Perpetua Vink had been educated in Lancre, which is not something that happens to a person so much as something that is done to them. Her teacher was Mistress Esmerelda Weatherwax, of whom it was said, mostly at a safe distance, that she was the greatest witch on the Disc, and who held that the craft came down to two t…

A state can keep a Holocaust museum and defend a man whose signature sits on a 1941 order concentrating Jewish people into a ghetto, and Lithuania does both without apparent strain. The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum in Vilnius runs a permanent exhibition on the murder of the country’s Jewish people. In the same years,…

The agent has been doing this for eight months. It reads approved tickets, renders them into firewall configuration, verifies the result against intent, and closes the loop. It is good at the job: faster than the network team it replaced, and it does not mistype an address at the end of a long shift. A change ticket ar…

Inside the same problem ended with a person doing the comparing: for example, an analyst who takes what the systems report, holds it against what is actually happening, and decides which of the two to believe. Route around that job in one place and it reappears in another. So the obvious next proposal: give the compari…

Cassie Kozyrkov’s question is a good one: if machines now do the doing, what is left for leadership? Her answer is attention. Leadership becomes the design of what machines notice, optimise and repeat. That is a useful shift. It becomes more interesting if Ashby’s law and Lewin’s field theory are read a little more lit…

Consider a medieval castle. It is tempting to imagine that its security rested on the thickness of its walls, and that a besieging army faced essentially one problem, repeated: get past the stone. But that is not how a defended position worked, and the people who built them knew it. A castle was arranged so that every …

A medieval city was never secured by its wall alone. It had guilds that vouched for their members, letters of introduction carried from town to town, gate guards who knew faces, innkeepers who noticed accents, and neighbours who registered a stranger in the lane before any official did. The wall was one instrument amon…

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 ki…

Organised violence tends to appear where the substrate makes it the higher-return move, and to recede where it does not. That is one way to read the origins of war. Inverted, the same reading yields a second claim, less obvious and more useful. If war is what the ground rewards under some conditions, then peace is what…

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 …