Geopolitics

Veritatis splendor

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Week XIX, MMXXV
It’s not every week that Russia invades a neighboring country, or the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan, or there’s a new pope. But there’s always news. Do you sometimes wonder, though, what exactly news is? We tend to talk about it as if it’s a thing in the world—like the weather—that simply happens, whether we know about it or not. But news is a tricky idea, when you think about it: meaningless apart from the real events it refers to, incomprehensible without understanding it’s also essentially constructed by the people who produce it. That might sound like a philosophical problem, but it’s increasingly a practical one—as news organizations give themselves over more and more to business models that depend on capturing as much of our attention as possible. And you just can’t pay attention to all of it. You literally have better things to do. So we have a rule of thumb: Does it raise a good question?—one you want to be thinking about if you need to be oriented in the world, now or weeks and months from now.

—John Jamesen Gould
The Signal is your loyal guide to a fast-changing world. … This week, in the member’s despatch:
DEVELOPMENTS
‘We have a pope.’ India, Pakistan, and all-out war. & An election surprise in Australia.

+ The U.S. and U.K. announce a trade deal. Germany’s parliament manages to confirm the country’s chancellor, to uncertain effect. & Thinking about the beauty of art seems to help thinking abstractly.
CONNECTIONS
Is Donald Trump making China more popular?
FEATURES
What are the risks of “killer robots” to civilians? Lucy Suchman on the automation of modern warfare.

& Why are people in the United States eating record amounts of meat? Glynn Tonsor on a mysterious outlier trend in the Western world.
BOOKS
From Allison Pugh, on humane labor in an age of automated work; Deborah Davis x Terry Lautz, on how personal encounters have shaped Chinese-American relations; and Wolfgang Münchau, on what happened to the German economy.
MUSIC
From Max Richter, Anthony Naples, and Tenor Saw.

+ What’s dancehall reggae?
WEATHER REPORT
54.4138° S, 36.5827° W …
Open
Getty Images
‘Ring the Alarm’
Tenor Saw, a pioneer of dancehall reggae, was killed in 1988 at the age of only 21 by a hit-and-run in Houston, Texas. In this 1985 track, he became one of the original “singjays”—DJs who sing over instrumental music tracks, or “riddims”—using the backing track “Stalag 17,” which artists in reggae, reggaeton (reggae’s Panamanian / Latin American variant), punk, and hip-hop have since sampled for hundreds of derivative tracks.

What’s dancehall reggae?
From the member’s despatch …
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