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Ukraine, Hormuz and the New Meaning of European Energy Security

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Editorial image generated by the author. Wars are terrible ways to discover that an economic system contains a design flaw. Europe has been forced to learn two versions of the same energy lesson in four years. Ukraine exposed the danger of depending on the wrong supplier. The conflict around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz exposes the vulnerability that remains even after better suppliers are found. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated how dependence on a hostile state for essential energy could become a strategic liability almost overnight. Europe responded by cutting Russian imports, buying gas elsewhere, building LNG infrastructure and accelerating investment in renewables, grids, efficiency and electrification. Hormuz presents a different problem. Much of the oil and gas passing through the strait comes from states that have no intention of using energy as a weapon against Europe, yet a regional conflict can still interrupt supply and drive up prices thousands of kilometres...
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The Mistral Paradox: Why Europe's AI Funding Gap Runs Deeper Than Money

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Europe has the researchers to build competitive AI. The harder question is why it struggles to turn that capability into companies with the resources to compete at global scale. On 6 October 2026, the French AI company Mistral unveiled Mistral Large 4 , a roughly one-trillion-parameter model trained from scratch on just 3,800 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs in European data centres. According to Mistral, its mixture-of-experts architecture activates around 52 billion parameters at a time. As of 10 October, the model was available in public preview, with downloadable weights announced for later in the month. Early independent results were striking: Artificial Analysis gave it a score of 38 on its Intelligence Index, placing it among the strongest models developed outside the United States and China. It is not the world's strongest general-purpose model. Several Chinese alternatives remain ahead on important measures, and strong benchmark results do not automatically translate into...
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Chimes at Midnight by Seanan McGuire: Making Faerie Fairer

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Cover image: Chimes at Midnight by Seanan McGuire, published by DAW Books. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Faerie is not fair. It has never pretended to be, and in Seanan McGuire's Chimes at Midnight , October Daye increasingly finds herself asking why everyone else has tolerated that unfairness for so long. Faerie is beautiful, ancient and governed by rules, but rules are not the same thing as justice. Purebloods live for centuries. Changelings occupy an uncomfortable space between worlds. Power is inherited more often than earned, and those who possess it have had a very long time to become comfortable with arrangements that work rather well for them. Toby, naturally, is having none of it. By oak and ash, she may die trying, but she seems increasingly determined to make Faerie at least slightly fairer than she found it. Somewhere around Chimes at Midnight , an awkward question becomes difficult to ignore: why does it always have to be Toby? ...
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When Nobody Knows How It Works Anymore: AI, Cognitive Offloading and Lost Expertise

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Editorial image generated by the author. In 1958, Leonard Read published a peculiar little economics essay called I, Pencil . Its narrator was an ordinary wooden pencil, and its central boast was that no single person knew how to make it . That sounds, at first, remarkably like one of the anxieties now surrounding artificial intelligence. We increasingly rely on systems whose workings we do not fully understand while handing them tasks we once had to perform ourselves. Eventually, perhaps, we forget how. But I, Pencil was not a warning about lost knowledge. It was an argument for the enormous productive power of not knowing everything. The wood, graphite, lacquer, metal and machinery involved in making a pencil depend on different people possessing different pieces of knowledge. Nobody has to understand the entire process for the process to work. That makes the pencil a better starting point for thinking about AI than it first appears. The problem is not that arti...
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Slow Horses Season 2 Review: The Cold War Refuses to Stay Buried

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Official promotional image for Slow Horses Season 2. Apple TV+ promotional material, used for review and commentary. Season one of Slow Horses asked what happens to intelligence officers MI5 has written off. Season two asks what happens when MI5 has written off the past. Adapted from Dead Lions , the second of Mick Herron’s Slough House novels , Apple TV+’s six-episode second season begins with the death of a former agent and a warning about Russian “cicadas”: sleeper agents planted in Britain during the Cold War and left dormant until they are needed. What looks at first like an old spy following an old suspicion expands into several connected investigations, concealed identities and political schemes. The sleeper-agent plot brings the series’ Cold War inheritance closer to the surface, but its real advance lies elsewhere. The slow horses are no longer merely proving that they retain useful skills. They are discovering that a correct conclusion does not compensa...
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Starlink Mobile Is Building the Cellular Network Backwards

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SpaceX's latest spectrum deal has unnerved America's mobile operators. The threat is not that satellites will make cell towers obsolete, but that a company starting with the satellite layer might need a different mix of towers, spectrum and capital to compete. On 9 October 2026, America's biggest mobile operators suffered a remarkable sell-off. T-Mobile fell by roughly 13%, AT&T by nearly 10%, and Verizon by almost 9%. Across the same trading session, shares in the companies that own mobile towers rose sharply. Crown Castle gained about 16%, American Tower more than 9%, and SBA Communications more than 7%. The contrasting reactions, documented in Reuters' account of the sell-off , were responses to the same development. The previous day, SpaceX had announced an agreement to buy Grain Management's nationwide portfolio of 800 MHz mobile spectrum, a deal reportedly worth around $8 billion. Grain's announcement confirmed that the sale remained subject to a...
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