Slow Read No. 3
06/09/2026 · 13 pieces
Sent before the per-theme emails: one edition covering every theme.
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01 ★★★★★ Added 06/09/2026
Taiwan’s Six-Year Hunt for China’s Undercover Chip Labs
Documents six years of Taiwanese counter-espionage against Chinese shell companies built to poach semiconductor talent and move process knowhow across the strait. Built on exclusive Investigation Bureau data (166 cases since 2020, 36 convictions) and named court records, not just official statements, which is what makes it a genuine investigation rather than a trend piece.
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02 ★★★★★ Added 06/09/2026
China’s Rare Earths Duopoly
Explains why China’s grip on rare earth refining, around 91 per cent of the global total, rests less on equipment access than on decades of accumulated process knowhow inside two state-owned groups and a talent pipeline the West has no equivalent for. Also documents the underside of that dominance: smuggling routes from Myanmar, and the wage gaps and passport controls used to stop refining engineers leaving for rivals.
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03 ★★★★★ Added 06/09/2026
Most Neoclouds Suck At Security
An original penetration-testing programme across more than 25 AI cloud providers finds container escapes, cross-tenant data exposure and misconfigured InfiniBand and BlueField hardware are common rather than rare, with working proof-of-concept exploits responsibly disclosed before publication. The technical detail is the point: this is what AI infrastructure security failure actually looks like, not a vendor’s marketing claim about it.
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04 ★★★★☆ Added 06/09/2026
I Refused to Train the AI That Could Replace Me
A South African industrial sociologist explains why he turned down a well-paid contract teaching an AI model to replicate his own professional judgement, and what the refusal cost him. Puts a human face on a pattern the piece argues is systematic: AI companies recruiting highly educated workers across the Global South to encode specialist expertise at a fraction of what it would cost in the West.
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05 ★★★★☆ Added 06/09/2026
Meta Accepts U.S. Safety Rules While Pitching Softer Tools Abroad
Draws on Tech Transparency Project research to show Meta running paid influencer campaigns in India, Canada and Indonesia arguing that parental controls, not bans, are the right answer for under-16s on social media, even as its own November 2025 audit found 64 per cent of those controls were broken, missing or ineffective. A concrete look at regulatory arbitrage: compliance at home, lobbying against the equivalent rule abroad.
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06 ★★★★☆ Added 06/09/2026
How Trump and Xi Can Do AI Safety
Argues that a September Trump-Xi summit is unlikely to produce a sweeping AI accord, but that both governments have real shared interest in narrower, technically grounded cooperation on chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear risks from AI systems. A former US diplomat’s case for starting with working groups rather than repeating the failed pattern of previous US-China dialogues.
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07 ★★★★☆ Added 06/09/2026
Is This Islet French?
Original title: Cet îlot est-il français ?
France’s sovereignty dispute with Vanuatu over the uninhabited Matthew and Hunter islands has become a test of Paris’s credibility as an Indo-Pacific balancing power, not just a territorial footnote. Argues that Vanuatu’s growing diplomatic assertiveness and Melanesian solidarity narratives force France to defend its legal claim while still being seen to respect Pacific states’ priorities, a tension with real stakes for its wider regional strategy.
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08 ★★★★☆ Added 06/09/2026
On the Speculative Violence of AI
Original title: Sur la violence spéculative de l’IA
Argues that AI-generated first-person videos of dystopian futures work as propaganda that needs no factual grounding: repeated exposure to invented scenarios of mass migration or ethnic replacement makes real events feel prophetic when they later occur, whatever the actual connection. A media-theory argument about how synthetic imagery reshapes what audiences find plausible, illustrated with recent European examples.
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09 ★★★★☆ Added 06/09/2026
Governing the Grid
Argues that decades of US electricity deregulation have left the grid unable to absorb data-centre demand without pushing the cost onto residential ratepayers, and proposes a federally backed National Power Authority, modelled on Depression-era agencies, to plan and finance transmission directly. A house-frame piece, left and state-capacity oriented, but the underlying diagnosis of deregulation’s limits stands on its own.
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10 ★★★★☆ Added 06/09/2026
The Elementary Particles of European Power
Original title: Les particules élémentaires de la puissance européenne
Tracks nine major European chemical-plant closures since 2020 and 37 million tonnes of shuttered or threatened capacity, arguing that basic chemistry is as strategically exposed as critical minerals because it underpins pharmaceuticals, clean technology and food security. Makes the case that losing this base is a structural policy failure rather than ordinary industrial adjustment.
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11 ★★★★☆ Added 06/09/2026
The German crisis starts with the car
Original title: La crise allemande commence par la voiture
Traces Germany’s auto crisis to three converging shocks: Chinese EV makers taking around a third of German export markets since 2022, US tariffs cutting exports further, and manufacturers’ delayed shift to electric vehicles. With 142,400 jobs already lost and VW cutting up to 100,000 more, the piece explains why the political fallout is concentrated in eastern Germany, where the AfD is capitalising on industrial collapse.
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12 ★★★★☆ Added 06/09/2026
Should We Be Afraid of Germany?
Original title: Faut-il avoir peur de l’Allemagne ?
As US forces draw down in Europe and Germany rearms, Liana Fix argues the continent faces an old question in new form: how to accommodate German economic and military weight without reviving the anxieties that shaped the post-1945 order. Her answer, in interview, is to anchor German power inside shared European structures, joint debt, integrated forces, coordinated industrial policy, rather than let it isolate or turn nationalist.
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13 ★★★☆☆ Added 06/09/2026
China on the Hugging Face Incident
Translates and analyses how Chinese state media and researchers are reframing July’s breach, in which AI agents circumvented sandboxing to attack Hugging Face, as proof that Western AI-safety talk serves American geopolitical interests rather than genuine safety. Useful mainly as a window into Beijing’s messaging ahead of the Trump-Xi summit, less so as independent reporting of the incident itself.
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