In an interview, best-selling author and machine-learning expert Pedro Domingos discusses the global competition to take the lead in artificial intelligence, the advance of autocrats and the threats modern technology presents to Western democracies.

A dangerous mix of increasing international conflict, global climate change, and a lack of governmental efforts to fix either could be leading the world to an era of unprecedented destruction.

A dangerous mix of increasing international conflict, global climate change, and a lack of governmental efforts to fix either could be leading the world to an era of unprecedented destruction.

From the militarization of social media to the corporatization of the art world, Hito Steyerl’s writings represent some of the most influential bodies of work in contemporary cultural criticism today.

In 2006 a man walked into an internet cafe in Kassel, Germany, and shot dead Halit Yozgat, a 21-year-old member of the Turkish-German family who owned it. It was the ninth in a series of racist killings by neo-Nazis, the motivation for which the police persistently refused to admit.

I am trying to remember a term for a specific zone designated around a bomb during its diffusal. Something about only certain people being able to pass through, or exchange places during the disposal operation. The term may apply to the rules followed in that zone, rather than the zone itself. I may have got some of the details wrong, but the term designates a transition area. Something about the way that site is regulated and the procedures of disposal are carried out that ensures the safety and authority/hierarchy of the teams undertaking the task (usually during war).

For bonus points, I heard this term because it was the title of an exhibition in London some years ago. Wish I could recall the term, or the exhibition.

Thanks

Like most every­thing today, the campaign was launched with a hashtag. But instead of promoting a new album or a movie release, #AllEyesOnISIS announced the 2014 invasion of northern Iraq—a bloody takeover that still haunts global politics two years later.

Just after World War II, when the atomic bombs fell and our thirst for coal and oil became a full-blown addiction, Earth entered the Anthropocene, a new geologic time when humanity’s environmental reach left a mark in sediments worldwide.

IT IS HARD to simply skim through the materials on Amitav Ghosh’s website. The information is bountiful, and the data is incredibly varied, indexing the many dimensions of his oeuvre. One is forced to pause periodically to contemplate each new facet of Ghosh’s interests and writings.

When Michael Haas, a former senior airman with the US air force, looks back on the missions he flew over Afghanistan and other conflict zones in a six-year career operating military drones, one of the things he remembers most vividly is the colorful language airmen would use to describe their targe

Deep in the arctic, inside over 400 feet of rock, a huge cache of seeds is stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in case of some global emergency. Today, the first of the seeds from that supply have arrived to replenish a collection sent away for safe keeping during Syria’s Civil War.

“If this had been a real emergency you would already be dead.”

Anne crawled out of bed in her North Las Vegas house around 10 p.m. and started to get ready for her shift. She pulled her chestnut hair into a bun and slipped on her olive green flight suit.

As the 19th century entered its final decade, the War of Currents was nearing its peak. On one side of this war was Thomas Edison, who had invested heavily in direct-current (DC) technology. Tesla and Westinghouse backed alternating-current (AC), which they believed (correctly) to be more efficient.

You go to war with the paintings you have, not the paintings you might want or wish to have at a later time. Right now the paintings we have are by George W. Bush.

From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke.

Documentation of Hito Steyerl's lecture "Is the Museum a Battlefield", first shown at 13th Istanbul Biennial. Steyerl’s new lecture, pro­duced for the 13th Istanbul Biennial, takes as its departure point her March 2013 talk ‘I Dreamed a Dream: Politics in the Age of Mass Art Production’ and focuses on the arms industry, a phenomenon constantly re-conceptualized by the media through the regular flow of images. It asks the question of how a museum and a battlefield could be related. The question emerges when Steyerl follows the trace of an empty bullet casing which she found in the area where the mass grave of Andrea Wolf and her friends were located in Van, Turkey.Cast: Museum Battlefield

The War Game is a fictional, worst-case-scenario docu-drama about nuclear war and its aftermath in and around a typical English city...

Peter Watkins

There's nothing remarkable about Rolf Nikolaus Cornelius Gurlitt's flat, a fifth-floor apartment on the shady side of a modernist apartment block in Munich's Schwabing district: walking distance to the lush English Gardens nearby; a balcony with black stains from years of inefficiently drained rain

Have you watched the last few moments of Saddam’s life? Or the necrophilic videos with Gaddafi’s behind? Al Zarqawi’s internet kill rooms? Magnotta’s cat suffocation videos? Ronal Poppo’s eaten face? I will admit that I have and it is ticklish, but not in a good way. Gore videos on the internet are abundant and they certainly work up the stomach. It’s no trek to watch them, but apparently that is the point. Recently, I stumbled (as one does on the internet) on a range of gore forums and videos. All sorts of weird kinks flourish in these platforms, and they will give you a good dose of weekly shock ‘n’ awe material. In these marginalized discussion groups, a certain thought intrigued me. Gore aficionados claim that watching ‘real’ murder protests the distorted and censored imagery of world horror events, and these videos correct our vision by portraying a more realistic representation of atrocities and the macabre. Also, gore audiences are stigmatized as those who engage in snuff activi