The End of Hypocrisy with Martha Finnemore

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, “a high-tech terrorist.”

More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs

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Other Writing:

Essay

Large Language Models Will Upend Human Rituals – with Marion Fourcade

ARTHUR C. CLARKE wrote a story in which the entire universe was created so that monks could ritually write out the nine billion names of God. The monks buy a computer to do this faster and better, with unfortunate consequences for the rest of us. The story’s last sentence: “Overhead, without any fuss, the stars ...
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Essay

A More Imperfect Union: On the European Central Bank

How a central bank created to exist apart from politics got drawn into bitter political arguments. In September, the European Central Bank announced that it had taken decisions on a “number of technical features regarding the Eurosystem’s outright transactions in secondary sovereign bond markets.” The ECB did all it could to make these decisions sound ...
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