What an incredibly cool FT article and WWI story!
The FT contest that challenged readers to redraw Europe’s borders (🎁🔗)
giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
15.02.2026 06:48
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What an incredibly cool FT article and WWI story!
The FT contest that challenged readers to redraw Europe’s borders (🎁🔗)
giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
‘They Couldn’t Break Me’: A Protester, the White House and a Doctored Photo www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/u...
In the face of lawsuits, AI companies have long claimed that LLMs do not memorize copyrighted works, but researchers have consistently found that LLMs can be made to reproduce copyrighted works almost exactly, and a significant fraction of LLM output is verbatim plagiarized text.
Latest iteration of the German nuclear proliferation debate.
Apart from everything else, I don't understand the preference for tactical nuclear weapons.
Generally any deterrent starts with the strategic capability to inflict unacceptable damage on key cities and/or decision-making centers.
Absolutely right.
AI might be able to summarize (poorly) what we currently know, but a major goal of historical research is to find the hidden surprises out there.
Let me illustrate …
Today we mourn our beloved colleague Bill Burr, a giant in the field of nuclear history, who passed away last week. Click below to read tributes to Bill that have poured in from around the world.
nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/2025-12...
Terribly sad news. A lovely tribute for a wonderful man and a very fine scholar.
Dismantled by DOGE, a Foreign Policy Center Finds New Life www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/u...
v1.108 is rolling out today 🚚
Now live, at long last: Bookmarks, aka Saved Posts. For all those posts you'll definitely plan to come back to!
Update the app and give it a try. The button is right down there 👇
👏
So do I.
The world was forever changed in the early hours of the morning 80 years ago today.
In the quiet desert basin near Alamogordo, New Mexico, a plutonium bomb was detonated, beginning the Atomic Age in what is known as the Trinity Test. 🧵 #NukeSky
A black and white, high-speed photograph of the Trinity explosion at 0.025 seconds, showing what looks like a very large, slightly irregular bubble with a curtain of dust all around its bottom edge against a pitch dark sky. A scale indicating “100 meters” shows that the fireball was already approximately three times that size.
Another black and white photograph of the Trinity explosion a few milliseconds later, showing an almost ghostly mushroom cloud with glowing tendrils rising from the ground above the very bright fireball.
Another black and white photograph of the Trinity explosion with the same 100-meter scale, this time at 60 seconds post-detonation, showing a very large and billowy mushroom cloud rising into the sky.
Another black and white photograph of the Trinity explosion taken some minutes after the previous photograph and showing the ominous looking mushroom cloud at a distance, its top spreading out and merging with regular clouds.
80 years ago this morning—at 5:29 AM (Mountain War Time)—about 35 miles southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, the nuclear age began with a big bang. Contrary to widespread assumptions, the area surrounding the remote Trinity test site was not uninhabited, and the fallout did not drift away harmlessly.
Two days after the recording, I just listened to this, and if I may say so, I don't think I've done a better interview.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaSA...
🙄
This is disastrous.
Why am I so unimpressed by these strikes? Israel and the US have failed to target significant elements of Iran's nuclear materials and production infrastructure. RISING LION and MIDNIGHT HAMMER are tactically brilliant, but may turn out to be strategic failures. 🧵 1/17
Trump was too weak to stand up the hawks and powerless to stop Netanyahu's war. They two will have co-ownership of the ensuing disaster.
www.iiss.org/online-analy...
Is he going to rename it the USS Dan White?
That is a bit too cold for the Swiss. Glad you’re having fun!
Writing lets us organise our experiences and express their implications. It's hard because doing that is hard. If we never write, we never learn to represent our judgements in ways that can be studied for bias, meaning, or novelty. Nor communicate our worlds to others. This is a form of death.
Ireland’s “Social Partnership” in the late twentieth century maybe? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_...
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New at Observing Japan: Remarks by an LDP lawmaker suggest that “Liberation Day” may prove as important for Japan as the Zelenskyy meeting at the White House was for Europe.
open.substack.com/pub/observin...
Awful news
Big assumption that there will be FRUS volumes 😔
I remember the 1990s moral panic about alcopops. As if a big slice of Irish culture and society didn’t revolve around drink.
Hiroshima being woke is not the outcome I expected, and yet here we are.
