Substack glory and livestream anxiety ... Reading eugenics into a dopey jeans ad ... Does Sydney Sweeney spell the end of “inclusive marketing”? ... Bob vs. Paul on IQ and “general intelligence” ... Paul reviews the new Billy Joel documentary ... The Epstein prison video snafu: a Bayesian take ... Ghislaine gets a free upgrade ...

Why Gaza’s famine is the "most intense" in decades ... From food secure to starvation: How Gaza unraveled ... Blinken's willful blindness to Israel's obstruction of aid ... How the US muzzled its own famine warning system ... The political power of the term "famine" ... What starvation does to the body—and to society ... The perverse logic of starvation as warfare ... How the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation puts aid in Hamas's hands ... Evaluating Israel's accusation against UNRWA ... How many Gazans are dying of starvation? ... What a real aid response would take now ...

Derek and Danny plug their new Crusades series ... This week’s shift in Gaza discourse ... The real danger Gaza poses for Israel ... Does the left’s rhetoric on Israel miss the mark? ... Elite media’s think tank problem ... Is American imperialism really the problem? ... Heading to Overtime ...

Trump’s AI Action plan ... The contradictions inherent to Trump's plan ... How Trump’s anti-globalism undermines his AI goals ... Anthropic’s leaked memo: Ideals vs Persian Gulf cash ... Bob: Dario Amodei is the true AI ideologue ... How AI “safety” became a hawkish movement ... Why true objectivity in LLMs is a fantasy ... A Palantir exec dives into the movie business ... Is AI surgery around the corner? ... Why the Gaza ceasefire talks are collapsing—again ... Biden and Trump's allergy to using US leverage ...

Josh’s hopes for post-Assad Syria—revisited ... The challenge(s) facing the Syrian government ... What’s driving Syria’s sectarian violence? ... Josh’s personal window into the al-Sharaa regime’s brutality ... The new regime’s church vs state problem ... How the Druze became central to Israeli-Syrian hostilities ... Why did Israel escalate with Syria, really? ... Josh’s current outlook on Syria's future ... Heading to Overtime ...

The full reason for Bob’s absence—revealed ... What’s the real story with Trump and Epstein? ... A peek down the Epstein rabbit hole ... Grok goes full Nazi-pornbot ... The promise and perils of AI companions ... Bob on dealing with cancer in the age of AI ... Heading to Overtime ...

Why a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is so unlikely ... Taiwan’s terrain: A defender’s dream, an invader’s nightmare ... Why Taipei might be the hardest city in the world to conquer ... Dan: China would need nearly 5 million soldiers to have a chance ... The 2027 invasion theory—and why it doesn’t hold up ... Is China trying to bankrupt the US military? ... A cheaper, smarter way to defend Taiwan ... Submarines: A deterrent with a message ... Comparing a Taiwan invasion to D-Day ... China's long game ... Why a blockade might be worse than an invasion ...

A brief message from Bob ... Why many intelligent people think we’re living in a simulation ... The philosophical argument that you’re probably not real ... How cosmic rays might (and might not) reveal that reality is fake ... Preston’s dire warning against trying to determine if we’re in a simulation ... Is the simulation hypothesis non-falsifiable? ... Is “the simulation” just religion for atheists? ...

A brief message from Bob ... What Lee means when he says "time is fundamental" ... Understanding the universe as a network ... A (very) tentative theory of consciousness ... Did the laws of physics evolve? ... Is the universe fine-tuned for the emergence of life? ... Applying Lee's theories of time to everyday life ...

Why Neysun brings American students and scholars to China ... Visiting China after Covid ... Balancing US and Chinese red lines ... When Neysun's students pushed Chinese officials on human rights ... Do US students fear career risks for going to China? ... Cultivating cognitive empathy ... China's obsession with US politics ... Trump's surprisingly consistent approach to Beijing ... Are Chinese students really spies? ... Is China studies becoming the next Kremlinology? ... How Neysun navigates US fears about exchange with China ...