Friday, 9 October 2026
Picked from the best of the world's press
PO boxes at the historic U.S. Post Office in downtown Chico, California. Today is International World Post Day.
Watching American culture empty out, the author argues the missing crowds did not go back to books or bars — they were swallowed by vertical short-form video into a personalised digital heaven.
Listeners commit to an interpretation long before a speaker finishes, and the only interlocutor whose commitment point can actually be set in advance is a language model.
DJI, China's drone leader, can no longer get new products approved by US regulators, and Shenzhen rival Insta360 is using its clean legal status to open a Times Square store and poach DJI's American customers.
Much of the 2026 surge in US corporate profits was one company's chip-and-datacenter bill becoming another company's revenue, not new money actually earned.
Ottumwa, Iowa passed a rule allowing religious invocations at city council meetings; a former council member and practicing Satanist then delivered one, triggering an argument over how to undo the 'curse.'
A US surrogate refused to terminate a pregnancy with a severe heart defect, moved to a state that bans abortion, and ended up with no rights to the baby after the Supreme Court declined to hear her case.
A paper that rebuilt early medieval trade routes from where ancient coins were buried finds that after the Arab conquests of North Africa and Spain, Europe's wealth shifted from Italy and the Balkans to France and Germany.
Washington is set to spend 7.4 trillion dollars in 2026 while borrowing 1.9 trillion of it, with total public debt now equal to the entire economy, and two scholars have put five tax proposals on the table to close the gap.
A 15-year study in Borneo found that orangutan mothers will set off a day early and cross territories so their young can spend twenty minutes with a playmate their own age — and no one yet knows what it is for.
A new class of model called Jev returns probabilities instead of prose, turning semantic search and content scoring into arithmetic — and handing the judgement itself to a black box that explains nothing.
American government has exactly four levels — federal, state, county and city — and city councillors typically do the job part-time, about 20 hours a week.
