Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book, “Superintelligence,” a crucial text for the community of worriers about the risks of artificial intelligence, begins with a fable: A tribe of sparrows, weary of a marginal existence, becomes convinced that everything would be better if they could only have an owl to help…

In the responses to a recent death-of-the-humanities dirge, a long reported piece by Nathan Heller for The New Yorker on the decline of the English major, you could see an illustration of its thesis: The story’s most depressing anecdotes were plucked out and swapped around on social media by people…

When the Ukrainian military made rapid advances in its autumn campaign, the fears of Russian nuclear retaliation were connected to a longstanding American interpretation of Russian strategic theory: “escalate to de-escalate,” the idea of using a limited nuclear strike to raise the stakes of…

If the Democrats end up losing both the House and the Senate, an outcome that looks more likely than it did a month ago, there will be nothing particularly shocking about the result. The incumbent president’s party almost always suffers losses in the midterms, the Democrats entered 2022 with thin…

If the Democrats end up losing both the House and the Senate, an outcome that looks more likely than it did a month ago, there will be nothing particularly shocking about the result. The incumbent president’s party almost always suffers losses in the midterms, the Democrats entered 2022 with thin…

Liz Truss, the new prime minister of Britain who may not be the prime minister for long, is by general agreement out of touch with reality. Her big gambit upon succeeding Boris Johnson, a mini-budget crowded with tax cuts, looks like a policy debacle, recklessly inflationary and fiscally…

At a 1985 banquet marking the 30th anniversary of National Review, with Ronald Reagan in attendance, William F. Buckley Jr. gave a speech celebrating the American nuclear deterrent, and the willingness of the American president to use it. Those weapons and that willingness, Buckley declaimed, had…

The summer of war in Ukraine, while brutal for soldiers and civilians on the front lines, has been experienced from afar as a stalemate, depressing enough in its grinding sameness to slip out of American headlines for a time. The autumn and winter will be different, supplying answers to the two…

Strip away the weird semi-fascist optics, the creepy crimson lighting and the Marines standing sentinel, and the speech Joe Biden gave on Thursday night outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall could have been given by other prominent Democrats throughout the Trump era. The song is always the…

The two weeks since the F.B.I. descended on Mar-a-Lago have felt remarkably familiar. It’s not just that Donald Trump is dominating headlines once again; it’s that all the hits of 2017 and 2018 are being played again: legal experts cobbling together complex theories out of fragmentary information,…