Hugin & Munin Journal

Editorial image generated by the author. When Ursula von der Leyen proposed “opening the door” for Canada to become the European Union’s first “associate member” in her September 2026 State of the Union address , the phrase sounded more constitutional than it actually was. The EU treaties contain no category called associate membership, and Canada cannot use the ordinary accession route under Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union , which allows a “European State” to apply for membership. What Brussels eventually puts behind the label may amount to little more than an unusually deep partnership. The awkwardness of the phrase nevertheless points towards a larger possibility. Europe already integrates countries economically, legally and strategically without making them EU members. Canada could become the test of whether those arrangements can be turned from a patchwork of exceptions into a recognisable institutional model: an outer layer of European integration that is d...

Warnings that ChatGPT is making us less intelligent have become increasingly common. Students can generate essays without learning to write them. Workers can ask a model to construct arguments they have barely examined. One much-discussed MIT experiment found weaker patterns of measured brain connectivity among people writing essays with an LLM than among those working unaided. Editorial image generated by the author. There is a real problem here, but “using AI” is too broad a category to explain it. Someone who encounters a difficult question, asks ChatGPT for the answer and copies what appears on screen is doing something cognitively different from someone who starts with a hypothesis, uses an LLM to locate research, asks it to construct the strongest counterargument, checks the underlying evidence and revises the hypothesis accordingly. Both are using the same technology, but only one is necessarily outsourcing the thinking the exercise was supposed to develop. Th...

Morning Star begins with Darrow in ruins. Across Red Rising and Golden Son , he has learned to infiltrate the Society, manipulate its rules and break increasingly large pieces of its political order. Pierce Brown’s third Red Rising novel gives him a harder problem: what happens when destruction starts working? Darrow has already proved that he can inspire people, build alliances and win loyalty. What he has not proved is that any of those things can survive the collapse of the system around them. He knows how to turn the Society’s assumptions against it, win battles that should be unwinnable and force events forward before his enemies can recover. But a revolution eventually reaches the point where breaking the old order is no longer enough. Someone has to decide what comes afterwards, and Brown makes sure Darrow discovers how difficult that is. Poor Darrow. Spoiler note: This review discusses Darrow’s situation after Golden Son , the broad themes and character arcs of Morning ...

Official promotional image for Slow Horses Season 1. Apple TV+ promotional material, used for review and commentary. Adapted from Mick Herron’s first Slough House novel , Apple TV+’s six-episode first season of Slow Horses begins by presenting River Cartwright as the kind of young MI5 agent who normally anchors a spy thriller. He is ambitious, physically capable and racing through an airport during a counterterrorism training exercise that is rapidly going wrong. The sequence appears designed to establish his credentials. Instead, it ends his career. River is sent to Slough House, the neglected office where MI5 deposits officers it cannot quite dismiss. Its inhabitants—the “slow horses”—have embarrassed the Service, antagonised the wrong superior, made serious mistakes or simply become professionally inconvenient. They receive tedious assignments in the apparent hope that boredom and humiliation will eventually persuade them to resign. The cleverness of the pre...

Official promotional image for Reacher Season 4. Used for review and commentary. Reacher Season 4 is darker, more complicated and considerably more violent than the three seasons before it. It is also, strangely, less tense. Alan Ritchson's Jack Reacher faces more enemies, absorbs more punishment and spends more time being hunted, yet all that escalation increasingly reveals the protection built into the character rather than making him feel vulnerable. I have found myself liking each successive season of Reacher a little less than the one before it. That sounds harsher than it really is, because the starting point was unusually high. Season 1 remains one of the better television adaptations of a popular thriller series I can remember: confident, contained and remarkably clear about what kind of show it wanted to be. Season 4, adapted from Lee Child's Gone Tomorrow , is still highly watchable. But it pushes both sides of Reacher's appeal—the almost su...

Editorial image generated by the author. Germany’s Brandmauer is the political norm that keeps the Alternative für Deutschland outside normal coalition politics. Other parties can compete with it and try to win back its voters, but cooperation is supposed to remain beyond the pale. The principle is understandable, particularly in a country where the boundaries of democratic politics carry unusual historical weight. It has not made the AfD disappear. In the 2025 federal election the party received 20.8 per cent of the vote, almost exactly twice its 2021 share. Sweden operated a looser version of the same strategy for much of the period after the Sweden Democrats entered parliament in 2010. SD grew until it received 20.54 per cent in 2022 and became the second-largest party in the Riksdag. In the 2026 election , however, its share fell to 17.48 per cent and 62 seats. Exclusion is therefore not a simple one-way ratchet either: SD remains a major party, but its growth...