Wales is getting its first Black leader – POLITICO

“Today, we turn a page in the book of our nation’s history. A history we write together. Not just because I have the honour of becoming the first Black leader in any European country — but because the generational dial has jumped too,” he told party members. Born in the former British colony of Zambia, … Read more

Briefly Noted Book Reviews | The New Yorker

Held, by Anne Michaels (Knopf). This episodic, philosophical novel orbits a group of loosely connected characters living between 1917 and 2025. It begins in France, during the First World War, with a British soldier lying on the ground after an explosion. We follow him home to North Yorkshire, where he works as a portrait photographer … Read more

Liz Truss’ journey from Downing Street to ‘deep state’ conspiracist – POLITICO

Liz Truss’ journey from Downing Street to ‘deep state’ conspiracist – POLITICO Skip to main content Read original article here Denial of responsibility! Pioneer Newz is an automatic aggregator of the all world’s media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to … Read more

How an Enthusiast of Soviet Socialism Fell Afoul of the Authorities

The Roman god Janus was possessed of two faces, one pointing toward the future and one looking backward into the past, and it is tempting to imagine that these faces must also have worn contrasting expressions, one brighter and hopeful, the other rueful or even aghast. Supposing you knew such a person, how would you … Read more

What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes

“There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet.” With that sentence, written by the journalist Samantha Cole for the tech site Motherboard in December, 2017, a queasy new chapter in our cultural history opened. A programmer calling himself “deepfakes” told Cole that he’d used artificial intelligence to insert Gadot’s … Read more

The Morality of Having Kids in a Burning, Drowning World

In August, 2003, I was living in London when a weeks-long heat wave seized much of Europe, killing tens of thousands of people. Tarmac melted on the London Orbital Motorway. Portugal lost half a million acres to forest fires. Water levels in the Danube River fell low enough to expose Nazi military ruins—a jeep, a … Read more

Briefly Noted Book Reviews | The New Yorker

Smoke and Ashes, by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A hybrid of horticultural and economic history, this book proposes that the opium poppy should be taken as “a historical force in its own right.” Ghosh touches on opium’s origins as a recreational drug—it was favored in the courts of the Mongol, Ottoman, Safavid, and … Read more