Slow Read No. 9
12/10/2026 · 25 pieces
Sent before the per-theme emails: one edition covering every theme.
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01 ★★★★★ Added 12/10/2026
Xi and Trump in the Eye of the Storm
Original title: Xi et Trump dans l’œil du cyclone
Argues that the warmth of Xi Jinping’s recent Washington visit conceals a rivalry that has simply moved from tariffs to the infrastructure underneath the global economy: critical minerals, chips, AI and the dollar’s monetary plumbing. Traces the shift to domestic US pressures such as inflation and a falling labour share, and to China’s new five-year plan, which makes technological self-sufficiency the explicit goal.
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02 ★★★★★ Added 12/10/2026
Can AI automate AI R&D yet?
Epoch AI’s InnovationEval tests whether frontier models can independently devise a machine learning technique that matches one researchers already built by hand, and finds Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol reaching only 2 and 15 per cent of the original’s performance after correcting for selective reporting. A clean, well-controlled result against the claim that AI can already automate its own research pipeline.
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03 ★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 12/10/2026
European defence against the national bureaucratic-industrial complex
Original title: La défense européenne face au complexe bureaucratique-industriel national
Argues Europe’s defence build-up is held back less by money or political will than by a “national bureaucratic-industrial barrier”: EU-level decisions get diluted once they hit national budgets and procurement, leaving under 20 per cent of equipment bought through joint purchasing. Proposes five concrete levers, including a credible EU defence budget through 2034 and steering national procurement toward European cooperation, rather than another statement of intent.
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04 ★★★★★ Added 12/10/2026
Marco Rubio invents Trump's West
Original title: Marco Rubio invente l’Occident de Trump
Dissects Marco Rubio’s Athens speech as the foundational text of an emerging “Trump doctrine”, which casts the West as a conquering civilisation running from Athens and Rome to Washington, forced to choose open national power or decline. Argues the speech’s reading of Greek history is shaky and its Straussian frame favours aristocratic excellence over democratic heritage, and links it to a deeper convergence between American and Russian-aligned nationalist currents.
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05 ★★★★★ Added 12/10/2026
Eurosclerosis or US Decline?
Picks apart the claims of European economic decline relative to the US, made by figures from Jamie Dimon to the Draghi report, arguing nominal exchange-rate comparisons and inconsistent price adjustments do most of the work in the pessimistic numbers. Accepts a moderate relative productivity slip but finds no evidence of a decisive loss of competitive position, and argues for far more care in how these cross-country comparisons get made.
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06 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
Russian economy: one in three companies in the country is loss-making
Original title: Économie russe : une entreprise du pays sur trois est déficitaire
Rosstat data for the first seven months of 2026 show a third of Russian firms now running at a loss, with profits down 16 per cent year on year, as borrowing costs above 20 per cent and a VAT rise to 22 per cent squeeze firms that cannot pass costs on to weak demand. Oil, gas and pharmaceuticals are the exceptions, posting gains while metals, finance and coal post the sharpest losses.
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07 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
Did Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centres weaken Russian troll farms?
Original title: Les frappes ukrainiennes sur des centres de données de Yandex ont-elles affaibli les fermes à trolls russes ?
Tests the claim that Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex data centres this week disrupted Russian disinformation operations, and finds the evidence thin: the Cloudflare traffic drop cited as proof is dominated by crawler bots, not propaganda accounts. Honest about the limits of what can be verified, which is rarer on this subject than the strikes themselves.
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08 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
What the diesel deal between Trump and Putin conceals
Original title: Ce que cache l’accord sur le diesel entre Trump et Poutine
Reads the new US-Russia diesel deal, billed as relief for American pump prices, as a minor trade dwarfed by Russia’s normal export volumes and a refinery sector running at 60 per cent capacity. The more durable effect, it argues, is political: normalising Washington-Moscow relations while pressuring Kyiv, which has agreed to stop striking Russian refineries in exchange for a pause on Russian strikes against Ukraine’s energy grid.
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09 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
US adults are no more likely to face cyber incidents than when Claude Fable 5 launched
Two Epoch AI/Ipsos surveys of US adults, three months apart, find no statistically detectable rise in people reporting a cyber incident even among heavy AI users, despite rising AI capabilities and vulnerability disclosures over the same period. Useful as a check on the gap between capability headlines and measured real-world harm, though it only captures what people notice, not what actually happened to them.
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10 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
Conflict in the Red Sea is forcing cloud giants to find a new route for the internet
Reports that Google, Meta and Microsoft are paying premium rates for backup land routes as fighting near Yemen threatens the undersea cables that carry internet traffic between Europe and Asia through the Red Sea. A concrete case of a regional conflict reshaping the physical infrastructure of the global cloud, not just shipping and oil.
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11 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
As U.S. blocks DJI, Insta360 races to win American creators
Reports how Insta360 and its drone brand Antigravity are gaining ground among American creators as clearer US rules against DJI create an opening, with Insta360’s cameras and drones now harder to avoid at the point where DJI used to dominate. A concrete look at how an export ban reshapes a market rather than just restricting one company.
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12 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
How do Chinese AI companies make money?
Finds China’s six leading AI firms together earn roughly a tenth of what OpenAI and Anthropic pull in combined, with open-weight releases eroding the pricing power of firms that rely on API sales. Argues Alibaba and ByteDance likely do better than their AI revenue alone suggests, since cloud compute and advertising that AI supports are harder to measure separately.
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13 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
Who is most exposed to a chip supply shock?
Epoch AI’s modelling finds China more exposed than the US to a combined Taiwan chip-supply shock and China-West trade decoupling, mainly because chips make up a larger share of the cost of what China imports. The exact margin is uncertain, but China comes out worse in every version of the model the authors tested.
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14 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
Can AI automate Epoch?
Epoch AI turns its own research process into a test case, finding that frontier models such as Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra handle well-defined coding and analysis tasks reliably but fall down on open-ended work: learning house standards, designing informative experiments, judging flawed results. A rare instance of an AI research outfit testing whether the technology could already do its own job, and concluding it cannot.
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15 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
Why don't Russia's elites turn against Putin?
Original title: Pourquoi les élites russes ne se retournent-elles pas contre Poutine ?
Argues Russia’s elite lost the channels to push back on Kremlin decisions well before 2022, so loyalty to Putin now reflects a rational survival strategy rather than genuine support. Makes the sharper point that sanctions on individuals punish their positions without offering any route to relief, deepening their dependence on the regime rather than creating pressure for change.
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16 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
Xi Jinping and the Problem of Heaven
Original title: Xi Jinping et le problème du Ciel
Traces how Xi Jinping’s China has revived tianxia, the old idea of a unified world order under one authority, fusing imperial heritage, Confucianism and communism after the concept lost out to the nation-state model a century ago. Surveys the Chinese thinkers building a philosophical case for this order and the domestic critics who warn it curdles into nationalism or empire, and notes the regime’s talk of harmony sits oddly against its intolerance of dissent at home.
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17 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
The Spice Trader vs. the Tariffs
Interviews the co-founder of a small spice importer now suing over tariffs imposed under a trade statute, Section 301, he argues was never designed for this use, with forced-labour justifications that do not track actual labour-risk data by country. A rare worm’s-eye view of how sweeping tariff powers land on a bootstrapped business still waiting 12 to 18 months for its case to clear the courts while the tariffs keep getting collected.
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18 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
Beijing Will Not Pace the Frontier: China’s Speed-First AI Safety Regime
Argues China’s AI safety rhetoric is some of the most forward-leaning of any government on paper, but its practice is speed-first: only 3.6 per cent of releases in the authors’ dataset come with a published safety evaluation, and regulation targets applications rather than frontier model capability itself. Paywalled beyond the opening section, but the data point alone is worth having.
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19 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
Zhejiang, Xi Jinping's Laboratory
Original title: Le Zhejiang, laboratoire de Xi Jinping
Traces how Zhejiang became Xi Jinping’s testing ground for national policy since 2023, piloting initiatives in technology, rural renewal and “common prosperity” that sometimes spread nationwide, with Party-state direction doing as much work as private enterprise. Concludes most provinces cannot actually replicate the model, given regional wealth gaps and the property slump, so it works better as inspiration than template.
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20 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
Trump wants to reduce the American press to vassalage
Original title: Trump veut vassaliser la presse américaine
Argues Trump’s second-term pressure on the press works through the structural conditions that make journalism possible, White House accreditation, broadcast licence threats, lawsuits and mergers that leave media owners dependent on Washington’s goodwill, rather than through insults alone. Sets this against the American tradition, from Montesquieu’s view of the press as a check on power to Jefferson and Madison’s case for an informed public, and warns that concentrated ownership and the decline of local papers are the deeper risk.
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21 ★★★★☆ Added 12/10/2026
After the Ordeal of Proof
Original title: Après l’épreuve de la preuve
Eva Illouz compares the Dreyfus affair, where verifiable documents eventually shifted minds, with today’s debate over whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide, arguing the latter has outrun legal standards of proof and now runs on fragmented media and identity instead. Concludes that truth and justice have come apart, so the word now functions as a political rallying cry rather than a legal or moral finding. A demanding essay on a genuinely contested question; no comparably rigorous piece arguing the opposing case turned up in this week’s sweep.
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22 ★★★☆☆ Added 12/10/2026
What Time Is It on the Moon?
Original title: Quelle heure est-il sur la Lune ?
The US and China are about to put competing lunar time standards to a vote at this week’s Versailles metrology conference, each backing its own system for a Moon whose weaker gravity already runs clocks 56 microseconds a day faster than Earth’s. A small, concrete case of two powers setting rival technical standards for a frontier neither fully controls yet.
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23 ★★★☆☆ Added 12/10/2026
Not just AI. China is building technologies that challenge U.S. dominance
Adapted from Steve Feldstein’s book “Bytes and Bullets”, the piece argues China’s technology challenge to the US runs well beyond AI, into batteries, solar, drones and satellites, where Chinese firms already hold manufacturing and cost advantages. Useful for breadth, though it is a book excerpt rather than independent reporting, so treat the framing as the author’s own case.
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24 ★★★☆☆ Added 12/10/2026
Anthropic Subscriptions Offer 5x+ More Value Than OpenAI
Argues that subscription plans matter disproportionately for AI lab margins despite being a small share of revenue, because they are heavily subsidised, and that a plan’s real value depends on the specific model and workload rather than the headline price. Finds Anthropic’s current plans give noticeably more value than OpenAI’s since OpenAI tightened its top-tier usage limits.
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25 ★★★☆☆ Added 12/10/2026
The new class struggle will be a struggle between generations
Original title: La nouvelle lutte des classes sera une lutte des générations
In this interview, Pierre Rosanvallon argues generational conflict is replacing class struggle as the organising divide in politics, as short-termism lets today’s voters push the costs of public debt and pension promises onto people who cannot yet vote. Ties the argument to his new book and to citizens’ assemblies as one model for institutions built to think past the next election.
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