Finally, we will ask what went wrong.

The postmortem will be this. Many people panicked about the possibility of strong AI models killing us all. That fear was not based on peer-reviewed scientific research showing a high chance of doom, nor was doom indicated in any market prices of the time, including measures of risk. It was a story, just like this is a story, and it was spread on social media. The key point of the doom story was that, if America keeps the No. 1 spot in AI models, the models will be so strong they will do us all in, or lead to unimaginable catastrophes. We were too afraid to have America keep the lead, forgetting that if truly destructive AI is our fate, the doomer scenario can come from Chinese AI as well.

Today, we cannot say for sure that the AI doom scenario is false. But is it a story we wish to live by? Is belief in it a good way to protect and extend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Will it help us much, or for long, if it is Chinese AI that turns on us and does us in?

In my view, successful societies accept challenges and meet them. Solving problems, bit by bit, is the best way to ensure that we have the capabilities to meet big and truly existential risks, should those risks come along. Debating the chances of our doom, ex ante, on a highly speculative basis, is unlikely to provide the same kind of expertise and talent cultivation. It is instead more likely to demoralize and immobilize us.

So which America are we going to choose?

Read it all.

Tyler Cowen: A Doomsday Scenario for American AI https://t.co/3qm0eVwQ3I

— Mark Semonian (@msemonian) September 21, 2026

Iran, China and groups in Israel used artificial intelligence in novel ways in recent months to create first-of-their-kind influence campaigns on social media, ratcheting up concerns among U.S. officials and security researchers about the fast-evolving technology.

The countries and groups combined A.I. tactics to ramp up the speed and scale of online campaigns beyond what people could easily achieve and with minimal human interaction, U.S. officials and security researchers with knowledge of the efforts said.

First, the countries and groups turned to Chinese “open-source” A.I. models, which are increasingly powerful systems that are freely available to download and modify. Then they used those A.I. models to create “agents,” which are bots that can operate software and complete tasks on their own.

Once hundreds of those A.I. agents were let loose, they autonomously opened networks of fake accounts on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, the officials and security researchers said. The agents then rapidly seeded the fake accounts with false posts about politics and current events to sway opinions and inflame issues.

Read it all.

there’s more to the effect of our modern screen life on our reading habits than merely the choice between glass and paper. The personal computers of the 1980s gave us word processing, making the typewriter obsolete; the early internet of the 1990s gave us email (I remember thinking that this was reviving the lost art of letter writing that had been killed by the telephone); and by the turn of the century the bounty promised by the web looked truly impressive: digitized books and primary sources for research, online journals, a proliferation of news and commentary. (Yes, also the logorrhea of early blog culture, now reappearing on Substack.) Then came the smartphone, the jazziest (though not the first) being the iPhone, debuting in 2007. Now in the hands of billons worldwide, these devices have fundamentally changed our daily lives, for good and for ill. They are designed to seize and keep our attention, to amuse us endlessly with ever-changing stimuli, and to lure us into an in-the-cloud world that contains much of the human race’s knowledge yet also makes us dumber. As Wolf writes: 

No self-respecting internal review board at any university would allow a researcher to do what our culture has already done with no adjudication or previous evidence: introduce a complete, quasi-addictive set of attention-compelling devices without knowing the possible side effects and ramifications for the subjects (our kids). 

What we are all experiencing—and Wolf confesses her personal struggle to return to deep reading of books—are “decreasing attention spans, pushed beyond their cognitive limits by a flotsam of distractions and information that will never become knowledge.” 

Convinced that consistent, attentive reading is essential for the development of both our reason and our compassion, Wolf is worried about the effects of our contemporary screens on our capacity for self-government. This is even more explicitly the concern of British writer James Marriott, a journalist at The Times. Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society has been out for a few weeks in the UK, and is soon to be published here in the U.S. (This one, dear reader, I acquired on paper from the publisher.) 

Marriott is a worried man, and he works hard not to be too alarmist—to use his indoor voice, as it were. But The New Dark Ages, which I hope will be widely read, is a brief, brisk, and persuasive book about the damage our screen life is doing to our social and political life. He puts the matter starkly in his introduction: “As reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.” We fill our eyes (and now increasingly our ears, too) not with the pages of books or even with the extended narratives and arguments to be found in newspapers and magazines, but instead with TikTok and YouTube videos, podcasts, X memes, Instagram posts, and Reddit rants.  

Read it all.

“As reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.”https://t.co/1igjBHxPox

— Jordan J. Ballor (@JordanBallor) September 21, 2026

Lambeth Palace said on Thursday that it had withdrawn an interfaith award given to a Muslim cleric by the Archbishop of Canterbury last week (News,18 September).

Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi was given the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation last Friday — 11 September — for his “outstanding work as an ambassador of interfaith harmony in Pakistan”. He was described in the citation as a “prominent Muslim scholar and religious leader in Pakistan, known for his unwavering commitment to promoting religious tolerance and interfaith harmony”.

The Church Times understands that Mr Ashrafi’s nomination was made before Archbishop Mullally’s time in office.

Photos of Mr Ashrafi receiving the award from the Archbishop next to his wife wearing the niqab attracted attention after being published on social media on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Nick Timothy, the Conservative MP for West Suffolk, began publishing links to previous comments made by Mr Ashrafi.

Read it all.

Lambeth Palace said on Thursday that it had withdrawn an interfaith award given to a Muslim cleric by the Archbishop of Canterbury last weekhttps://t.co/GYqfoUtH6o

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 18, 2026

Mr. Kramer doesn’t shy away from pointing the finger at Germany’s newer demographic sources of antisemitism, even as he cites the latest official figures, which show right-wing extremism as the single largest identifiable source of antisemitic crime. In 2024, he says, 48.4% of antisemitic offenses were classified as right-wing, compared with 31.1% as fueled by “foreign ideology” and 11% by “religious ideology.” He stresses that “antisemitism linked to Islamist and anti-Israel milieus has risen sharply since Oct. 7 and is now a major part of the threat picture.”

And so, 25 years after it opened, Berlin’s Jewish Museum must face up to an existential challenge. It’s no longer enough to “explain Jewish culture to Germans from a Jewish perspective,” as Ms. Berg describes the institution’s founding mission. It must adapt to—and push back against—a spate of ugliness and violence in Germany that flows from sources old and new, from a resurgent right that many believe is nostalgic for a Nazi past and from an arriviste cohort of Islamist Jew-haters who teem in Germany’s cities.

“We cannot ever be complacent,” Ms. Berg says, as she navigates the barriers outside her buildings, each bollard proof of how hard it is for a German Jew to live in peace.

Read it all.

Fun Fact: Daniel Libeskind, who designed the Jewish Museum Berlin, and the National Holocaust Momument in Ottawa, is the uncle of Canada's NDP leader, @avilewis. https://t.co/edrdD9AwDz

— Phil Pothen 🇨🇦 he/him (@pothen) September 9, 2026

One of the most persistent news stories about religion in recent years has been the decline of Christianity and the rise of the “nones,” or people who have no religion in particular. The nones narrative suggests that American Christianity is in free fall. One headline in recent weeks announced that even young Latinos, part of what is often regarded as one of the most religious ethnic groups, are “abandoning churches to be ‘nones.’”

Look closer, however, and you can find data suggesting that Christianity is flourishing. Some signs indicate that young American men are attending church more than they did in previous generations. High-profile intellectuals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was one of the leading figures of the New Atheist movement, have publicly announced their conversion to Christianity. And even the Pew Research Center, a chief promoter of the nones story, has admitted that the nones have plateaued at less than 30 percent of respondents.

What is really happening? Rather than experiencing simple growth or decline, American religion is in a state of churn. Some sectors are falling fast, while others show phenomenal growth.

Throughout history, Americans have routinely misinterpreted religious change as decline. Headlines about the demise of faith may be attention-grabbing, but they conceal a more complicated and interesting reality….

Read it all.

“Drawing on a dazzling range of disciplines and data, Byron Johnson and Thomas Kidd's The Death of Religion demonstrates that much of what we’ve heard about religion's demise is unfounded. There are causes for worry, but there are also strong reasons to think that religion… pic.twitter.com/IIAcJypgp4

— Thomas S. Kidd (@ThomasSKidd) September 14, 2026

Did it not trouble her conscience that, as the beneficiary of several generations’ work invested in female emancipation, which have culminated with her being the very first woman to hold the Archbishopric of Canterbury, she gave a tacit endorsement to those who would be contemptuous of women holding any such exalted office in church or state?

Did she not think, being the beneficiary of these hard-won liberties, that she should be at pains to advocate for them fearlessly, rather than turning a blind eye when others are denied them?

Perhaps she forgot the Christian insistence on the inalienable dignity of all humans, made as they are in the image of God, which runs so strongly through scripture that – for the modern Church of England – it outdoes even St Paul’s demand that women should remain covered and silent in church. Or the dignity of women in the Christian story – the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, the women who first discovered the Resurrection. How could she appear at such ease when other women around her are denied the respect due to their dignity?

This whole affair leaves serious questions for Lambeth Palace to answer. If none of these questions came to the Archbishop’s mind, then she must answer for her naïveté, and her advisers must explain why she was put in this position.

Read it all.

New @Telegraph I've written on the fiasco of Sarah Mullally and the award to bin Laden supporter Tahir Ashrafi. Gift access in next post… pic.twitter.com/UWjNYmEBNv

— BijanOmrani (@BijanOmrani) September 17, 2026

In December, Edward Hughes and Louis Kirsch, two of the world’s leading artificial intelligence researchers, left Google. Their goal: to build an A.I. system smart enough to build a better A.I. system.

At their new London start-up, Inherent, they now spend their days working alongside a prototype called Faraday. Named for the 19th-century English physicist Michael Faraday, it gathers mountains of data capturing the daily activities of Dr. Hughes, Dr. Kirsch and Inherent’s other researchers: emails, instant messages, meeting transcripts and their ongoing chats with Faraday itself. The company then uses this data to build a better version of Faraday.

“Faraday has access to everything that goes on at the company,” Dr. Hughes said. “We want to give it data describing the process we go through, to discover something.”

Though Inherent pledges to keep humans involved in this elaborate process, many other companies are building similar technology, and some leading researchers believe A.I. systems will eventually be powerful enough to improve themselves with little or no help from human developers — a mind-bending goal that computer scientists call recursive self-improvement, or R.S.I.

Two Silicon Valley start-ups — each valued at $4 billion — are proudly pursuing this dream, and leading labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are chasing it too. They hope to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence that discovers drugs, creates new materials, speeds other forms of scientific discovery and, one day, surpasses human intelligence in practically every way.

Read it all.

The Liftoff Scenario That Terrifies A.I. Doomsayers: “Recursive self-improvement” is the idea that artificial intelligence could learn to build & train itself, creating exponential new progress — & risk (NYT) https://t.co/y5RXO0VbEu

— Candice Rose (@CandiceRose) September 16, 2026

Two things should make you consider what artificial intelligence could mean for humanity. One is that those working with the technology are warning about it leading to a catastrophe—human extinction, even. The other is how technological innovation is aggravating the destruction of Ukraine. These things offer conflicting lessons for whether AI’s rapid progress can or should be slowed down.

For years, leading AI bosses have signalled that their technology could become lethal. Bots may become brainy enough to outwit their creators before they are “aligned” with humanity’s goals and ethics. Bad people could use AI to wreak havoc. These warnings have become more credible as AI agents have escaped their sandboxes during testing, co-ordinated with one another and hacked organisations, including an AI lab itself. Anthropic, one model-maker, has caught people using its models for malign ends, from Mali’s intelligence services getting a mass-surveillance system built, to Houthi rebels in Yemen thought to be writing software for ballistic missiles.

Following the recent resignation of a researcher at Anthropic, public fear of AI doom has spread. In a post viewed more than 170m times, he said that it and OpenAI were “gambling with our lives”. AI is rapidly growing more potent, for good and ill. In May prediction markets priced a less-than-one-third chance of AI solving any millennium prize maths problem before 2030; on September 8th OpenAI said it had solved one of them, causing angst among mathematicians. On September 12th Sam Altman and Elon Musk, two AI titans, endorsed a call by Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic, to “pace the frontier”, ie, to slow AI’s progress. Those in favour of a slowdown include Bernie Sanders, a left-wing senator, and Steve Bannon, a right-wing populist.

Read it all.

Can the AI arms race be stopped?https://t.co/iuG0rZA8CW

— Héctor Dedrick Guerrero (@hectordguerrero) September 17, 2026

The sight of London’s Muslim mayor celebrating the transformation of a crown jewel of the Anglican estate into a semi-secular setting, and doing so while reducing a venerated place of English Christian worship to the status of a landmark, felt like a provocation to some. Taking up Khan’s challenge, the journalist Tom Harwood proposed: “Heaven nightclub. Baitul Futuh Mosque,” referencing a prominent gay nightspot and a south London masjid.

The mayor’s disregard for England’s Christian heritage notwithstanding, the Fabric collaboration comes at a time of profound tribulation for Anglicanism. The denomination has been the established church in England continuously since the seventeenth century, but its origins stretch back to the Reformation. Its (temporal) head is King Charles III, and its bishops sit in the House of Lords, but its nominal flock, the English, are a thoroughly irreligious lot. Just 5 percent of British adults attend church weekly, a figure that rises to a mere 13 percent for professed Christians. The collapse in formal worship in the United States in recent years might leave American clergy despairing, but their English brethren would consider such numbers a gift from the Almighty. The sunset of English religiosity is by no means only an Anglican phenomenon, as a glimpse at a typical Sunday Mass in England’s Catholic churches will attest. Only Islam is experiencing growth in Blighty.

The emptying of the pews has coincided with a hollowing out of the church in other senses. Between 2010 and 2019, 423 Anglican churches closed their doors permanently. The Church of England’s website advertises shuttered churches for lease or sale. There are currently forty-one listed. Amid widespread reports of overstretched and underpaid vicars, forced by a decline in vocations to minister to an ever-growing number of parishes, our friend Rev. Walker recently warned the church was “on a path to annihilation,” noting a 20 percent drop in paid clergy since the turn of the century. The Labour government hardly eased the financial pressure when it announced that grants from a £23 million per annum church restoration fund would now be liable for 20 percent value-added tax.

The Church of England benefits from an £11.6 billion endowment fund, but parishes see precious little of it. Commercial ventures like concert-hosting might seem benign enough as money-spinning schemes go, but whether it’s raves in the naves or Fiona Apple by the lady chapel, there is a risk that by welcoming in the secular, England’s cathedrals and churches are letting some of the sacred escape. A Christian house of worship offers the pilgrim something no secular space can: the chance to encounter the Divine within a monument to his majesty. Step over the threshold to a church, and you are instantly aware of having left behind the worldly and ventured into the spiritual. Nothing that diminishes this experience is worth any financial reward.

Read it all.

What happens when the Church tries to fill its empty pews by making room for the secular world?

Stephen Daisley examines the Church of England’s struggle to preserve the sacred and what is lost when churches begin to look more like cultural venues than houses of worship.

Read… pic.twitter.com/zPh1rppxtv

— First Things (@firstthingsmag) September 15, 2026

Julian Atkins, the Church of England’s Net Zero Carbon Programme Director, said: “As Christians, we believe we have a responsibility to care for God’s creation and to bear witness to the love we have for our neighbours, particularly those who are most vulnerable to the devastating effects of climate change. That is not about politics, but about living out our faith in a practical and demonstrable way. 

 “Across the country, parishes are taking action in ways that make sense for their own buildings and communities – raising money locally, making buildings more energy efficient and finding other practical solutions to reduce carbon emissions. 

“We are deeply grateful to all our many committed volunteers who make this possible. Our role through the national Net Zero Carbon Programme is to create the conditions and provide the funding and expertise to help them do that. 

“For many churches, this is about much more than reducing carbon.

“It is about creating warmer, more welcoming buildings that can serve their communities well, while using resources wisely and, where possible, reducing energy costs so that more can be invested in mission and ministry. 

“That is why this work matters. 

Read it all.

As energy prices surge, I spoke to churches that have got rid of oil fired boilers in favour of 'green' heating alternatives and energy efficiency measures, backed by the @churchofengland Net Zero carbon programme. https://t.co/aYXtN5nTsp via @churchofengland

— Martha Linden (@MarthaJLinden) September 16, 2026

Roman Catholic or Jewish prime ministers from being involved in the process of making Church of England appointments.

It was among the first pieces of legislation to be introduced to Parliament under Prime Minister Andy Burnham, himself a Catholic, who has called the current laws “unacceptable”.

When appointing bishops and archbishops, the Church presents a candidate to the prime minister who then advises the monarch on who to install in the role.

Although the involvement of the prime minister in this process has become more of a formality in recent years, legislation still exists that specifically bars Roman Catholics and Jews from exercising this responsibility.

That is why earlier this month Burnham, the first Catholic prime minister, transferred the responsibility of advising the King on Church appointments to the Lord Chancellor.

Read it all.

Government to end ban on Catholic and Jewish PMs' involvement in Church appointments https://t.co/2p9sAwzXeZ

— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) September 16, 2026

Teddy Wojtowicz hasn’t gambled in about three years, after his betting habit cost him his career and enough money to have bought a house, and left him with a criminal record.

He says his addiction escalated from spending $20-$40 on a night out, to wasting his paycheque every two weeks, to getting payday loans — and writing $22,000 in cheques to himself from his workplace.

“When you’re gambling and you see that you keep losing and you know that you’re losing, there’s some part of you saying, ‘Well, the next time I’m gonna win,'” Wojtowicz said.

The former accountant, who also had an alcohol addiction, admitted himself to a hospital in Dauphin, Man., in April 2023, after he began to think about suicide, and went through weeks of treatment to deal with his gambling. It was the second time he had sought help in the past decade.

Wojtowich is one of a rising number of men and boys who are turning to hospital emergency departments after reaching rock bottom with gambling and related addictions and disorders, according to a new study published Wednesday in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Researchers in Ontario found a dramatic increase in emergency department visits in just the past few years, following the rapid growth of online gambling in that province and the legalization of betting on single sports events.

Read it all.

‘Tip of the iceberg:’ More Ontarians with gambling disorders are showing up in emergency departments, study finds https://t.co/3yqZYzzvip

— CTV News Northern Ontario (@CTVNewsNorthern) September 16, 2026

“It’s like the countries don’t trust the U.S.,” said Daniel Tannebaum, a partner in Oliver Wyman’s finance and risk practice who served at the Treasury Department as the Office of Foreign Assets Control compliance coordinator for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “I do think that there is a fear factor.”

That fear factor is also creating blowback for American companies that are trying to do business abroad.

Mr. Tannebaum, who is a partner in Oliver Wyman’s risk and public policy practice, said that the aggressive use of tariffs and export controls by the United States has made European countries and companies wary of adopting American technology for sensitive industries such as artificial intelligence. They worry that if they are dependent on the United States for such infrastructure it could be used against them if Washington decides to ban or disable the technology, as it has done during disputes with China and Russia.

All of this has contributed to an erosion of America’s status as a safe haven.

Read it all.

The World Economy Is Becoming Wary of the U.S. https://t.co/BkvAF43pOj via @NYTimes

— John Bresnahan (@bresreports) September 16, 2026

Parish-church and cathedral choirs are among the beneficiaries of the £438,955 awarded by the Cathedral Music Trust this year.

Among the 27 grants is a Church Choir Award of £8,655 to establish a junior training choir at Lancaster Priory as an “inclusive, high-quality pathway to choristership”; £4,000 to provide singing tuition to choristers at Kendal Parish Church; £3,800 to launch a new junior choir at Holy Trinity, Stratford upon Avon; and £3,700 to enable Halifax Minster to launch a schools singing programme.

Twelve Anglican cathedrals in England and Wales have received awards, several of which will support the salaries of musicians; these include assistant directors of music at Truro, Chelmsford, and Wakefield, and lay clerks at Bradford, Newcastle, and Coventry. Llandaff Cathedral was awarded £22,350 to provide vocal coaching and theory tuition for cathedral choristers, and targeted vocal development for back row singers.

Read it all.

Parish-church choirs are among the beneficiaries of the £438,955 awarded by the Cathedral Music Trust this year. #ChurchNews #ChurchTimes @_cathedralmusic https://t.co/NULMuRHxLp

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) September 15, 2026

In its latest (fourth) report on AI “misuse”—more essential reading—Anthropic revealed that its most popular models (Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus) are being, or have recently been, misused by a variety of Generative Threat Groups (GTGs) in “seven harm areas: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development, and distillation.” In each case, AI was making bad human behavior much more effective, until Anthropic spotted what was going on.

The interesting thing is who out there is up to no good. GTG-20006 (Anthropic gives each case a number) was the inevitable Russians, “attacking military intelligence targets in Ukrainian and European governments as well as diplomatic and defense organizations and individuals connected to U.S. foreign policy.” Putin and his little green men have been doing this kind of thing for years, of course. But AI makes the mobile exploitation kit, the credential-stealing tool, and the phishing platform all work better and faster as well as helping evade detection.

I have long shared the view articulated by Gregory Conti, a professor of politics at Princeton, that “even if AI does not end life on Earth, it will destroy our way of life”.…..To understand why Conti is right, you need to grasp the four forces inexorably driving p(Doom) upward above 10 percent: Recursive self-improvement, The unscrupulousness of Sam Altman, The complete confusion in Washington, The utter cynicism in Beijing.

Read it all.

Niall Ferguson: AIpocalypse Now
It’s not just the next 9/11, enabled by AI, that is coming. It’s the next global financial crisis. It’s the next pandemic. It might even be the next world war. What, if anything, can we do about it? https://t.co/DRLqpVxqKF

— Juan Carlos Zapata S. (@jczapata_s) September 14, 2026

For most of modern history, the household was a bundle. Under one roof, families pooled rent and meals, raised children, cared for parents, kept each other company and insured one another against bad luck. Nobody itemized it, and national accounts barely noticed.

Across East Asia, that arrangement is coming apart, and one line item after another has turned into something you pay for. The loneliness economy is the usual name for the result; the unbundling of the family household is the more accurate one.

In South Korea, single-person households are now 36% of the total, the largest category. Japan was at 38% in 2020 and is expected to reach 44% by 2050; Tokyo is already past half.

China’s 2020 census found 125 million people living alone, equal to one in four households. Fertility has fallen in step. South Korea’s rate is 0.80, Hong Kong’s is 0.84 and Taiwan’s births fell 20% in 2025 alone.

The money has followed. Discovery Reports, a Chinese research firm, puts spending by singles in China at more than US$1 trillion in 2025, up about 50% in two years. The “silver economy” serving the elderly is expected to reach 30 trillion yuan, about $4 trillion, by 2035. Pop Mart, the toymaker behind Labubu, reported $5.4 billion in revenue last year, up 185%.

Read it all.

#Asia’s $1 trillion singles economy is not simply a demographic crisis or a retail boom. Much of it reflects family functions becoming paid services, while care, emergency support and social insurance remain stubbornly hard to unbundle. #LonelinessEconomyhttps://t.co/ufYz5N1MdD

— Asia Times (@asiatimesonline) September 14, 2026

Peter Green’s translation of the Odyssey keeps Homer’s repeated epithets and formulaic phrases fully intact. Achilles remains “swift-footed” whether he is fighting or sitting in his tent. Green’s English is plain and meant to be read aloud; he preserves the repeated epithets and formulaic phrases precisely because the repetition itself is part of the point. Read Green and you will hear “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn” exactly as Homer repeated them. 

Robert Fagles took the opposite approach. Uncomfortable with straight repetition, he worked to make the epithets contribute to the drama of each moment. Where Homer has Hector carry his “shining helmet” unchanged from line to line, Fagles makes the helmet flash repeatedly, until the device starts to feel more like a cinematic lighting effect than a Homeric formula.  

More recently, Emily Wilson made the choice consciously rather than instinctively. She explained to the Chicago Review of Books that repetition means something different depending on who is listening: in Homer’s oral culture, repetition signaled that something is important and worth listening to and remembering. Back in 2017 she shared in that same interview her belief that in a literate culture like ours, the same repetition reads instead as unimportant, something to skip. She therefore chose to preserve the feeling of Homer’s repetition through variation, rather than reproduce the exact words. Dawn still appears as often as she does in the Greek, and each appearance keeps the recurring imagery of roses, flowers, pinkness, fingers, and newness, but the phrasing changes from occurrence to occurrence. 

Wilson has since reconsidered that decision. After finishing her Iliad and living longer with the Homeric material, she returned to the Odyssey and began an entirely new translation. In a March 2026 talk at the University of Iowa titled “Realms of Gold: Re-translating Homer in the Twenty-First Century,” and in subsequent interviews, she has said that her experience has changed her understanding of repetition: she now sees more clearly how repeated phrases create patterns across the poem and help readers recognize connections between scenes. She is allowing herself more lines and syllables than in the first version precisely so that more of those repetitive elements can remain. The fact that she is willing to redo one of the most successful and widely read translations of the last decade because of this shift is rare and revealing. 

Read it all.

Homer Against the Attention Economy – Public Discourse
https://t.co/X74jw8MZ7O

— rogueclassicist ~ david meadows (@rogueclassicist) September 11, 2026

The Prime Minister has pledged to change what he calls the “unacceptable” law that prohibits Roman Catholic and Jewish Prime Ministers from advising the Crown on ecclesiastical appointments.

In a statement to the House of Commons on Thursday of last week, Andy Burnham, who is the first Prime Minister to be a Roman Catholic on taking office (News, 4 September), said that the restrictions were an “antiquated and archaic anomaly”.

The “restrictions set out in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 and the Jews Relief Act 1858 prevent persons professing the Roman Catholic and Jewish faiths only from advising the Sovereign on appointments to the Church of England and Church of Scotland”, he said.

As such, Mr Burnham had transferred his constitutional responsibility for advising the Sovereign on church appointments to the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Alex Norris.

Read it all.

EXC: Legislation to remove the constitutional bar on Catholics advising the King on Church of England appointments being introduced in the Commons tomorrow

It’s our first Catholic prime minister’s first billhttps://t.co/ojXo0L6Yuv

— Patrick Maguire (@patrickkmaguire) September 14, 2026

MPs have voted against proposals to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, bringing the latest effort to change the law to an end.

Following a debate in which both sides made emotional speeches, the House of Commons voted 286 to 270 – a majority of 16 – against the proposed legislation.

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill would have allowed adults with fewer than six months to live to apply to be given help to end their own life, subject to certain safeguards.

A similar bill in the last parliamentary session was supported by MPs before stalling in the House of Lords. The decision from MPs on Friday rules out the prospect of changes to the law on assisted dying in the short term.

Read it all.

The assisted suicide Bill is dead. After two years of debate, MPs have rejected it by 286 votes to 270.

A victory for vulnerable people — and a reminder that bad legislation becomes harder to defend the more closely it is scrutinised, writes @AdamPollockhttps://t.co/d7JZTQ5iiU

— The Critic (@TheCriticMag) September 12, 2026

Among the growing fears about artificial intelligence, one threat has proved particularly alarming: the possibility that A.I. could be used to create a new wave of biological weapons.

In April, biosecurity experts warned that it was disturbingly easy to get advice from chatbots about making pathogens more dangerous. In June, scientists and A.I. executives signed an open letter calling for new controls on the fabrication of DNA because A.I. can now speed up the design of toxins and viruses.

In August, scientists reported that they had used A.I. to build viruses not seen in nature. And on Thursday, Anthropic announced that it had blocked several attempts to use its models by people who might have been trying to weaponize pathogens.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, followed up with a call on Saturday to slow down the development of A.I., with a set of proposals to keep it safe.

Read it all.

A.I. Queries From Abroad Raise Fears of a Biological Weapons Race
Today’s chatbots aren’t likely to help lone actors invent a deadly pathogen, experts say. But newer models, trained in biology, may need stronger safeguardshttps://t.co/x3XhW9s4ph

— Emily Turrettini (@textually) September 14, 2026

The Man Behind the Red Bandana from Drew Gallagher on Vimeo.

From there:

I got up and turned on the TV, and there was just this big black hole in the World Trade Center. And there was just smoke billowing out of it. I called my sister Cathy I said, “You might wanna wake up, turn in your TV and take a look at what they’re showing.” The commentator’s saying that it’s an American Airlines plane. And I casually asked Cathy, I said, “Do you know where Betty is?” And she says, “Betty’s supposed to be flying out of Boston.” And I said, “Do you think Betty is on that plane?” We just didn’t know. So I left a phone call on her cellphone, just asking her when she’s landed or anywhere you’re on the ground, to just give us a call and tell us you’re okay. And there was no call from Betty. I called American Airlines, and it was only then that it was confirmed that Betty was on the flight.

I just want to add, through your passing, Betty, our family’s gotten very very close. Dad, who’s quite stoic, doesn’t really say a whole lot, man of the family, one day told us that he cries himself to sleep. Even to this day, he just keeps staying up watching TV, hoping somehow that you’ll reappear. And we’re all still waiting for that phone call from you to tell us that you’re okay. We just miss you a whole lot.

You may find the transcript of Betty Ong’s conversation reporting the hijacking from the American airlines plane here.

Every year on 9/11 I take the kids to ground zero to write down names engraved in the memorial. Then we go home and look them up to talk about their stories. Today, my youngest was writing a name when a woman walked up and asked her what she was doing. When she explained, the… pic.twitter.com/Xd8ZknmOX1

— Samantha Steele Ponder (@samponder) September 12, 2026

This site is intended as a place to remember and celebrate the lives of those lost on September 11, 2001. It includes Guest Books and profiles for each of those lost.

It is well worth your time to explore it thoroughly today.

September 11, 2001, as reported the next day by the New York Times: pic.twitter.com/DH6QUFnDgo

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) September 11, 2026

“The cloudless sky filled with coiling black smoke and a blizzard of paper—memos, photographs, stock transactions, insurance policies—which fluttered for miles on a gentle southeasterly breeze, across the East River into Brooklyn. Debris spewed onto the streets of lower Manhattan, which were already covered with bodies. Some of them had been exploded out of the building when the planes hit. A man walked out of the towers carrying someone else’s leg. Jumpers landed on several firemen, killing them instantly.

“The air pulsed with sirens as firehouses and police stations all over the city emptied, sending the rescuers, many of them to their deaths. [FBI agent] Steve Bongardt was running toward the towers, against a stream of people racing in the opposite direction. He heard the boom of the second collision. “There’s a second plane,” someone cried.”

–Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Random House [Vintage Books], 2006), pp.404-405

11 Sept 2001: Al-Qaeda conducts #terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York City and the #Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia by flying planes into the buildings. A fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania. The White House or #Capitol was the likely target of that… pic.twitter.com/GxvhseKBbL

— Today In History (@URDailyHistory) September 11, 2026

Almighty God and Father who wills that all people may flourish and have abundance of life, be with us especially on this day when we remember such destruction, darkness, devastation, death and terror; help us to honor the memory of those whose lives were utterly cut short, and to believe that you can make all things new, even the most horrible things. Redeem and heal, O Holy Spirit, grant us perspective, humility, light, trust and grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Please note the following changes to our hours of operation as we commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Thursday, September 10: The #911Museum will close at 3 p.m.

Friday, September 11: The #911Museum will remain closed to the public all day so that 9/11… pic.twitter.com/VigSzHl6WS

— 9/11 Memorial & Museum (@Sept11Memorial) September 10, 2026

OpenAI has appointed to its foundation’s board a senior US government official who warned that advanced versions of AI could kill “most people” without more robust safeguards.

Paul Christiano, who tests model safety at the commerce department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, said on X on Wednesday that the risk of losing control over AI systems “is now acute” and requires more work to align with human interests.

“If we build superintelligence without more robust alignment, I expect we will permanently lose control of it,” he said when announcing his new role at OpenAI. “If that happens then most people could die. I believe we would need domestic and international co-ordination to ensure global consistency and reduce risk to an acceptable level.”

Christiano previously led AI safety at Caisi. He designed and ran government tests on frontier AI models from leading companies and assessed them for national security risks.

Read it all.

Top US official named to OpenAI non-profit board warns advanced AI could be ‘deadly’ https://t.co/5bZXexRldI

— FT World News (@ftworldnews) September 9, 2026

A friend you haven’t heard from in a while suddenly calls. You don’t pick up, but in a matter of seconds, the damage is already done.

The call wasn’t actually from an old companion looking to reconnect, but from a hacker who had hijacked that number. Worse, the assailant now secretly has control over your account, including access to your private messages, and is already using your number to reach your saved contacts and compromise them, too.

Like a raging, highly contagious virus, the attack keeps spreading. Within hours, millions of people have suffered the same fate.

A year ago, such a cyberattack might have sounded far-fetched to even the most paranoid digital experts, or at least like something only the world’s most elite spy agencies could have pulled off.

Read it all.

A Hacking Tool Built With A.I. Can Breach Phones Without a Click

An attack discovered by A.I. researchers could have compromised hundreds of millions of devices within hours, experts said.https://t.co/xDCxrJmJdm via @NYTimes

— Walter Appling (@WalterAppling) September 9, 2026

Nvidia was  named in 1993 after the Latin word for envy. Sure enough, the American colossus inspires plenty of it. Insatiable global demand for its graphics-processing units (GPUs), the chips that power artificial intelligence, has made Nvidia the world’s most valuable company, worth $5.4trn. Next year it may also become the most profitable, generating $370bn in net income. By 2029 its sales could hit $1trn.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s boss, is truly the magician at the heart of the AI boom. His firm’s share price is 14 times what it was on ChatGPT’s release in late 2022. The ten biggest public companies championing AI make up 40% of the value of the S&P 500 index. Nvidia alone accounts for 8% and unlike, say, Apple or Tesla, which make smartphones and cars, it is almost solely a bet on AI. The company has produced about 15 cents of every dollar the American stock market has returned since 2023—returns that have kept consumers spending despite rising interest rates, tariffs and a war with Iran.

Yet many also see Mr Huang as a magician in a more worrying sense, fearing that he is an illusionist inflating a dangerous bubble. Through $1trn-worth of deals, Nvidia provides data-centre landlords and AI labs with cash or guarantees so that they can buy its GPUs. Some call it the “bank of AI”. At the very least, Nvidia’s critics say, its financial engineering smacks of the “vendor financing” which pumped up the revenues of networking-gear makers like Cisco in the dotcom mania of 2000-01, whose collapse brought about a recession.

Look more closely, however, and the worries are mostly unjustified. If Nvidia’s bets on ai come good, they could accelerate the technology’s adoption, boosting productivity and living standards. If they misfire, the cost will fall chiefly on Nvidia’s shareholders. That is how capitalism is supposed to work.

Read it all.

Tapa y tema principal de The Economist esta semana dedicada a Jensen Huang, Nvidia y su liderazgo en la revolución de la #InteligenciaArtificial.
👉🏼https://t.co/ai8ulqpCSo pic.twitter.com/zhOJP63BVm

— Aldo Lema – Uruguay (@AldoLema_uy) September 3, 2026