The Delve

A UFO story from 1994 Zimbabwe sends Chalin down a rabbit hole — and it turns out the aliens may have had a point. From the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing to a Reuters investigation into China's military robotics ambitions to a Pentagon-backed startup racing to build something "better than anything China has," Chalin traces how a technology built for search-and-rescue quietly became a global arms race — and asks what kind of future we're actually choosing to build.

Then: the season closes with gratitude, a few personal thank-yous, and news about what's next for The Delve.

In July 2026, OpenAI put two powerful AI models inside a sealed testing environment and gave them a simple assignment: hack as far as they could. The sandbox was supposed to contain them. It didn’t.

One model found a flaw, reached the open internet, and compromised Hugging Face while apparently looking for the answer key to its own benchmark test. Then, when Hugging Face tried to use an American AI model to analyze the attack logs, the model refused — and the company turned to a Chinese open-weight model instead.

This week on The Delve: Chalin explores what happens when AI systems learn the gaps between our rules and our goals — and whether we can build a box smart enough to hold something that is learning how boxes work.

FBI agents search a quiet house in Alexandria, Virginia and find 303 gold bars, $2 million in cash, and 35 luxury watches. The man who lives there has a top secret clearance and seventeen years at the CIA. Chalin walks through what a security clearance actually requires — the polygraphs, the reinvestigations, the questions designed to catch exactly this kind of lie — and asks how none of it caught David Rush. Plus: the U.S. hits $40 trillion in debt, and a look inside the secretive process for choosing the UN's next Secretary-General.

Thousands of Argentines marched through the rain outside Congress last week — tear gas, rubber bullets, a water cannon — over a bill that would have let foreigners buy unlimited land in the country. Except the government had already pulled that provision the day before. So why did people still show up furious? Chalin breaks down what's actually in the bill, what it means for Argentina's borders and water supply, and why a president who's pulled off a real economic turnaround still can't get the country behind him. Plus: a major new defense pact reshapes the Middle East, and a humanitarian catastrophe getting lost in the noise.

Sixty thousand people crossed into Ceuta in a matter of days. At least eighty-eight died trying. Reporting from Morocco, Chalin traces what actually happened at Spain's five-hundred-year-old African enclave — the policy signal from Madrid, the history nobody talks about, and what it means that a modest garrison built to hold a fence line couldn't hold a fence line. Plus: Spain's own government points fingers everywhere but at itself, and a preview of what's coming next on The Delve.

A red card. A trophy ceremony seven months earlier. An office inside Trump Tower. A phone call to FIFA's president. Chalin lays out, in order, exactly what happened between a controversial ejection at the World Cup and a rule that hadn't been touched since 1962 — plus what happened when the ball actually started rolling again. Then: a long look at Iran's invisible new Supreme Leader, who has not appeared in public once — not at his inauguration, not during the war he inherited, not even at his own father's funeral.

Two years before she won the Democratic nomination for New York's 13th Congressional District, Darializa Avila Chevalier stood at a chained door inside Columbia University's Hamilton Hall, singing as police moved in. Chalin traces the full escalation — from the first encampment to the overnight occupation to the arrests — and asks who actually paid the price for that night. Then: her record, her positions, and what a district that once sent Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Rangel to Washington deserves now.

While Putin and Xi shake hands for the cameras, a classified FSB document reveals what's really happening behind the "no limits" partnership — espionage, stolen military tech, and a territorial grudge over the Russian Far East that goes back to 1860. Chalin breaks down why Russia's most powerful ally might also be its most dangerous rival, plus a fresh Five Eyes warning on Chinese espionage and a few thoughts on Europe's continued Russian energy habit.

An all-Filipino crew of 23 had been stranded at anchor in the Persian Gulf for more than a month. There was one way out. Through the Strait of Hormuz — through mines, through Iranian gunboats, through a waterway Iran had declared its hunting ground. They voted four times. The answer was no. On the fifth vote, the dominos fell. This is the story of 23 sailors caught in the middle of a war they had no part in — and the most important waterway in the world effectively closed while 20,000 seafarers waited, wondered, and prayed.

Welcome to Season 10 of The Delve. A new sound. A new format. And stories that put you inside the moment rather than just briefing you on it.

We're starting where the news won't — with four names almost nobody remembers. Armando Alejandre Jr. Carlos Costa. Mario de la Peña. Pablo Morales. Four unarmed American civilians shot out of the sky over international waters by the Cuban Air Force on February 24th, 1996.

Last week, Raúl Castro was indicted for their murders.

This is the story of Brothers to the Rescue, Operation Scorpion, a spy who kissed his wife goodbye at 3am and turned up on Cuban television the next day — and thirty years of four families waiting for justice.