Compact

Brazil’s upcoming election pits President Lula da Silva, eighty, against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, forty-five. If he wins, Lula will serve a record fourth (non-consecutive) term. His opponent is the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. To much of the unenthusiastic electorate, it feels like an election about nothing. Both candidates have rejection rates between 45 and 55 percent. Lula’s slogan is “Brazil, ready for more” (of what?); Flavio mainly wants to get his dad out of jail.

When I was a kid, there were long periods when we didn’t have television. Bored senseless, I read all the books on my shelf. When I was finished with those, all that was left was the Bible. So, naturally, I picked it up and began my quest to read it cover to cover. I think I only made it to Leviticus, but the exercise did leave me with one lasting impression, or rather question: Why was the God of the Old Testament so different from the God of the New?

After a Massachusetts judge announced a mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case on September 4, it didn’t take long for the media to turn its focus from the trial to the jurors. We learned that the jury was hung by a single holdout juror who wanted to convict Clancy. We also soon discovered that the jury deliberations had been heated.

The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World By Mike Beggs, Ben Burgis, and Bhaskar Sunkara Verso, 432 pages, $29.95 The surprising electoral success of avowedly socialist candidates in big-city mayoral campaigns and some congressional races has raised the profile of the Democratic Socialists of America, forcing people to ponder what the term “democratic socialism” actually means.

LFI: Anatomie d’une perversion Edited by Pierre-André Taguieff David Reinharc, 424 pages, $26 We live in an age of inversions. With class inversion, college-educated professionals have moved inexorably leftwards, while once left-leaning blue-collar workers have veered to the right. A few years ago, there was also talk of a demographic inversion, as affluent populations that used to be drawn to the suburbs moved back to cities.

One sunny day in June, I opened up my university email, which I only do occasionally now that I am retired, to see an email marked “confidential” in my inbox. In it, the deputy vice-chancellor at my former employer, the University of Sunderland, informed me of an external complaint concerning my recent public social media activity. When I eventually managed to see the much-redacted complaint, it found fault with the “tone and nature” of my online engagement on the topic of assisted suicide.

The future world statesman, in full military uniform, leaps athletically on to the table. Then he reaches up into the ceiling lamp of his hotel room and pulls out a concealed microphone. It has been placed there by his American allies, or perhaps by the perfidious British. Or possibly by both at once. There are a lot of wires. If there is one brief scene which encapsulates the two vast new films about Charles de Gaulle, I think this is it.

In the last week of July, two incidents involving disruptive Chinese fans of a genre of Asian media triggered something close to a crisis in international relations. Security personnel had forcibly removed a Chinese woman from an event in Bangkok. Patrons of this type of event, known as a “fan meet,” pay considerable sums to see their favorite entertainers in person, hear them being interviewed, and watch them perform song-and-dance routines.

On September 13, Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, wrote on X, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it,” referring to a photograph that showed a few dozen Indian American students celebrating the University of Texas’s football win over Ohio State. This resulted in a massive online debate, pitting Indian Americans and their defenders against the group’s critics.

The resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who warns that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade,” has prompted a new wave of attention to existential risk from AI, while drawing scrutiny to what the people working at frontier AI companies really believe about the technology they are developing. Many of those who continue to work at Anthropic and OpenAI share Coxon’s fears.