Humans have probably always killed one another. Warfare is something narrower. It implies groups, planning, logistics, memory, leadership, and enough social organisation that violence stops being a personal act and becomes a collective institution. The interesting question is not when humans first killed. It is when killing acquired administration. Ask that question and a small crowd of theories turns up, each with its own literature, its own favourite dig site, and its own conviction that the others have missed the point. The Hobbesians say war is ancient. The Rousseauians say civilisation invented it. The circumscription theorists say geography did. The economists point at surplus, the anthropologists at prestige, the international relations scholars at the security dilemma. Each theory has evidence. Each has counterexamples. The usual response is to pick a champion and treat the rest as noise. ...

At eight in the evening on 31 August 1939, a small team in Polish uniforms seized a radio transmitter at Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia and broadcast a few minutes of anti-German agitation. By the following morning the event had a name, an author, and a consequence: a Polish provocation, answered by the invasion that began the Second World War in Europe. The name held for six years. The finding out took until December 1945, when the sworn affidavit of the SS officer who ran the operation was read into the record at Nuremberg, complete with the code name for the murdered prisoner left at the scene. ...

Reading the Substrate argued that analysis of conflict tends to read a story first and the ground beneath it late, and that the ordering is often backwards in its emphasis: ideas set a conflict’s direction, conditions set its reach. That was a claim using looking backwards, about explaining wars that have already happened. A fair question is whether the same method survives being turned around to face forward. If conditions set reach, can a reading of conditions say anything useful about what comes next? ...

By the time a clash in the central Sahel reaches a wire service, it has already been given its name: a jihadist attack, or ethnic violence between Fulani herders and settled farmers, with the dead counted under one heading or the other. What rarely travels with the dispatch is the thing underneath it: a rainy season that arrived late or not at all, a grazing corridor quietly ploughed under for cropland, a herd pushed a hundred kilometres further south than the route it followed a decade ago, into country that was never its own. The label arrives first. The condition that produced it, if it arrives at all, arrives as background colour. Between the two sits a gap, and what falls into it. ...

There have been and are prominant figures whose conduct is usually filed under unpredictability. The word does a lot of work, and most of it is concealment. Unpredictable is what an observer says when a pattern is present but a frame that would catch it has not been picked up. It describes the watcher, not the watched. The interesting question is whether a frame exists that turns the noise into something legible, and what such a frame would have to leave out to manage it. ...

The nuclear analogy is at the moment the most popular frame for thinking about advanced AI, and it is the most comfortable one for the people who built the bomb metaphor’s home institutions. It carries an implicit theory of control: states hold the technology, deterrence holds the states, and a small club of capable powers manages the rest of the world’s exposure. That theory has a long pedigree and a familiar cast. It also, for Europe, leads somewhere worth noticing before the door closes. ...

A law arrives in the language of protection, positioned as a boundary between harm and those exposed to it. What can happen in these moments is less interruption than conversion. The existing practice remains. Its surface becomes clean, its paperwork complete. The activity is now recognisable, regulated, and formally permitted. Once upon a time The practice had been in place for centuries. A worker who left before a contract ended, refused an instruction, or simply failed to appear could be fined, have wages withheld, or be imprisoned with hard labour. A master who broke the same contract, or failed to pay, faced at most a civil claim for damages. Labour was bound. Departure was criminal. ...

A friend who was at HackIT 2026 in Firenze sent me a photograph of a printed handout. Two pages, a bit creased, a faint smear of something on the second one. It was the material for a workshop called Imagining collectivity under oppression, run on the Friday afternoon in Sala M by two people going by Alecs and webbie. I did not attend. So I am reviewing a piece of paper, which is worth saying out loud: a workshop is the room and the people in it, not the script. Most of what follows is about the script. By the end, that gap might be the whole point. ...

Bestuurlijke instrumenten beoordelen toestanden. Een toets, accreditatie of kader stelt vast of iets op een bepaald moment in de juiste staat verkeert, en ontleent zijn waarde aan de aanname dat die toestand stabiel blijft tot het volgende toetsmoment. Dat werkt zolang de eigenschap waar het om gaat berust op een stabiel object: iets dat zich laat aanwijzen, vastleggen en opnieuw onderzoeken. Veel eigenschappen waar beslissingen uiteindelijk over gaan, gedragen zich anders. Ze liggen niet besloten in een object, maar ontstaan in een proces, verhouding of gebruik. En die houden niet stil voor de meting. Dan komt een instrument niet tot een verkeerde conclusie, maar meet het een ander soort eigenschap dan de relevante. Niet omdat het slecht ontworpen is, maar omdat het aangrijpt op iets anders dan waar de relevante eigenschap ontstaat. ...

Any lens explains something. That is the problem with them, not the recommendation. Point a strong enough frame at a situation, and it will find its own pattern there, because a frame is built to find that pattern, and the finding feels like discovery rather than like the frame doing what it was made to do. So the fact that a lens explains a thing is almost no evidence that the lens is the right one. Every lens clears that bar. The question worth asking is narrower and less flattering: what does the situation still leave unexplained after the usual reading has done its work, and which lens, if any, picks that up. ...