We're debating: Do social media influence public opinion, and do they harm young people? Ceuta showed just how dangerous they can be: A rumor drove 60,000 people out into the open sea. 83 people lost their lives because of a slogan www.reuters.com/world/europe...

Social media rumours, economic hardship fuel migrant surge into Ceuta

Many young people spend years in Morocco waiting for a chance to cross the border.

reuters.com

Es wird wieder heiß, es brennt allerorts, aber auch hier gibt es ja immer wieder einige, aus der Fraktion „früher gab es auch schon heiße Sommer“. Hier ist die Antwort darauf, denn ich diskutiere das nicht mehr. #Klima #Klimakrise

Applebaum fact-checks Ceuta. For the German AfD, no facts, only the image matters. A death in Berlin merges with an invented 'invasion' in Spain into one picture: a helpless state. The AfD sells itself as the fix. Cave, Germany. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The Far Right Is Distorting Ceuta

We’ve seen this before.

theatlantic.com

Germany pauses. The attack in Berlin stemmed from a religious mindset that views queer joy and self-acceptance as a sin. Give it a few days, the right that despises queer life will instrumentalize the tragedy for its own ends. Queer life remains the litmus test for freedom and democracy.

Berlin Pride Event Attacker Killed in Police Shootout, Officials Say (Gift Article)

The confrontation with the suspect in what has been described as a likely act of Islamist terrorism occurred as a large-scale manhunt was underway, the authorities said.

nytimes.com

The article is inconsistent. Cigarettes carry warnings, age limits, ingredient disclosure. Users know the risk. Social media has none of this, for any age. Engagement design doesn't distinguish 15 from 45. Safer platform design should apply to adults too. So far, nobody's asking for that.

Banning Social Media for Kids Is a Bad Idea

The risks are real. But banning children from the internet could create new problems without solving the ones that really matter.

wired.com

Search engines or AI, both sell statistics as expertise. In the past, the selection was visibly displayed alongside ten links. Now, it appears in a single sentence that sounds like knowledge. Berners-Lee’s internet is dead. But the weapon that dug the grave can also be used to dig it back up.

How Google’s A.I. Search Is Imperiling the Open Web (Gift Article)

As Google incorporates more artificial intelligence into search, people are spending more time on Google. Some website operators are crying foul.

nytimes.com

O'Brien writes about drones replacing jets. Germany's version of "warfare evolving" looks different: water systems + power grids + dam barrages, turned into weapons once compromised. No drone swarm needed. We're not ready for a war that doesn't look like one. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Fighter Jets Are Passé

The future of warfare is drones, clearly.

theatlantic.com

Fan of the series and comics. It's not the blood, it's the mechanics of an autocratic power grab: a compliant board, a press in lockstep, a population cheering on the person causing the damage. Homelander in the Oval Office doesn't read as satire anymore. It reads as documentary, five years behind.

Opinion | ‘The Boys’ Is the Biggest Snub of the Emmys (Gift Article)

“The Boys” was supersnubbed.

nytimes.com

Spahn's real offense wasn't surrogacy. It's voting against legalizing what he then bought abroad for himself. Position vs. practice, the exact gap the far right has been pointing at for years. He just handed them the case study. Explore this gift article from The New York Times.

Uproar Over Surrogate Baby Prompts German Official’s Sudden Resignation (Gift Article)

Jens Spahn, a top leader of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, resigned his post after announcing that he had a baby by surrogate, which is illegal in Germany.

nytimes.com

A story from my hometown. Not revenge, not the arrogance of victors. Empathy for the defeated. Care packages from the US that stood at the start of decades of friendship. There's always a time after the war. That's when the future gets decided. www.butenunbinnen.de/nachrichten/...

Bremerhaven: Vor 80 Jahren kam das erste Care-Paket aus den USA - buten un binnen

Vor 80 Jahren brachte der Frachter "American Ranger" 35.700 Hilfspakete für die notleidende Nachkriegs-Bevölkerung über Bremerhaven nach Deutschland. Zeitzeugen erinnern sich.

butenunbinnen.de

Old norm: neighbors help during disasters. New norm: neighbors get billed for them. Trump wants Canada to pay tariffs for smoke from its own wildfires. edition.cnn.com/2026/07/17/p...

Trump says he’s holding Canada responsible for wildfire smoke and threatens higher tariffs | CNN Politics

President Donald Trump said Friday he’s holding Canada responsible for wildfire smoke hovering over much of the Midwestern and eastern United States and vowed to call Prime Minister Mark Carney, sugge...

edition.cnn.com

Trump has not merely attacked the separation of powers in the US; he is now attempting to establish a fourth branch of power: "Truth Media" an entity that controls market-moving information and sells it to paying customers. Montesquieu could never have imagined such a scenario.

CNN@cnn.com · 3w ago

Truth Social will sell Wall Street firms quicker access to market-moving posts from President Donald Trump, the company said. https://cnn.it/4fFodsp

We face the same fate as Odysseus: Scylla and Charybdis. He could not avoid that strait. Neither can we. Skeptical of AI, yet it's undeniably useful. We are not Leda, Anthropic not a swan, not every egg hatches a Helen. We decide the path, not the gods of Silicon Valley. -- gift link

Anthropic Accidentally Made the Perfect Commercial

How a 90-second ad encapsulates the AI industry

theatlantic.com

Lindsey Graham was one of the main subjects of a @theatlantic.com cover story I wrote in 2020, on why people collaborate with regimes they know are immoral. Here's a gift link: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

History Will Judge the Complicit

Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?

theatlantic.com

No prophecy required: AI providers face the same saturation every market does. "Do I need the newest model?" is the question that kills premium pricing. Once asked + lean models get attractive + cheaper providers get their opening. AI models are worth exactly their utility to the user. Nothing more.

Anthropic Wants You to Pay Up for Claude Fable 5

Claude subscribers must soon pay usage-based fees to access Anthropic’s best consumer AI model—a sign that the golden era of AI subscriptions is ending.

wired.com

Musk claims certainty about what a demigoddess looked like. Knowing a god's face is itself a divine claim. Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/o...

Opinion | Does Matt Damon Look Greek? No. So Stop Complaining About Lupita Nyong’o. (Gift Article)

Helen of Troy was a legendary beauty, but also so much more.

nytimes.com

Follow the money: the IMF's own numbers show the US growing faster in 2026 than 2025, with AI-boom equipment exporters beating forecasts. And that's before anyone's looked at the stock market the S&P is up nearly 9 percent since February.

Trump’s War-Not-War Is Doing Something Odd to the Economy

Businesses and consumers are struggling with a bizarre conflict that is simultaneously happening and not happening.

theatlantic.com

A chance find: Miloš Forman's Hair. Long ago. The film remains worth seeing and hearing. Has society changed? Hatred is gaining followers, boosting poll numbers, and paving the way to the presidency. Where have the hippies gone? Those ambassadors of love and good music? It is time to remember them.

Hair (1/10) Movie CLIP - Aquarius (1979) HD

YouTube video by Movieclips

youtu.be

The EU's tech sovereignty push has a name: Trump. Tariffs, troop pullbacks, a frozen model. The response is real money for infrastructure. What's missing is a European model to run on it. commission.europa.eu/news-and-med...

New EU plan to address the risks and opportunities of advanced AI for cybersecurity

The European Commission has presented a plan to address the risks and harness the opportunities of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity.

commission.europa.eu

One Wednesday, three fronts: Iran bombed again, Spain cut off from trade, Greenland demanded back. Also 4:1 exit to Belgium, an opponent dancing Trump's own move on the fourth goal. Belgium's PM says he won't bring it up himself. Proposal: declare the US world champions anyway. Might buy some quiet.

Trump may try to manipulate the World Cup, but he doesn't understand dynamic processes. NATO and the EU are slowly but surely drifting away from the USA, leaving it sitting only at the table of autocrats. Explore this gift article from The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/w...

Drama and Spectacle as Trump Makes His NATO Entrance

nytimes.com

Trump was never comfortable with reality, with risk, with outcomes that aren't predetermined. The only place he ever felt safe was scripted television, where the ending is fixed before filming starts. Writing himself a script for the World Cup isn't a departure. It's just consistency. gift article

Trump Asked FIFA to Review U.S. Player’s Suspension. Now He’s Eligible to Play.

nytimes.com

Lilburne's 1646 fight for equality before the law is still unresolved, and not just in one country. Germany's AfD keeps the word "equal" while defining the "Staatsvolk" ethnically, in step with the ethnopluralist right from Europe to the US. It now leads German polls at 27%.

All Men Are Created Equal, but What Does "Equal" Mean?

The expansiveness of the concept helps explain its endurance.

theatlantic.com

At Rushmore, Trump warned of a communist menace. At Madison Square Garden, Swift got married. Fear on one stage, love on the other. Love won the news cycle. Don't tell me she didn't know exactly what she was doing.

The New York Times@nytimes.com · last mo.

About 1,000 guests were expected to attend the wedding extravaganza for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden on Friday. The list included Reese Witherspoon, the Haim sisters, and Karlie Kloss and Joshua Kushner.

People are mad about a wedding? In an age this ugly, watching two people celebrate love is the least offensive thing on my feed. I'm biased, I admit it. But Swift's songs have done more good than Trump's two terms combined. Explore this gift article from The New York Times.

What We Know (So Far) About Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Wedding

nytimes.com

The Atlantic profiles 'Freddy,' a German tourist who went viral touring the US. In Germany he's a tabloid footnote, not a cultural symbol. The magazine doesn't examine that gap. It just writes as if virality equals relevance, the mechanism it claims to describe.

The Atlantic@theatlantic.com · last mo.

The internet couldn’t get enough of “Freddy,” a German tourist on an epic World Cup road trip, Will Oremus reports. Why did he suddenly go silent?

Pity for a man in a world made of deals without pity. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

It’s a truly Trumpian tragedy: he’s made billions of dollars but can’t buy love or respect | Emma Brockes

Potus pocketed over $2.2bn last year – but with an algae-filled reflecting pool and his State Fair a fiasco, what price happiness? asks Guardian columnist Emma Brockes

theguardian.com

Until recently, climate change was abstract. Now we're sweating, and the answer is AC. Classic Jevons paradox: unit cools one apartment and warms the street outside, emissions rise. The bucket leaks. Solution: pump faster. Was humanity always this good at it?

Europe’s Come-to-AC Moment

The heat is changing the continent’s interest in cooling technologies of all kinds.

theatlantic.com

The AfD leads the polls. A 1,500-page legal opinion says it's unconstitutional. A democracy that waits for better polls before defending itself has already lost.

DER SPIEGEL@spiegel.de · last mo.

Die AfD ist verfassungswidrig: Zu diesem Schluss kommt ein Rechtsgutachten von einem Team um Bijan Moini. Hier sagt der Jurist, wo der Verfassungsschutz rechtlich falschliegt und was er der radikalisierten Partei zur Last legt.

SUVs and pickups don't just dominate U.S. roads they're killing pedestrians at record rates. Higher hoods, bigger blind zones. 200–400 extra deaths per year. The industry profits. The regulators look away. In Germany, the response? Demand wider parking spaces. gift article from The New York Times.

The Deadly Rise of Giant Trucks and S.U.V.s (Gift Article)

The vehicles on American roads have grown larger — and they are killing thousands more pedestrians, a Times investigation found.

nytimes.com