The New York Times obituary headline for Ward Churchill states what was most noteworthy about the controversial academic. It makes explicit reference to his statements on 9/11 that led to a university investigation for “academic misconduct” and later to his firing from a tenured faculty position at the University of Colorado Boulder. That text pairs with the black-and-white photograph of Churchill, resting his head in his palm, black hair parted down the middle, and eyes gazing directly into the lens while a desk lamp casts a halo over his head. Taken together, the headline and the photo frame a central question: was this man a sinner or a saint? Was he a martyr for academic freedom, or what we might call in today’s hyper-online parlance an “edgelord,” intentionally shocking the public by comparing the people who died in the Twin Towers during the 9/11 attacks to Nazi war criminals, calling them “little Eichmanns”? Either way, “the paper of record” only grants thousand-word retrospectives to those whose fame or infamy rises to a certain level of importance to justify the ink spilled. More

When Serb nationalist leaders were inflicting ethnic cleansing on Bosniaks in 1995, NATO was relatively swift about using military force to stop it; and it offered the same assistance to Kosovar Albanians in 1999. Today, Israel is three years into its genocide in Gaza, which now increasingly extends into the West Bank. Western governments would be horrified to even contemplate military force to end this much more catastrophic, and extensively-documented, genocide. The West’s still mostly liberal democratic governments are, with rare exceptions, not trying to do much of anything, by any means, to stop it. The most prominent and powerful Western governments are more committed to inflicting draconian punishments on those who are trying—and trying nonviolently. More

European leaders are now fretting about Vladimir Putin in much the same way that everyone worries these days about artificial intelligence. Until recently, AI agents remained within the virtual spaces where they’d been developed. Rather than free range, they were confined to their “sandboxes.” But there have been a number of cases of these AI agents lying, cheating, and hacking their way out of their designated spaces. Now, even AI experts are talking about the not-insignificant odds that the technology they designed will run amok and kill all of humanity. More