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View All →AI Training Data and Copyright: Ownership, Compensation, and the Press
A NYT-led coalition is seeking court sanctions against OpenAI over the use of published journalism as AI training data — putting the legal and economic relationship between news publishers and AI developers before a federal court.
The End of the Monoculture: Cultural Fragmentation and Shared Identity
Streaming, algorithms, and social media have splintered the shared cultural touchstones that once defined national life. What does that shift mean for social cohesion — and for individual freedom?
Sanctions, Drones, and Fuel Shortages: Economic Coercion as a Tool in the Russia-Ukraine War
Sanctions and drone strikes have been linked to fuel shortages inside Russia — a test case for the effectiveness and limits of economic coercion in wartime.
Dollar Dominance and De-dollarization: The Future of the Reserve Currency
A contested shift in global currency arrangements — what the evidence shows about the dollar's reserve status, the alternatives on offer, and the trade-offs for different economies.
Philosophy of Punishment: Retribution, Rehabilitation, and Competing Frameworks
Prison systems in the US, UK, and beyond operate under competing justifications — retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and restorative justice — with significant disagreement about which goals punishment can or should serve.
Sovereign Wealth Funds: National Interest and Market Access
When a government fund buys a port, a semiconductor firm, or a media company, where does development finance end and geopolitical strategy begin — and how do existing capital-market frameworks apply?
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Articles
View All →AI Training Data and Copyright: Ownership, Compensation, and the Press
The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI is not a straightforward copyright case. It is a collision between two incompatible economic logics: one built on the premise that verified reporting requires institutions capable of sustaining labor over time, and another that treats every published sentence as statistical feedstock for models whose outputs no one can fully trace. The deeper question is not whether training constitutes fair use.
The End of the Monoculture: Cultural Fragmentation and Shared Identity
The real question is not whether shared culture has fractured, but whether it was ever anything more than a side effect of whoever happened to control the pipes that delivered attention at scale. The broadcast era sold one version of this arrangement. The algorithmic era sells another.
Sanctions, Drones, and Fuel Shortages: Economic Coercion as a Tool in the Russia-Ukraine War
The Russia-Ukraine war has become a live experiment in economic coercion. Sanctions and drone strikes have squeezed Russia’s fuel sector—export revenues down 14 percent, refinery capacity offline at 21-year lows, gasoline production covering only 65 percent of domestic demand. The pain is real.
Dollar Dominance and De-dollarization: The Future of the Reserve Currency
The dollar is not dying. But the system built around it may be quietly hollowing out from the inside — and that distinction matters more than almost anything else in the current debate about global monetary order. Here is the tension I kept returning to while moderating this week's discussion: the headline number everyone cites, the dollar's fifty-seven percent share of global official reserves, is probably the least important metric in the entire debate.
Research
View All →AI Training Data and Copyright: Ownership, Compensation, and the Press
Courts have now ruled AI training on copyrighted books to be "spectacularly transformative" fair use in two major U.S. decisions, but the NYT-led coalition's sanctions motion — alleging OpenAI destroyed evidence of how journalism was used in training — could reshape that picture if spoliation is proven, since the core evidentiary problem is that even OpenAI's engineers cannot reliably trace which content drove which model behaviors. OpenAI is simultaneously licensing content from AP, Axel Springer, the Financial Times, News Corp, and Le Monde while contesting the NYT lawsuit, revealing a dual strategy that raises an unresolved distributional question: if training is lawful fair use, why pay some publishers and not others? The deepest tension the briefing surfaces is not doctrinal but structural — whether the right remedy for journalism's compounding economic crisis is copyright litigation, collective licensing, statutory levies, or equity deals remains genuinely contested, and the experiences of small and mid-size publishers, who make up most of the press ecosystem, are almost entirely absent from the evidence base.
The End of the Monoculture: Cultural Fragmentation and Shared Identity
Streaming has structurally displaced broadcast media — now 44.8% of US TV usage versus broadcast and cable combined — but the social consequences remain genuinely contested: fragmentation may broaden cultural exposure or merely substitute one algorithmic monoculture for another, and whether social cohesion requires shared cultural content or only shared institutions is a values dispute that data alone cannot settle. The old broadcast monoculture is simultaneously mourned as lost civic glue and indicted as an exclusionary cartel, with non-Western scholars adding that its decline often represents reclamation rather than loss — a tension the briefing maps but does not resolve. Critical causal questions remain open: longitudinal evidence on whether transnational fan communities can substitute for cross-class solidarity, and whether media fragmentation independently drives institutional trust decline or merely tracks economic insecurity and partisan sorting, are both absent from the current literature.
Sanctions, Drones, and Fuel Shortages: Economic Coercion as a Tool in the Russia-Ukraine War
Western sanctions and Ukrainian drone strikes have measurably degraded Russia's refining capacity — now at 21-year lows — and cut export revenues, but Russia has offset much of this through shadow tankers, deep discounts to India and China, and domestic rationing, producing the core tension of the briefing: economic damage is real and documented, yet has not translated into strategic concession. The central dispute is whether this represents the "sanctions paradox" — where authoritarian regimes absorb pain without changing behavior — or cumulative cost-imposition that is slowly eroding Russia's long-term war-financing capacity, a question the evidence cannot yet resolve. A critical gap the briefing flags but cannot fill is who inside Russia actually bears the fuel shortages: whether costs fall on military logistics or on peripheral workers and low-income households has direct implications for assessing both the strategic effectiveness and the ethical weight of this form of coercion.