Just sent out a free piece to expand on my article in @theatlantic.com yesterday. The signs of rot in US military and diplomatic capabilities are real and even more extensive than I could say in that article. Here are more-and a gift link to the original article. open.substack.com/pub/phillips...
‘For all his sensitivity to the potential for fragmentation, Zbigniew Brzezinski embraced an essentialist vision of Russian culture as a foundation for dictatorship.’
Jackson Lears on how Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser reshaped US foreign policy.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Information warfare in Iran - what PSYOP looks like in 2026 techletters.substack.com/p/techletter...
CrowdStrike says attackers are moving through networks in under 30 minutes cyberscoop.com/crowdstrike-...
>they're going to vibecode cobol
so, who's stocking up on canned food and shotguns?
‘We can see that courage’: Greece recovers long-lost photos of Nazis’ May Day executions
Happy Valentine's day, folks. Here's my favorite story about the nerd and the honeypot.
Our major new book is out today, exploring the changing circumstances of the poorer half of Britain, and setting out a policy agenda.
Read a summary of it all here resolutionfoundation.substack.com/p/unsung-bri...
Is this the shortest ever scientific paper? @stephenbheard.bsky.social manages to extend it into a 1400-word blog post with the story behind it.
When democratic states adopt the methods of tyrannies, they become weaker. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
in which, I try to remember why so many IT types hate Excel so much and what it might mean for the future of AI backofmind.substack.com/p/snobby-abo...
Read the piece here and subscribe to our twice-weekly newsletter to receive Stewart's column on Fridays
www.thenerve.news/p/stewart-le...
Our paper on the mysterious Devonian organism Prototaxites has now finally been published! See the paper here (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...) and our explainer thread below!
Prototaxites reconstruction by Matt Humpage
In Poland, generations of experience in dealing with Communist Russia and fascist Germany have taught people about dealing with bullies who want to steal your land. And this is about Trump.
Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She was 95.
Meme of the day
I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows. I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.
Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...
The Aughnacliffe Dolmen a megalithic tomb in County Longford. It consists of an enormous boulder used as a capstone perched on top of a tall portal stone at the front and a smaller arrangement at the rear
Aughnacliffe Dolmen • Longford
Aughnacliffe is one of the most remarkable and distinctive of all of Ireland’s portal tombs.
Despite looking somewhat precarious, it has stood here for more than 5,000 years.
#Ireland #Archaeology 🏺 #SpéirGhorm
A new documentary reveals how the comedian overcame her insecurities to reach the top in a male-dominated industry: ft.trib.al/cCvDbzB
In light of the Royal Society's continued inaction on Elon Musk, it seems appropriate to share this again.
I wrote it last March when I resigned my position as associate editor at a Royal Society Journal.
Things haven't got better since then.
After years in limbo, NASA’s groundbreaking Mars Sample Return (MSR) programme, which was supposed to ferry Martian material collected by the Perseverance rover to Earth, looks set to be cancelled.
go.nature.com/4aTLe9i
Status. My teams and I have been fighting Sentinel One Antivirus which marked a utility application on our machines and servers as malicious.
No only is it ignoring my whitelisting, it's rolling back HOW to address the threat. It's locking down machines.
How??? It's fucking AI. It's not listening
In what's now become an annual tradition, I've written another piece for The Gist about how and why I hate A.I.
On a bubble about to burst, a future rotted to its core, and the limits of the Mrs Doyle Theory of artificial intelligence.
www.thegist.ie/guest-gist-2...
Interesting post on why manufacturing mania is misguided, but an idea that never really dies if you don’t believe too much in markets. Some lessons for Blue Labour here open.substack.com/pub/rbaldwin...
"What is certain is that prior terrorism classifications have been rendered obsolete by a fast-moving, freewheeling, and spectacularly cruel online community that glorifies violence and targets a broad spectrum of victims, including young children," writes @jacobware.bsky.social.
My latest. Moscow’s effort to suborn Trump is the most successful covert influence campaign in decades.
tomorrowsaffairs.com/a-tempting-m...
DXC: 5 lessons we learned from our ransomware attack:
-Know your infrastructure
-Involve sr. leadership from the start
-Engage authorities & experts early
-Gain as much leverage as you can & don’t pay
-Be transparent
H/T @ecrime.ch cc @gate15.bsky.social dxc.com/ca/en/insigh... #cybersecurity
Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.
harpers.org/archive/1941...
