ROBERT BOOTH – Wynd Kaufman, the activist who blocked the entrance to one of the world’s biggest AI companies, is believed to have become the first person jailed for protesting against artificial intelligence as supporters dub her the “Rosa Parks of AI risk.”
Real Power No Longer Resides in Military Might
WINSLOW MYERS – When are we going to understand that power no longer resides in military might, but instead in mutual understanding of what leads to common survival? The prevention of war by tenuous military superiority has now become unworkable on this planet, forever. When we admit this to ourselves, the door to new visions of security will open.
Inside the longest refugee protest in history
MATT BENSON – The choice of nonviolence isn’t incidental. In a system designed to render them invisible, protesters have chosen a strategy that forces the world to look. They have chosen to absorb violence without returning it, not as a form of passivity, but as a strategy grounded in their reality. Their discipline in the face of brutality lays bare the moral asymmetry of the system that claims to protect them while imprisoning them.
Peace Requires Leaders Who Understand the Limits of Power
GEORGE CASSIDY PAYNE – George Payne explains and exposes the “limits of power” for every political leader, using Donald Trump as the example of one who does not understand what limits his power. Every presidency eventually encounters forces beyond politics. There comes a point when personality collides with reality—and reality cannot be negotiated, litigated or rebranded. Three realities illustrate that truth: science, the rule of law, and geopolitics.
Robert Hubbell’s Democracy Brigade
ROB OKUN – There’s a five-alarm autocratic wildfire raging. It isn’t necessary to be an activist to feel the hot flames of fascism licking the edges of the Constitution. Robert Hubbell has donned his firefighting gear and stepped into the fray. What about the rest of us—what are we going to do?
Is Netanyahu on His Way Out? Current Status in Israel/Palestine
MEL GURTOV – David Remnick, who writes for The New Yorker from Israel (August 3), believes Trump holds the key to a Netanyahu victory (in a critical election October 27). At the moment that’s not good news for Netanyahu, since Trump has clearly regarded Bibi as an obstacle to a war settlement with Iran. But Trump is notoriously unpredictable. He “may still prefer the devil he knows,” Remnick writes.