft’s vast computational needs. The symbolism would be heavy-handed if it were fiction: the technology that nearly poisoned Pennsylvania is being resurrected to feed the insatiable appetite of the technology that promises to remake consciousness itself. Two transformative and risky technologies—nuclear power and artificial intelligence—converge on a single site, a convergence that is either a sign of progress or a sign of the end times, depending on your priors. Meanwhile, Barclays suggests that humanoid robots could offset sixty per cent of China’s projected labour-force decline by 2035, and Standard Chartered eliminates eight thousand jobs by replacing what it calls “lower-value human capital” with AI. The phrase is a masterclass in corporate euphemism: “human capital” is already a reification, but “lower-value human capital” is a double reification—a category that strips the person not only of their humanity but of their exchange value, leaving them with nothing to offer the market and therefore, in the market’s terms, nothing at all.

7. The Plague Ships

“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet we somehow find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.” — Albert Camus, The Plague

There is a ship in the Southern Ocean, and aboard it, an ancient disease. The MV Hondius departed Argentina on a birding expedition around the Antarctic, and somewhere in its voyaging, a passenger contracted the Andes strain of hantavirus—the only known hantavirus that transmits between humans. He passed it to his wife. He died. She died in a South African airport. Other passengers left the cruise early, exposing hundreds more on their journeys home, creating what the epidemiologists call a “global web of potential infections.” The language is clinical; the reality is medieval. A plague ship, traversing the shipping lanes of the twenty-first century, carrying not spice or oil but a virus carried by rodents, transmitted between lovers, amplified by the very mobility that globalisation celebrates.

Camus wrote The Plague as an allegory of fascism, but it reads with equal force as an allegory of globalisation. His plague arrives in Oran by ship; our plagues arrive by cruise liner and by supply chain. The Andes hantavirus, the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda—where more than five hundred suspected cases and over a hundred deaths have been recorded—these are not separate events but nodes in a single network of vulnerability. The WHO has declared the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency of international concern, its highest level of alarm, and has done so before convening its emergency committee—an unprecedented step that Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said reflected the epidemic’s “scale and speed.” In Goma, the humanitarian hub where the outbreak has been detected, M23 rebels have closed the airport, hindering the movement of supplies. Disease and war, as always, are not separate catastrophes but intertwining tendrils of the same root.

The United States has banned non-citizens arriving from the DRC, South Sudan, or Uganda. A US missionary has tested positive. The CDC, still without a permanent director after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency purged career health leaders, did not provide a public briefing until a week after the WHO identified the outbreak. “CDC needs to be far more honest and transparent,” says Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University. “There’s much that we don’t know.” The phrase echoes through the centuries: from Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in the shadow of the Black Death, to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, to our own moment of hantavirus and Ebola and the lingering trauma of Covid-19. Each generation believes it has escaped the ancient scourges; each generation discovers that it has not. The difference now is that the infrastructure of response—the public-health apparatus, the international coordination mechanisms, the trust between citizens and experts—has been deliberately eroded, stripped down, purged. We have the knowledge to contain these outbreaks; what we lack is the institutional will. The plague ship docks, and there is no one on the pier to meet it.

8. Route 66 and the Ruins of the Future

“The desert is not.” — Jean Baudrillard, America

Approaching its centennial in November, Route 66—that 2,400-mile ribbon of asphalt from Chicago to Santa Monica—has become what a Los Angeles Times reporter calls an “American artifact,” a road that is simultaneously a means of transportation and a museum of itself. The Cadillac Ranch, the Art Deco gas station turned café, the giant fibreglass space cowboys advertising Buck Atom’s Cosmic Curios—these are not ruins in the classical sense, ivy-covered remnants of a vanished civilisation. They are something stranger: ruins of the future, structures that were always already nostalgic, buildings that announced their own obsolescence at the moment of their construction. As W.G. Sebald understood, the ruin is not what remains after catastrophe; the ruin is what catastrophe reveals was always there.

Baudrillard, driving across America, saw in the desert not emptiness but pure surface, a “mobile, minimally social, minimally circumstantial space” that stripped civilisation to its essence. Route 66 is the desert made linear, a line drawn across the continent that both connects and isolates, that promises arrival while ensuring that the journey is the destination—or, more precisely, that there is no destination, only the perpetual motion of the road. The visitors who come from all over the world to drive it—“You never know what language or accent you’re going to hear,” says the National Trust’s Rhys Martin—are not tourists but pilgrims, seeking not a place but a feeling, the feeling of being in motion, of heading somewhere, even if that somewhere is merely the next motel, the next diner, the next fibreglass dinosaur.

Pynchon understood this. In The Crying of Lot 49, his protagonist Oedipa Maas drives the freeways of Southern California in search of a hidden communication system, an alternative postal service called Tristero. She never finds it, of course; or rather, she finds it everywhere and nowhere, in the margin notes of old plays and the muted post horns on bathroom walls. Route 66 is America’s Tristero: a communication system that no longer communicates, a highway that leads not to a destination but to a question. In its centennial year, as the AI buildout transforms the landscape into data centres and the sky into satellite constellations, the road remains—stubbornly material, stubbornly analog, stubbornly human. You cannot download Route 66. You cannot optimise it. You can only drive it, and in the driving, discover that the America it crosses is both more and less than the sum of its data points.

9. The Pope and the Machine

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” — Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is to be released on May 25, and its subject is artificial intelligence. The Vatican has announced that the launch will feature an unexpected guest: Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic. The juxtaposition is striking—the successor of Peter and the builder of Claude, the heir of two millennia of moral theology and the architect of a machine that can generate moral arguments in milliseconds. The encyclical will explore whether AI systems “can ever be understood well enough to be trusted.” It is, in its way, the most fundamental question that can be asked about the technology: not whether it is good or bad, not whether it will create jobs or destroy them, but whether we can ever know it well enough to entrust it with the decisions that shape human life.

This is a question that would have been familiar to Pascal, who in the Pensées posed the wager that bears his name: we cannot know whether God exists, but we must bet our lives on the assumption. The AI wager is its secular mirror image: we cannot know whether these systems are trustworthy, but we must bet our civilisation on the assumption that they are. The difference, of course, is that Pascal’s God was inscrutable by definition, whereas the opacity of AI is a product of human design. We built these systems; we chose to make them inscrutable; we now profess ourselves unable to understand them. This is not a theological mystery but an engineering choice, and the Pope’s encyclical, whatever its conclusions, performs the valuable service of reframing the question in terms that the tech industry cannot easily dismiss: not “Is it efficient?” but “Is it trustworthy?”—which is to say, “Can it be held accountable?”

Simone Weil, the French mystic and philosopher whom the Vatican has increasingly embraced, wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” The attention we pay to AI—the scrutiny, the regulation, the ethical frameworks we impose upon it—is a form of generosity toward a technology that is not yet capable of returning it. But attention is also, as Iris Murdoch argued, a moral discipline: the effort to see the world as it really is, not as we wish it to be. The encyclical, with its promise to explore whether AI can ever be understood well enough to be trusted, is an act of attention—a refusal to look away from the machine that is reshaping the world, a demand that it be seen clearly before it is trusted blindly. That Anthropic’s co-founder will be present at the launch suggests that at least some in the industry recognise the urgency of this demand. Whether the industry as a whole will heed it is another question entirely.

10. The Language of the Machine

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

A study from the University of Michigan and the Center for Strategic and International Studies has revealed something that should disturb anyone who believes that artificial intelligence is a neutral technology. When researchers posed the same politically sensitive questions about China to every major commercial chatbot—once in English, once in Chinese—the Chinese-language answers came back more favourable to Beijing in 75.3 per cent of paired comparisons. Nine human annotators, working blind, confirmed the pattern. The exception was China’s own DeepSeek, whose V4 Pro model was uniformly pro-Beijing regardless of language—a result that reflects not a bug but a feature, the direct expression of state regulation of Chinese models and their training data.

But the most revealing finding was not about any particular model or any particular regime. It was about the structural mechanism through which propaganda enters the AI pipeline: not through deliberate manipulation but through the simple, indifferent scraping of the open web. As researcher Angela Roberts explained, “The propaganda is simply there on the open web, in plain HTML, free for any AI lab’s web crawler to scoop up.” Xinhua does not sit behind a paywall. People’s Daily does not. The Wall Street Journal does. The consequence is an “uncomfortable asymmetry”: the free information that trains AI models is disproportionately produced by authoritarian states with an interest in shaping global discourse, while the independent journalism that might counterbalance it is locked behind subscription walls that prevent its incorporation into training data.

Wittgenstein’s dictum—“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”—acquires a new and literal significance. If the language in which you ask a question determines the answer you receive, and if that language is itself shaped by the political structures of the country where it is spoken, then the AI chatbot becomes not a window onto the world but a mirror of the world’s power structures. The study found the same pattern wherever it looked: the lower a country’s press freedom, the more regime-friendly the AI’s local-language answer. China is the case study; the phenomenon is global. “LLM responses do not cite their sources,” Roberts observed, “and therefore we can’t decipher the origins of the information presented to us.” This is the new epistemological crisis of the digital age: not the crisis of too much information, which was the crisis of the twentieth century, but the crisis of information that cannot be traced to its source, that arrives with the authority of computation but without the accountability of authorship. The question of whether Beijing is shaping what your chatbot says about China has now been answered. The question of what to do about it has not.

11. The Jury and the Profit

“Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.” — Blaise Pascal, Pensées

In Oakland, California, a jury of nine deliberated for less than two hours before rejecting Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. The verdict turned not on the substance of Musk’s allegations—that he was manipulated into donating tens of millions to what he believed was a nonprofit, only for it to become a for-profit venture—but on the statute of limitations. He waited too long to sue. The law, in its procedural majesty, declined to adjudicate the question of whether Altman betrayed the public-interest mission of OpenAI. The question remains, unanswered and unanswerable in any court, hanging over the industry like the sword that Damocles never had to worry about because he never founded an AI company.

OpenAI now faces a clear path to an IPO. The irony is structural: an organisation founded as a nonprofit to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity is now a for-profit corporation preparing to enrich its investors. The transformation is not merely a change in legal status; it is a metamorphosis in the existential sense—Kafka’s Gregor Samsa waking to discover he has become something else entirely. What was pledged to the commons has been enclosed; what was promised to the future has been mortgaged to the present. As Dave Lee writes for Bloomberg Opinion, Wall Street may still take the question of Altman’s integrity into account when OpenAI attempts to go public. But integrity, in the context of a public offering, is merely a variable in the pricing model—a risk factor to be discounted, not a moral category to be honoured.

Meanwhile, the United States Justice Department has sealed a deal with Trump in which the president agreed to drop a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the 2019 leak of his tax records. In exchange, Trump—who as president has direct authority over the Justice Department—will never be subject to an IRS probe of any kind. The deal was approved by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer. A separate $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” will compensate people who claim the government targeted them, with payouts potentially directed to Trump’s allies and to January 6 defendants. Senator Chris Murphy calls the White House ballroom—built without approval after Trump demolished the East Wing—a “proxy for the broader corruption.” The jury in Oakland could not reach the merits of Musk’s case; the Senate parliamentarian has ruled that funding for the ballroom’s security cannot be added to a spending bill on immigration enforcement. But the structural questions remain: What happens when the law is itself the instrument of evasion? What happens when accountability is not merely absent but architecturally impossible? Pascal’s warning—that justice and power must be brought together—resonates with a bleak clarity. They have been brought together, certainly; but it is power that has absorbed justice, not the reverse.

12. The Louvre and the Lock

“One cannot but be struck by the way the architectural object persists.” — Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

In Paris, the Louvre—that vast palimpsest of monarchy, revolution, empire, and republic—is to be renovated. STUDIOS Architecture, a firm founded in San Francisco and now based in Paris, has won the competition for the Louvre Nouvelle Renaissance, joined by Annabelle Selldorf—the architect who recently completed the Frick Collection’s renovation—and the French landscape agency BASE. The project, expected to cost one billion euros, was delayed after the October theft of France’s crown jewels from the museum, a heist that exposed the inadequacy of the Louvre’s security and gave the renovation a new urgency: “Repair and transform, that is the dual objective.” The phrase is almost theological—a motto for the entire civilisational project of preservation through renewal, of conserving the past by rebuilding its container.

The Louvre is, of course, the ultimate “compartmentalised world” in Fanon’s sense: a former royal palace turned revolutionary trophy turned universal museum, its collections shaped by colonial extraction and its architecture shaped by monarchical ambition. To renovate it is to confront this double inheritance—to ask whether the container can ever be separated from what it contains, whether the palace can ever truly become the people’s house. The renovation will build a new room for the Mona Lisa, that most immobile of paintings, which has become not a work of art but a pilgrimage site, a black hole of attention from which no visitor can escape. The Mona Lisa’s new room is a kind of architectural acknowledgment of her gravitational power: she will be given her own chamber, like a deity in a temple, and the crowds will flow toward her as they have always done, through corridors designed to manage the torrent of desire that she generates.

At Christie’s, meanwhile, the market speaks in numbers that have their own poetry. An 11-foot-wide Jackson Pollock drip painting sells for $181.2 million. A gilded bronze head by Brâncuși fetches $107 million. A Rothko abstraction from 1964, No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe), goes for $98.4 million. These are expected results; what is more telling, as ARTnews reports, is the recovery of the market below $20 million, where deep bidding has returned after years of absence. Most of the action came from US buyers, while European and Asian clients stayed on the sidelines. “The bullish art market is back,” declares one dealer, “but not for young, emerging artists.” The qualifier is the key: the market is bullish for established names, for the safe harbour of proven value, for art that has already been validated by the very market that now celebrates its purchase. The emerging artist, like the emerging economy, is left to wait—to hope that the rising tide will eventually lift all boats, though the tide, as always, rises first for those already aboard.

13. Hungary and the Reversal

“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” — Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

In Budapest, a new government is picking a side, and the side is not Russia’s. Hungary’s new foreign minister, Anita Orbán (no relation to the former prime minister), summoned Russia’s ambassador to receive a “brisk wigging” over drone strikes on Ukraine’s Zakarpattia oblast, which borders Hungary and is home to an ethnic Hungarian community. The new prime minister, Péter Magyar, intends to take a much firmer line toward Moscow than his predecessor Viktor Orbán, who spent years using the rights of Hungarian minorities in Ukraine as a pretext for obstructing Kyiv’s EU membership ambitions. Now Budapest and Kyiv will hold talks over those minority rights, and Hungary has another 17 billion reasons to make nice: EU funds previously blocked because of Orbán’s obstructionism.

The reversal is a reminder that the geopolitical landscape of Central Europe is not a fixed tableau but a palimpsest, constantly being written and rewritten. Havel’s Czechoslovakia, Orbán’s Hungary, and Magyar’s Hungary are not three separate countries but three iterations of the same country, each shaped by the pressures of its moment. What Magyar’s government represents—if it represents anything durable—is the recognition that the alignment with Moscow was never ideological but transactional, a bargain that made sense for Orbán personally but that extracted a steep price from Hungary collectively. The 17 billion euros of EU funds are the material expression of that price; the diplomatic reconciliation with Kyiv is its political expression. Putin, for his part, will attempt to maintain his “wooden horse inside the EU/NATO citadel” by cultivating Moscow-friendly Slovakia and the new government in Bulgaria. The wooden horse, like the chokepoint, is an ancient metaphor with modern application: the enemy within the walls, the vulnerability that is not on the frontier but at the centre.

Putin himself has travelled to Beijing for talks with Xi Jinping, accompanied by five deputy prime ministers, eight ministers, and the head of Russia’s central bank. The delegation’s size is itself a message: Russia is not isolated; Russia has friends; Russia can pivot. The war in Iran has made China more flexible in negotiations over gas prices for the planned Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, according to people familiar with the talks. Energy and geopolitics, once again, are inseparable. The chokepoint at Hormuz creates new leverage; the pipeline from Siberia creates new dependencies; the dance between Moscow and Beijing is choreographed by the price of oil and the closure of straits. As half the world burns and the other half computes, the old game of empires continues—not because it is wise or just, but because it is the only game the players know.

14. The Art of Paying Attention

Isamaya Ffrench has launched Studio Iron in London, a gallery that invites artists to create design objects and sculptures that “dissolve boundaries between genres.” The objects on view “sit in the liminal space between art and function and design.” “Creativity is creativity,” she says. “It’s all magic.” In Turin, young executives commute daily to Milan because the wealth boom in Italy’s financial capital has made it unaffordable, creating a rare big-city commute from one urban centre to another. In the Dorsoduro district of Venice, a swimwear brand called Lido has opened a pop-up shop, its wood and terracotta finishes inspired by the beach cabanas of the Hotel Excelsior, a small act of nostalgia in a city that is itself a museum of nostalgia. In rural Louisiana, a data centre called Hyperion is being built that will consume more energy than anything that has come before. On Route 66, visitors from around the world drive the ruins of the American future. In Omaha, Nebraska, Americans quarantined after exposure to hantavirus wait out a forty-two-day incubation period. In the Strait of Hormuz, tankers do not move.

These are the dispatches from the edge of the present. They come to us not as a narrative—the present never does—but as a constellation, a pattern of points in space and time whose shape is visible only from a distance we do not yet have. To read them is to practice what Weil called attention: the rarest and purest form of generosity. To write them is to practice what Sebald called “the art of straying,” the deliberate cultivation of digression as a method of truth-telling. The news, parsed correctly, is never merely the news; it is the signature of the world upon the moment, the trace of a reality that is always more complex, more interconnected, more strange than any headline can convey.

The chokepoint, we begin to see, is not only the Strait. It is the gap between the event and its comprehension, between the data point and its meaning, between the newsletter in your inbox and the world it describes. Every fact in these dispatches is also a question. Every question points toward another fact. The chain extends in all directions, touching every aspect of our lives—political, social, economic, cultural—without ever resolving into a single, unified account. There is no single account. There is only the practice of paying attention, of reading carefully, of refusing the simplifications that power and profit and habit demand. This, in the end, is the only avant-garde that matters: the refusal to look away.

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[Edited by Pablo Markin. Produced with the aid of Claude, Anthropic, Qwen, Alibaba, GLM, Zhipu, tools (May 22-23, 2026). The newsletters were sourced from ARTNews, Artforum, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, CNBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Monocle, The New York Times, Newsweek, Nikkei Asia, Noema Magazine, El País, Rest of World, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Semafor, The South China Morning Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The featured infographic has been generated in Gemini, Google (May 23, 2026).]

I. Prelude in a Park (After Woolf)

Begin where Andrew Tuck begins: in the park. Regent’s Park, on a Sunday morning in May, the horse chestnuts not yet falling, the redwings not yet arrived from the Baltic, but the goslings already here, being steered by a hissing mother through the democratic grass. A man does not know a goose from a duck. This is not stupidity; this is a fact of metropolitan life, the way city-dwellers gauge the seasons by the weather app rather than by the first horse chestnut, by push-notification rather than by the behavior of birds. The first horse chestnuts—conkers to us Brits—falling from the trees signal that summer is closing down. Virginia Woolf understood this: in Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa walks through London on a June morning and feels, in the very air, the shock of life, the hinge of the ordinary. Parks are for confessionals, assignations, and the democratic practice of simply existing alongside people who are not like you. Women in abayas sit laughing and gossiping on park benches, young girls play football with no annoying boys around. The park as utopia, the park as the only genuinely public square remaining, delivered essentially by some trees and grass, costing nothing, belonging to everyone. The newsletter editor’s dog has died; for ten weeks he could not return. Grief and landscape are inseparable. We mourn in specific places.

And yet already the world is pressing in. The week will not stay in the park.

II. The Thucydides Trap (After Herodotus, After Graham Allison, After Everyone)

Somewhere above the Pacific, aboard Air Force One, the most powerful man in the world is flying toward a summit that the whole world is watching. He is accompanied by the men who make the chips and the planes and the electric vehicles and the social media platforms. They will sit at lacquered tables under chandeliers in the Great Hall of the People and discuss things that will not be resolved. The Chinese president—who speaks slowly, in measured cadences, in a voice described by a Newsweek editor as “kind of hot”—will invoke the Thucydides Trap, that old Greek warning about what happens when a rising power meets a ruling one. Athens and Sparta. Britain and Germany. The United States and China. Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm of major country relations? The question hangs in the air of the Great Hall like incense, like propaganda, like a genuine plea.

The American president does not appear to register the poetic symbolism when, walking in a garden, the Chinese president points to two ancient trees that have grown into each other over centuries, their trunks intertwined. “Other presidents, prime ministers—does he bring them here?” Trump asks. “Very few,” Xi replies. “I like it,” says Trump. And: “Nice. Nice place.”

This is not stupidity either. This is a different register of attention. Where Xi sees history, Trump sees real estate value. Where Xi sees the weight of millennia, Trump sees exclusivity. Both men, in their way, are reading the same text. They are simply reading different genres. Xi is reading tragedy. Trump is reading a brochure.

Thucydides himself, in the History of the Peloponnesian War, was the first great theorist of the gap between stated reasons for war and actual reasons for war. The growth of the power of Athens and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta made war inevitable. What Thucydides understood, and what the Athenians in their Melian Dialogue forgot, is that power does not wait to be invited. Strength is its own justification. The week’s newsletter corpus is saturated with this logic: Taiwan as the red line; rare earths as the choke point; semiconductors as the new oil; the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow body of water through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas normally transits, now effectively closed, its closure sending bond yields surging from Japan to Britain, oil climbing past $105 a barrel, the US 30-year Treasury yield hitting its highest level since 2007.

The island nation of Taiwan, meanwhile, is watching every syllable. Trump-Xi meeting keeps Taiwan on edge, eyeing subtle US shifts. Taiwan is a model US ally—spends big on its own defense, produces the world’s most advanced semiconductors, is a bastion of democracy—and yet its fate may be the bargaining chip that neither side will explicitly name. The semiconductor chip, the size of a fingernail, on which the entire AI revolution depends, was fabricated in TSMC’s clean rooms in Hsinchu, and it is the chip that gives the US its battlefield edge and Silicon Valley its capacity to create, and it is the chip that may be traded away in a garden conversation about intertwined trees.

III. The Empire of Signs (After Roland Barthes, After Monocle)

Against this planetary anxiety, the Monocle Weekend Edition offers its own geopolitics: a charcoal grill restaurant in London’s Soho, a farmers market in Melbourne, a hotel in Vienna, a Tunisian olive oil project. Tyler Brûlé’s civil aviation quiz. The best beard on a male crew member in European skies (it belongs to the men of TAP Portugal). The most efficient little hub in the Gulf (Bahrain). The carrier that has removed all magazines from its long-haul planes, leaving sad, empty racks (Swiss International Air Lines, and yes, this is presented as a genuine indictment).

One might be tempted to read Monocle’s world as escapism, as the fantasy of a cosmopolitan managerial class insulating itself from geopolitics through artisanal olive oil and collectable Etihad ceramic cups. But Roland Barthes, in Empire of Signs, understood that the texture of everyday life—the way a Japanese box of food is arranged, the way a city feels when you walk through it—is itself a form of political statement, a way of proposing that the world could be organized differently. The Impala restaurant in Soho, with its charcoal grill and iroko-framed frontage and bespoke sound system fashioned from modified cinema horns, is a cultural statement, as its reviewer writes. Chef Meedu Saad’s menu—North African grills, Caribbean jerk, Turkish ocakbaşı, Cypriot tavernas, fish baked in bran in Ismailia, ducks roasted in ghee—is a biography in the form of barbecue. It is also, reading against Barthes, a kind of empire in reverse: the post-colonial city absorbing, transforming, claiming the flavors that were once the flavors of the colonial periphery. The Mediterranean comes to London; London is remade.

The Vienna hotel, The Companion, is a tribute to friendship, set on Mariahilfer Strasse between the Westbahnhof and the Museumsquartier, a neighborhood that has an affinity for art and design. Its interior draws on Carlo Scarpa and Carlo Mollino’s eclectic modernism—two Italian architects famous for their refusal to separate beauty from structural necessity, for whom the joint, the hinge, the threshold were sites of philosophical intensity. Columns marked by time are flanked by black-lacquered metal beams. Multicoloured terrazzo floors reference the city’s material heritage. The bubinga-veneer shelves surround a fireplace. Vienna is, of course, a city that has made a religion of Gemütlichkeit, of the cultivated pleasure of the interior, while also being the city of Freud, of Klimt, of the logical positivists, of the annexation, of the Shoah, of the Cold War’s proximate geography. The Companion hotel does not mention any of this. It mentions the speakeasy in the basement, which is called Calypso.

The Tunisian olive oil, Tacapae, comes in 300 bottles adorned with designs by Hassan Hajjaj. It begins with El Seed, a Tunisian calligrapher who cultivates olive trees in Gabès—a town that has been contaminated by industrial pollution since the 1970s, one of the most polluted places in Africa—and invites artists to infuse their vision into his harvest. Olive oil is oil for the soul, like for the engine. The metaphor is interesting: the soul as engine, the soul as the thing that makes motion possible. This is close to what the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in Noema magazine this same week: there is a soul, but not a transcendent one. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world. Olive oil, cold-pressed from century-old trees in a polluted town in Tunisia, with its sweet, buttery taste, is perhaps the most material form of soul that one can hold in one’s hand.

IV. The Color of Washington’s White Horse (After Goya, After Arnold Friberg, After Christian Nationalism)

A 1976 painting by Arnold Friberg—George Washington on his knees in the snow at Valley Forge, a golden light falling on him and his white horse—has become an increasingly prevalent image used by the US government ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. The painting was posted online by the Department of Defense. It appeared in White House materials. Christian nationalists are now in power, says a historian from Messiah University in Pennsylvania. And that is why you are seeing it in different kinds of spaces.

Meanwhile, in Madrid, the frescoes of Francisco de Goya in the neoclassical church of San Antonio de la Florida have been restored to their vivid, original pigment tones. Goya’s frescoes depict the miracle of Saint Anthony of Padua. He paints in such a loose and brilliant way that in some sense he is searching for impression, says a restoration specialist. From below, everything looks perfect, but close up, it is completely free. Goya is buried here, beneath these frescoes—though his skull went missing before his remains were repatriated. The mausoleum is incomplete: it is missing the head of its most famous occupant. This is a very Spanish story, somehow. The body without the head. The work without the signature. The shrine whose saint is half-absent.

Between Friberg’s Washington and Goya’s frescoes, something is being worked out about the relationship between art, power, and faith. Friberg’s painting is legible, programmatic, ideological: it shows a founder in prayer, suffused with divine light, his horse white as purity. It is the visual grammar of Christian nationalism—God on the side of the nation, the nation as God’s instrument. Goya’s frescoes are more complicated. They are extraordinary in their informality: Goya painted common people, street characters, the urban poor of Madrid, as witnesses to the miraculous. His angels are famously flirtatious, his peasants specifically observed. The divine light in Goya illuminates not hierarchy but mess, particularity, the unruliness of the crowd. Goya is buried at the foot of his own complexity. The skull is missing. The light remains.

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V. The Auction Room as Barometer (After Benjamin, After Rothko)

Mark Rothko’s Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957) sells at Sotheby’s for $85.8 million. It was purchased by dealer Robert Mnuchin in 2003 for $6.7 million. It is not particularly exciting, says an advisor. It is good. The art market is, like the bond market, a barometer—not of aesthetic quality but of where capital feels safe, where it feels the need to denominate itself in something other than numbers on a screen. A Rothko is a field of color that asks you to stand in front of it and feel something. The Rothko Chapel in Houston was designed as a place of meditation, of interdenominational contemplation, of the kind of secular spiritual experience that the late twentieth century tried to invent as a replacement for religion. Rothko himself eventually refused to install his paintings in the Four Seasons restaurant, finding the commission too crass. He died by suicide in his studio.

The week’s newsletters are full of things that have a monetary value and a value in excess of money, constantly confused. A $107 million payout to the Yindjibarndi people of north-western Australia, whose songlines and heritage sites were destroyed by an iron ore mine that generated $57 billion in revenue. The Yindjibarndi call the payout unsatisfactory in the context of what has been lost. What has been lost cannot be purchased back. Significant damage has been done to Yindjibarndi songlines and other areas of cultural heritage, the court found. The price of destroying a songline has been set at a fraction of a penny on the dollar.

Meanwhile: the return of Ethiopian artifacts to the King’s Own Royal Regiment Museum Trust in the UK. The artifacts belonged to Emperor Tewodros II of Abyssinia, who died by suicide at the Battle of Magdala in 1868 after British forces breached his fortress. His hair. A cloth stained with his blood. The ceremony happened in Lancaster. These objects are returning, the press release presumably said, as if objects could return from the dead, as if the colonial theft could be reversed by a ceremony. Walter Benjamin: There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. The question is whether returning objects constitutes accountability or merely its performance.

Turner’s famous self-portrait—printed on the £20 note, hanging in Tate Britain—may not be a self-portrait at all. It may be a portrait of Turner by the portraitist John Opie. It was never, even on early lists, a ‘self-portrait.’ It was always a ‘portrait of Turner.’ Gradually, over the years, it became an assumption that it was by him. This is a parable about the construction of identity. The face we put on money is the face we have decided to claim as our own face. The portrait of the self is always partly someone else’s work. The banknote will have to be reprinted. The self will have to be reconstituted.

VI. The New Plutocracy and Its Discontents (After Marx, After DeLillo)

Wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The world’s wealthiest individuals are transforming their money into political influence to shape society and the democratic system to their liking. This sentence appears in El País’s English edition as a statement of fact, almost a weather report. The world has always had plutocrats; what has changed, in the years since the Global Financial Crisis, is the velocity of the extraction and the intimacy of the political influence. Jeff Bezos is not quite running Amazon anymore but still shapes it; Elon Musk is on Air Force One with the President; Jensen Huang’s chips are the subject of diplomatic negotiations between superpowers. These are not businessmen who happen to be politically connected. They are a new class of actor for whom the distinction between the economic and the political has effectively dissolved.

Don DeLillo, in Underworld, traced the connections between waste, capital, and the hidden systems that structure American life. The waste that goes unacknowledged. The bomb that was never dropped. DeLillo’s America is a country constituted by its underground, by the things it will not name. Reading the week’s newsletters with DeLillo in mind, one notices: the rare earths, which are mined in China and refine the magnets that guide missiles and the chips that power AI and the speakers in every smartphone. For two of the rarest and most important elements, dysprosium and terbium, countries outside of China will still meet less than a fifth of demand by 2035. These elements have names from Greek mythology—the hidden ones, the difficult ones. They are the underground of the digital economy. You cannot see them in your phone. You cannot feel them. Without them, the entire edifice collapses.

The fear is legible in the week’s reporting: that the US has built its military and technological supremacy on a foundation of materials it does not control. This is a new kind of vulnerability—not territorial, not ideological, but mineral. The Thucydides Trap has a new terrain. It is not the sea lanes of the Mediterranean or the straits of the Dardanelles. It is the mine in Jiangxi Province, the processing plant in Ganzhou, the supply chain that runs through a bottleneck no one thought to worry about until it was too late.

VII. The Jobs Apocalypse (After Shepard, After The Economist)

To some, the only good thing about work is the pay. Sam Shepard wrote this line in A Lie of the Mind, that scorchingly sad play about American family violence and the damage done when love becomes possession. The Economist uses it this week to frame a cover story on the AI jobs apocalypse—an apocalypse that has not yet arrived but whose imminence cannot be discounted. Eighty-four percent of Americans say their jobs are fulfilling most or some of the time. The question is not only economic but existential: when the machine can do what you do, what are you?

The Class of 2026 graduated into this uncertainty. The young woman who has applied to 500 jobs: What am I doing with my life? The employment-full-time rate for graduates in AI-exposed fields is down from 70% to 55% in four years. The computer science degree, once a golden ticket, is being repriced in real time. The irony is that those who built the machines that are now threatening the jobs were themselves trained in a system that promised employment in exchange for expertise.

Brian Dillon’s new book Ambivalence is described in the Monocle Weekend Edition as a study of how we build our tastes, an exploration of education and a celebration of lifelong learning. Dillon writes about his early encounters with Virginia Woolf. The book is about the way aesthetic formation is also self-formation, the way the texts we love become part of the architecture of who we are. This is a precisely classical humanist position, and it is not obviously compatible with an economy increasingly organized around tasks that can be decomposed into tokens and processed by a neural network. Susan Sontag told Wellesley graduates in 1983: Don’t move to a mental slum. Whatever feeds your head: keep feeding it. The mental slum is the condition of those who have surrendered their own curiosity to the algorithm, who let the feed curate the self.

VIII. The Island (After Fanon, After Bobi Wine, After Cuba, After Goya’s Missing Skull)

In Uganda, a musician-turned-politician named Bobi Wine—who survived shrapnel injuries in 2024, whose family was allegedly tortured by security agents—speaks from exile in Washington about the oil that is about to start flowing from his country’s earth. Today the leaders that we have are ruling us at gunpoint, and when our oil starts flowing, that’s going to be a greater danger. He is asking US senators to impose targeted sanctions against a president who has held power for forty years. The oil will be extracted. The petrodollars will flow to the regime. The people will remain under the boot.

This is Frantz Fanon’s analysis, made in The Wretched of the Earth in 1961 and still operative: the national bourgeoisie in post-colonial states tends to substitute itself for the former colonizers, using the apparatus of the state to enrich a narrow class while the majority remains in poverty. The extractive model continues. The mineral leaves the country raw. The value is created elsewhere. Tinubu in Nigeria says: No one can take any metal out of Nigeria without adding value. This is exactly right. The question is whether the political will exists to enforce it, whether the infrastructure exists to make it possible, whether the global system of finance will allow it—or whether, as Fanon feared, the international interests will find a way to route around the local claim.

Meanwhile, Cuba has run out of diesel. The lights are out for twenty-two hours a day. Havana is burning its rubbish in the streets, and the smoke is so thick it qualifies as a public health emergency. Toxic smog and foul odor have been choking the city. This is the result of a deliberate policy—an energy blockade—applied by the most powerful country on earth to an island of ten million people whose principal sin, in 2026, is still the revolution of 1959. The CIA director flew to Havana. Federal prosecutors are preparing an indictment of Raúl Castro, who is ninety-four years old. The Venezuela playbook may be coming for Cuba. The people in the streets, chanting turn on the lights, may not care about geopolitics. They want electricity. They want cooking gas. They want their children to receive surgery. Some things are not complicated.

IX. The Surface of the Present (After Rovelli, After Woolf, After Ann Quin)

Carlo Rovelli argues, in Noema magazine, that consciousness is not a hard problem if you stop treating the subject of knowledge as separate from the world it describes. We, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. The hard problem dissolves once you give up the Cartesian inheritance, the ghost in the machine, the soul that hovers above the body and watches it. There is a soul, but it is not transcendent. It is obtained by subtraction from a complete physical account, not by addition. The soul is what remains when you take away everything that is not the specific pattern of this consciousness, this body, this accumulated history of sensation and thought.

Reading these newsletters, these fragments of the week’s global mind, one has something like this experience: the world does not sit still for its portrait. The week is not a theme but a texture. The David Bowie immersive exhibition at Coal Drops Yard, where a writer stands at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1973 and Bowie discusses William Burroughs’s cut-up technique while lyrics scatter across the floor—it’s a clever reminder of the act of making things. The miso-butter asparagus and poached egg recipe, the gochugaru sprinkled on the yolk. The jumping-hours watch, where for a full sixty minutes the hour hand is still and time seems to stand. Time’s arrow points in both directions at once, just as it can in quantum mechanics. Where those arrows meet, lining up the Roman numeral marker, is a static point where the time is always now and where, for an hour at a stretch, time stands gloriously still.

Ann Quin, that underread British experimental novelist, wrote Passages in 1969: Not that I’ve dismissed the possibility my brother is dead. The narrator searches for her missing brother in unnamed territory. The novel’s gait is decidedly off-kilter. The world is porous. The self bleeds into the surroundings. This is the condition of reading the news in 2026: the borders between stories become permeable. The Strait of Hormuz is mentioned in newsletters about aviation, about South Africa’s rail system, about Norway’s salmon king, about Singapore Airlines, about the Thai prime minister convening a meeting of billionaires. The war in Iran is the water through which everything swims. It has driven oil above $100 a barrel, sent bond yields to levels not seen since 2007, created helium shortages that are disrupting semiconductor fabrication, disrupted fertilizer supply chains that will affect food prices for years, stranded ships in the Persian Gulf with their crews living in a kind of suspended time, the seafarers whose voices have been largely absent from the diplomatic conversation about reopening the strait—those invisible men and women on the water, waiting.

X. Coda: Eurovision (After Conchita Wurst, After the Greeks, After Everything)

On Saturday, May 17, the Eurovision Song Contest final takes place in Vienna. Five countries have boycotted because Israel is participating. An online advertising campaign funded by the Israeli government encouraged voters to vote as many times as possible. The rules have been changed. Finland is the favorite; the Finnish entry features a violinist and fire. Greece has a man dressed as a cat. Lithuania’s singer paints himself silver and sings a stirring ballad that turns into a 1980s club banger. Eurovision is seventy years old this year, and it is still the strangest, most improbably durable event in European cultural life.

Conchita Wurst, who won for Austria in 2014, in a gown, with a beard, singing an enormous power ballad: This night is dedicated to everyone who believes in a future of peace and freedom. You know who you are. We are unity, and we are unstoppable. The sentiment is operatic, excessive, kitsch in the very best sense—kitsch not as vulgarity but as the folk culture of the aspiration toward something better, the collective performance of a wish. Eurovision is what Europe looks like when it is not trying to look serious. It is also, apparently, what Europe looks like when it is trying to look serious, because the boycotts and the propaganda campaigns and the geopolitical disputes are as real as anything happening at the Great Hall of the People.

The Thucydides Trap is a theory about nations. Eurovision is a theory about songs. Both are theories about whether different powers can coexist in the same space without destroying each other. The answer, historically, is that they sometimes can, and when they can it is usually because something other than power—some piece of music, some shared meal, some accidental meeting in a park between people who would otherwise never encounter each other—creates a moment of interruption in the logic of domination. Not a solution. An interruption. A brief suspension of the hour hand. A space, as Andrew Tuck says of Regent’s Park, made for confessionals, assignations and problem pastry debates. A democratic space, delivered essentially by some trees and grass, or some sequins and a microphone. A place where, briefly, you are not inside history but standing just to one side of it, watching a goose and trying to remember what it is you actually love.

The week ended. The news did not.

[Edited by Pablo Markin. Produced with the aid of Claude, Anthropic, tools (May 19, 2026). The newsletters were sourced from ARTNews, Artforum, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, CNBC, The Economist, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Monocle, The New York Times, Newsweek, Nikkei Asia, Noema Magazine, El País, Rest of World, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Semafor, The South China Morning Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The featured infographic has been generated in Gemini, Google (May 21, 2026).]