Hugin & Munin Journal

Editorial illustration generated by the author. Anthropic's first operating profit, an $80 billion accounting loss, and hundreds of billions in computing commitments reveal a new challenge for artificial intelligence: how much of the future must AI companies buy before they know what it will be worth? Anthropic's October 2026 IPO prospectus presents three numbers that appear difficult to reconcile. In the second quarter, the developer of Claude made nearly $1 billion in operating profit. Across the first half of the year, it reported an $80.7 billion net loss. And according to the Financial Times, its broader computing arrangements involve more than $800 billion of prospective spending extending into the 2040s. Each number is meaningful, but each measures a different kind of financial exposure. The loss largely reflects changes in the value of financing instruments rather than cash consumed by operations. The quarterly profit reflects a genuine improvement in the economics of...

Cover image: The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature , first published in 1993, begins with one of biology’s strangest problems: why does sex exist at all? Sexual reproduction carries costs. It requires finding a mate, and recombination can break up combinations of genes that have already proved successful. In species with separate sexes, an asexual female can in principle produce only daughters that reproduce in turn, while a sexual female typically produces sons as well: the classic “cost of males.” Yet across much of complex life, evolution keeps paying the price. Ridley’s answer takes him through parasites, peacocks, mate choice, human intelligence, jealousy, beauty and the differences between male and female reproductive strategies. What ties these subjects together is the Red Queen principle: organisms do not evolve against a static environment. Much of thei...

Editorial image generated by the author. If you begin Tamsyn Muir's Harrow the Ninth shortly after finishing Gideon the Ninth , confusion quickly turns into suspicion. Why is Ortus suddenly Harrow's cavalier at Canaan House? Why does she remember events that plainly did not happen? Why has Gideon Nav—the protagonist of the previous novel—apparently vanished from history? And why is the Emperor's ancient Lyctor, whom the reader knows as Gideon the First, now being called Ortus the First? At some point a perfectly reasonable possibility occurs: did I misunderstand the first book? The answer is no. Harrow the Ninth is not quietly retconning Gideon the Ninth . The reader has been placed inside a version of reality that Harrow herself has made unreliable. The central fact that makes the novel intelligible is this: Harrow has deliberately altered her own brain so that she cannot properly remember, recognise or process Gideon Nav. She believes that making Gi...

Official promotional image for Slow Horses Season 6. Apple TV promotional material, used for review and commentary. By its third episode, Slow Horses Season 6 has its agents running for their lives, and they barely stop until the finale. Yet watching the episodes week by week, I found myself increasingly impatient. The series was never short of danger; what it lacked was the steady accumulation of discoveries that made its earlier conspiracies so absorbing. The change in viewing habits may have contributed to that impression. Most previous seasons passed quickly when watched over a few evenings, while the weekly release exposed the structure of individual episodes. But I suspect the difference runs deeper. The sixth season places more emphasis on immediate danger than on the political and institutional manoeuvring that once made Slow Horses distinctive. The story begins with the deaths of people connected to Slough House, MI5's dumping ground for agents whose...

New research suggests that the brain begins from two distinct developmental systems. The deeper puzzle is why something so biologically composite feels, from the inside, like one self. Editorial image generated by the author. The adult brain is a single organ. A study published in Nature Neuroscience in September 2026 suggests that developmentally, it may not begin that way. Using lineage tracing in mouse embryos alongside experiments with human pluripotent stem cells, researchers found evidence for an anterior neural progenitor population that gives rise to the forebrain and midbrain and a separate posterior population committed to the hindbrain. The authors describe the brain as a “composite organ” formed from two lineage-restricted progenitors . The finding quickly produced a more dramatic formulation. Stanford Medicine announced the research under the headline that the human brain is “two separate organs.” That should not be read as meaning that an adult human possesses tw...