Brexit and the Northern Irish Border

A new fight has been brewing over the consequences of Brexit for the border between Northern Ireland and the neighboring Republic of Ireland. Both British and EU negotiators have identified the border as one of the key political questions that have to be addressed early on in negotiations. It’s easy not to have a border between two states that are both part of the EU’s single market (the regulatory regime that allows easy trade across the EU) and customs union (the arrangement under which European states do not impose customs duties on each other and maintain a common

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Essay

Count the Costs of Cutting Technological Ties with China

The result of all this is that policy discourse about the United States, China,and technology has careened from one pathology to another: The cheeryglobalism of a decade ago has given way to today’s diffuse paranoia. Nowthe national security conversation is almost exclusively focused on theimpossible task of severing the ties of technological interdependence,with the only ...
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Academic Article

Bias, Skew and Search Engines Suffice to Explain Online Toxicity – with Cosma Shalizi

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi (2024), “Bias, Skew and Search Engines Suffice to Explain Online Toxicity,” Communications of the ACM, preprint, 67,4:25-28. U.S. political discourse seems to have fissioned into discrete bubbles, each reflecting its owndistorted image of the world. Many blame machine-learning algorithms that purportedly maximize“engagement” — serving up content that keeps YouTube or ...
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