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Nov 25, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Rob Brooks |David Stoll |Sonny Loughran |Jason Andrew Garshfield
Of all the ways people expect Artificial Intelligence to change their lives, making new friends is not high on anybody’s list. I wrote an entire book called Artificial Intimacy about AI-powered technologies that capable of socialising with human beings, and yet even I did not anticipate talking with a green-haired, violet-eyed chatbot in the hope of shaking myself out of a slump. Men of my age often don’t have enough friends.
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Nov 25, 2024 | 
quillette.com | David Stoll |Sonny Loughran |Jason Andrew Garshfield |Michael Shermer
A review of Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De Leon, 400 pages, Viking (March 2024)One of the reasons Donald Trump has just been re-elected US president is the battle over how to manage the country’s southern border with Mexico.
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Nov 24, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Sonny Loughran |Jason Andrew Garshfield |Michael Shermer |Marco Visscher
Disinformation is a term often deployed by politicians, journalists, and partisans as a catch-all to discredit opposing views and justify the censorship of inconvenient opinions. But disinformation is, nevertheless, a real problem and tackling it is a challenge we must not shy away from. In its most nefarious form, disinformation refers to lies spread by the agents of enemy states, whose intelligence services are hoping to gain some strategic advantage by deliberately manipulating public opinion.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Charlotte Allen |Robert Huddleston |Julia Friedman |Sonny Loughran
Jonathan Kay: In this week’s episode, I’ll be talking to scholar Musa al-Gharbi, author of the acclaimed new book, We Have Never Been Woke: the Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, published this month by Princeton University Press.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Charlotte Allen |Robert Huddleston |Julia Friedman |Sonny Loughran
In September 2022, Netflix released Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s 167-minute adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s 738-page novel about the life and death of Marilyn Monroe. If the studio’s executives expected the film to be greeted with plaudits and awards, they were mistaken—most critics responded with scorching outrage to Dominik’s brutal and lugubrious take on the misfortunes of the screen icon and sex goddess who died following a self-administered overdose of Nembutal some sixty years before.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Robert Huddleston |Julia Friedman |Sonny Loughran |Benny Morris
A review of On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice by Adam Kirsch, 160 pages, W.W. Norton & co. (August 2024).
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Julia Friedman |Sonny Loughran |Benny Morris |Allan Stratton
In his most recent book, The War on the West, British conservative polemicist Douglas Murray describes a revealing episode that occurred in the United Kingdom. In late 2020, the Tate Britain gallery announced the permanent closure of its restaurant, which is decorated with a wrap-around mural painted in the late 1920s by Rex Whistler and titled Pursuit of Rare Meats. Two years prior, some members of the public had complained about the mural’s “stereotypical” representation of people of colour.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Daniel Kodsi |Julia Friedman |Sonny Loughran |Benny Morris
Debates on sex and gender have suffered from a want of moral and intellectual toughness. More detailed, less question-begging diagnoses are possible of why so many smart people shy away from publicly acknowledging that a woman is an adult human female. But there has been a gross failure of nerve. Most of the men known as “trans women” are sex-typical adult human males.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Sonny Loughran |Benny Morris |Allan Stratton |Andrew Glover
Russia currently exists in a state of economic purgatory. Since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Western powers seeking to limit his nation’s warmaking capacity have instituted one of the harshest sanction regimes the world has ever seen. Imports of Russian oil, above a certain price, have been outlawed, as have exports of sensitive materials, such as semiconductors, engine parts, and communications equipment,that might find their way into Russian weaponry.
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Oct 7, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Oscar Clarke |Sonny Loughran |Benny Morris |Allan Stratton
The October issue of Commentary features a long article by Abe Greenwald titled “Why Won’t We Let Ukraine Win?” Meanwhile, in the Free Press, Eli Lake has an essay titled, “Let Israel Win the War Iran Started.” Both pieces do an excellent job of describing the absurdity of Western foreign policy in these two conflicts.
