Slow Read No. 10
19/10/2026 · 17 pieces
Sent before the per-theme emails: one edition covering every theme.
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01 ★★★★★ Added 19/10/2026
Foucault's forgotten encounter and geopolitics
Original title: La rencontre oubliée de Foucault et la géopolitique
Recounts, from a participant’s vantage, the 1975 Paris meeting between geographer Yves Lacoste and Michel Foucault that became the founding document of Hérodote the following year. Lacoste pressed Foucault on his limited use of geography despite his spatial metaphors, and the exchange ended with Foucault conceding that power, knowledge, territory and spatial control together amount to a kind of geopolitics. A rare first-hand account of where a discipline’s vocabulary actually came from.
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02 ★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 19/10/2026
Portraits of the Sacrificed Generation of Donbass
Original title: Portraits de la génération sacrifiée du Donbass
An interview with photojournalist Marion Péhée, who has followed a group of teenagers from the town of Chtchastia in Luhansk since 2016. After the Russian occupation the group scattered: some fought for Ukraine, some for Russia, several died. She describes how publishing her earlier photographs now carries real risk for people still in occupied territory. Ten years of access most reporting never gets, on the generation the war actually consumed.
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03 ★★★★★ Added 19/10/2026
Xi's Geopolitical Pivot for Acceleration Lies in Guangxi
Original title: Le pivot géopolitique de l’accélération de Xi se trouve au Guangxi
Traces how Beijing is building Guangxi into a trade corridor to ASEAN, using free-trade rules, rail and port links and the Pinglu canal to compensate for the province’s late start under Cold War-era tensions with Vietnam. The authors go past the strategy document to the balance sheet: a reported 2.4 billion yuan in incentives for Hozon New Energy, later said to have ceased operations, and continuing difficulty attracting foreign capital. Concludes the plan has not yet produced durable industrial gains, which is the part most coverage of China’s regional strategies skips.
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04 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Russian economy: public spending nears OECD average
Original title: Économie russe : les dépenses publiques se rapprochent de la moyenne de l’OCDE
Citing economist Alexandre Isakov, reports Russia’s consolidated public spending at around 39 per cent of GDP in 2025, closing in on the OECD average of 42.6 per cent, driven mainly by a defence budget set to rise 32 per cent by 2027. Isakov warns that crossing 40 per cent of GDP risks crowding out business investment, on top of a profit tax rise to 25 per cent and a VAT rise to 22 per cent already under way. A compact read on what funding the war is actually costing the rest of the Russian economy.
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05 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Beijing prepares an unprecedented control on the export of its AI models
Original title: Pékin prépare un contrôle inédit sur l’exportation de ses modèles d’IA
China’s commerce and science ministries released a draft export-control catalogue on 16 October adding 40 technologies, 23 of them in AI, covering model weights above a performance threshold, AI agents, compute-cluster architecture and sub-14 nanometre chip design. The draft also proposes automatic licensing for open-source releases, but the piece flags a real tension: labs such as DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM and Kimi could be caught by the same rule Beijing says is meant to protect them. Framed by Beijing as security policy rather than a trade weapon, which is itself worth noting.
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06 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Open-weight models trail closed models in cyber capabilities by 6 to 7 months
Epoch’s own Cyber Capabilities Index puts the best open-weight model, Z.ai’s GLM-5.3, above OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 but still six to seven months behind the closed frontier, where Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra are tied. A concrete, regularly updated number for a question usually answered by vibes: how far behind is open-weight AI really, and in which capability.
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07 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
BYD expands EV shipping fleet as wars upend freight costs and key trade routes
Reports that BYD is adding its own car-carrying ships because a global shortage of vessels, worsened by conflict-driven rerouting, is capping how many vehicles it can get out of China. A concrete look at how a carmaker ends up owning shipping capacity rather than buying it, and at war’s second-order effects on an industry that has nothing to do with the fighting itself.
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08 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Western open-weight models still can’t beat China
From a Rest of World San Francisco event, reports experts concluding that Chinese open-weight models now offer strong capability at lower cost than the nearest Western equivalents, even as the labs behind them struggle to turn that lead into revenue. Named, on-record disagreement rather than a single analyst’s take, on a question that keeps getting asserted rather than tested.
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09 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
AI has won the markets, but it is losing global opinion
Original title: L’IA a gagné les marchés, mais elle est en train de perdre l’opinion mondiale
Survey data show 71 per cent of respondents have used an AI tool in the past six months, yet only 18 per cent hold a positive view of it, the lowest trust score of any technology asked about. Respondents favour government authorisation with independent testing over industry self-regulation, which only 7 per cent back. Treats the adoption-versus-trust gap as the actual story, rather than either number alone.
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10 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
ASML Is Building a Hybrid Bonding Tool
Working from patent filings and ASML’s roadmap rather than any company announcement, argues ASML is quietly building a die-to-wafer hybrid bonding tool that would let it compete on alignment accuracy and particle control in advanced packaging, a segment currently led by Besi. Explicitly inference rather than confirmed disclosure, and paywalled past the open questions ASML still has to solve, but the underlying patent reading is the kind of groundwork most chip coverage skips.
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11 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Cognitive vassalisation is an existential threat
Original title: La vassalisation cognitive est une menace existentielle
Argues that Europe’s reliance on US AI platforms is a cognitive, security and linguistic risk, not only a cost line. Its sharper point is about interface design: systems built for maximum ease encourage people to offload thinking, while the friction that protects cognition is commercially unattractive to build. Cites Mistral’s Large 4 as evidence Europe still has a shot, but the argument is that not building is itself a choice that deepens dependence.
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12 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
The French language in the age of total automation
Original title: La langue française à l’ère de l’automatisation intégrale
Achille Mbembe argues French spread through centuries of migration, trade and colonial contact rather than decree, and that African speakers reshaped it as much as they absorbed it. Turns that history against the handful of companies now building AI language tools, which he argues optimise languages for reach and engagement at the cost of nuance. Proposes treating languages as a shared commons rather than a resource, with real ecological and democratic stakes if that fails.
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13 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
The Case for DUV Controls
Saif Khan of the Center for Technology and Statecraft argues that halting exports of deep ultraviolet lithography tools, not the more publicised bans on leading-edge chips, is the lever that actually caps China’s long-run compute. His own modelling puts China’s ceiling at roughly ten million domestically made chips a year by the mid-2030s against a US figure near a billion H100-equivalents, though he flags wide error bars. Worth reading as the strongest case for a specific policy from someone who wants that policy adopted.
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14 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
What if, at bottom, there was nothing in Putin's head?
Original title: Et si, au fond, dans la tête de Poutine il n’y avait rien ?
Russian investigative journalist Roman Badanine, interviewed around his new book on Putin, argues the more useful question is not what Putin believes but what he has actually done, since the gap between his statements and his conduct has become the whole story. Describes a Kremlin system where each concealment requires another to cover it, and reads the war in Ukraine partly as an attempt to rewrite Putin’s own legacy. An author discussing his own book, so treat the framing as his case rather than settled fact.
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15 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Europe has to relearn how to plan
Original title: L’Europe doit réapprendre à planifier
Rejects both standard explanations for China’s lead in electric vehicles, neither subsidies alone nor entrepreneurial culture, and argues the real difference is that Beijing coordinates state and private action across the whole value chain while Europe does not. Treats Europe’s tariffs and local-content rules as symptom management, and argues for a genuinely democratic form of value-chain planning covering minerals, batteries, demand and charging infrastructure. A structural argument rather than a response to this month’s tariff news.
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16 ★★★★☆ Added 19/10/2026
Giorgia Meloni chose to back Kyiv against Trump
Original title: Giorgia Meloni a choisi de soutenir Kiev contre Trump
The full text of Giorgia Meloni’s 14 October address to the Italian Senate ahead of the European Council, on competitiveness, energy costs, the 2028 to 2034 EU budget and migration. Its sharpest section calls the US decision to ease sanctions on Russian diesel very risky and argues Europe must speak with one voice rather than let Washington negotiate around it. The primary text, not an account of it, which is rarer than it should be on this subject.
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17 ★★★☆☆ Added 19/10/2026
Will developing nations be able to handle millions of AI agents?
Asks what happens when Meta’s and OpenAI’s new personal AI agents, trained mostly on wealthy-world data and behaviour, reach markets with different infrastructure, languages and family structures. Short on hard data by Rest of World’s usual standard, but the question itself, whether adoption outruns fit, is one the launch coverage skips entirely.
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