Monday, 28 September 2026
Picked from the best of the world's press
View of the Basilica Cistern, Istanbul, Turkey. The Basilica Cistern, or Cisterna Basilica is the largest of several hundred ancient cisterns that lie beneath the city. This subterranean cistern was called Basilica because it was located under a large public square, the Stoa Basilica, on the First Hill of Constantinople. The cistern, built in the 6th century during the reign of Byzantine emperor Justinian I, provided a water filtration system for the Great Palace of Constantinople and other buildings on the First Hill, and continued to provide water to the Topkapı Palace after the Ottoman conquest in 1453 and into modern times. Today it is kept with little water, for public access inside the space.
Microsoft pays hundreds of contractors to score Copilot's generated images, and what they see all day is the photos users assumed only the AI would see, plus a flood of explicit and sometimes illegal edit requests.
Thermal receipt paper often contains bisphenols that can be absorbed through skin, but the average person's exposure is thousands to tens of millions of times below safety limits; the real question is the cashiers handling hundreds of receipts a day.
OpenAI and Anthropic have paired alarming demos with an argument that only they can save us, and the author wants Congress to find out what the labs are actually building and why they never stopped.
America's creative industries have shed over 200,000 jobs in four years, with Hollywood down nearly a third of its workforce — and this time the competition is a model that works for free.
Official minutes are rarely a verbatim record: someone chose what to keep and what to polish, yet they read like a transcript, leading people to wrong conclusions about who said what and who agreed with whom.
A 21-year-old in Bangalore argues that eVTOLs already meet nine-tenths of what it takes to replace cars, and that carbon fiber is how he closes the last tenth: cost.
Stars, companies, dynasties and languages all rise, peak and contract; treating your own contraction as a personal failure is what actually ruins you.
Bill Bengen, who wrote the first serious paper on retirement withdrawal rates, now recommends splitting equities five ways and claims a 4.7% to 5.5% safe withdrawal rate; re-run on twenty years of real ETF data, the portfolio adds risk instead of removing it, and the higher rate rests almost entirely on a small-cap premium that was arbitraged away decades ago.
Samsung and SK Hynix make over 80% of the world's memory chips and are racing to supply Nvidia and OpenAI, even as US export controls tighten around their older plants in China.
Under normal trading rules the US stock market never closes for more than three consecutive days, even over Christmas or the Fourth of July, while the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges routinely shut for nine days around Spring Festival and National Day.
