Slow Read No. 7
28/09/2026 · 25 pieces
Sent before the per-theme emails: one edition covering every theme.
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01 ★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 28/09/2026
The plunging price of thought
Finds the cost of a fixed unit of AI reasoning has fallen at roughly 47 per cent a quarter since 2023, around 13 times a year, outpacing the decline in the cost of compute or electricity over the same period. The piece isolates capability-adjusted cost rather than raw compute, which is the harder and more useful number for anyone budgeting for AI use over the medium term.
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02 ★★★★★ Added 28/09/2026
South Korea’s AI chip giants are fighting for a bigger role in America’s AI boom
Samsung and SK Hynix between them control 83 per cent of the global memory chip market, and the piece traces how both are manoeuvring for closer supply ties to Nvidia and OpenAI as demand for high-bandwidth memory outstrips the compute story that usually leads AI coverage. Built on named industry sources rather than framed as a nationalist chip-race narrative.
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03 ★★★★★ Added 28/09/2026
The Keys to Houthi Power
Original title: Les clefs de la puissance houthiste
Laurent Bonnefoy argues the Houthi movement’s resilience owes less to Iranian backing than to deep roots in Zaydi tradition, leadership hardened by the 2004–2010 Sa’dah wars, and above all the durable fragmentation of its opponents, still split between Islamists, separatists and rival Gulf-backed factions. A scholarly corrective to the puppet-of-Tehran framing that dominates most coverage of Yemen’s war.
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04 ★★★★★ Added 28/09/2026
The Sánchez Doctrine for Refounding the World Order
Original title: La doctrine Sánchez pour refonder l’ordre mondial
The Spanish prime minister’s own doctrine text, published here in full, argues for reordering multilateral institutions around a multipolar world rather than patching the post-1945 order, across trade, defence and climate governance. A primary source worth reading directly rather than through secondhand coverage of its headline lines.
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05 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Bab el-Mandeb: Houthi control puts European diesel and jet fuel supplies at risk
Original title: Bab el-Mandeb : le contrôle houthiste fait peser un risque sur les approvisionnements européens en diesel et kérosène
Before the 2023 Houthi attacks, the Bab el-Mandeb strait carried 66 per cent of Europe’s jet fuel and 58 per cent of its diesel imports, and Europe has since leaned harder on Gulf refineries even as its own refining capacity has shrunk by around 13 per cent since 2000. Lays out why that leaves Europe structurally unable to offset a prolonged closure by refining more of its own crude.
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06 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Dario Amodei wants to slow AI. China isn’t taking orders
Chinese officials, state media and engineers at MiniMax, DeepSeek and Huawei have publicly dismissed Anthropic’s Dario Amodei’s call to slow frontier AI development, framing it as a bid to lock in American advantage while Chinese labs still trail on raw capability. Named sources on the record rather than a paraphrase of state media sentiment.
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07 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
In Uruguay, techno-libertarians are building a town for the post-AI era
Original title: En Uruguay des techno-libertariens bâtissent une ville pour l’après-IA
Reports on a planned private town in Uruguay, backed by Silicon Valley figures, designed as a haven for a small community betting that advanced AI will make most conventional work and governance obsolete within a decade. Field-reported rather than promotional, including scepticism from Uruguayan officials about the project’s legal and demographic plausibility.
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08 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Chartbook 476: Walled-in wealth #2
Adam Tooze tracks how the composition of the world’s largest fortunes has diverged since 2012: American wealth increasingly concentrated in a handful of tech founders whose net worth rides public markets, against a Chinese billionaire class whose fortunes stay tied to state-linked industrial and property assets. Chart-heavy and historically grounded, though the framing leans toward reading the divergence as a symptom of unequal late-stage capitalism.
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09 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Can China and the United States agree on AI safety?
Original title: La Chine et les États-Unis peuvent-ils s’accorder sur la sécurité de l’IA ?
Weighs whether Beijing and Washington could reach even a narrow bilateral understanding on frontier AI safety testing, against a backdrop of mutual distrust over export controls and military applications. Reads well alongside The Wire China’s interview with Brian Tse below, which argues from the Chinese side that Beijing’s own safety framework is further along than Washington assumes.
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10 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
In Greenland, Europe's strategy to resist Trump has ultimately paid off
Original title: Au Groenland, la stratégie européenne pour résister à Trump a fini par payer
Reviews the EU’s quieter, multi-year strategy of deepening economic and security ties with Greenland and Denmark, arguing it has pre-empted Washington’s periodic pushes to annex or control the island more effectively than any public rebuttal could. A retrospective assessment of a strategy over time rather than a reaction to a single statement.
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11 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Brian Tse on How China Plans to Keep AI Safe
A Q&A with the head of Concordia AI on Beijing’s emerging AI safety architecture, including which international coordination channels China still sees as viable with Washington and which it has written off. Useful as a corrective to coverage that treats Chinese AI governance as an afterthought to the compute race.
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12 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Xi's Great Fear of AI
Original title: La grande peur de Xi face à l’IA
Argues that Beijing’s anxiety about frontier AI is less about being overtaken by the United States than about losing the Party’s own grip on information and social control once AI systems mediate more of daily life. Draws on the sinology desk’s usual method of reading party documents and cadre commentary rather than Western press coverage of China’s AI policy.
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13 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Construction’s Data Center Gamble
Traces how construction firms and their subcontractors are absorbing the financing risk of the data centre building boom, taking on fixed-price contracts against uncertain future demand for the compute those buildings will house. Argues the industry’s own balance sheets, not just hyperscaler capital budgets, are where the AI infrastructure bet could unwind first.
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14 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
A National Champion?
Examines a government’s push to engineer a domestic corporate champion in a strategic industry, and the fiscal and regulatory contortions required to keep that support compatible with trade rules the same government has signed onto. Names the trade-offs rather than treating industrial policy as costless.
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15 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Can Marine Le Pen really break with Putin?
Original title: Marine Le Pen peut-elle vraiment rompre avec Poutine ?
Lou Fritel tests the credibility of Marine Le Pen’s recent distancing from Moscow against two decades of financial and ideological ties between the Rassemblement National and Russian institutions, including the party’s own loan history. Concludes the rupture is more tactical repositioning ahead of 2027 than a genuine doctrinal break.
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16 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Intel Panther Lake Teardown
A physical teardown of Intel’s Panther Lake chip, the first commercial part built on backside power delivery and gate-all-around transistors, finding that Intel’s 18A process does not lead TSMC’s N3P or N2 or Samsung’s SF2 on peak transistor density despite the architectural leap. Dense, component-level analysis rather than a verdict on Intel’s competitive position.
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17 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
America Has Not Yet Surrendered to Trump
Original title: L’Amérique n’a toujours pas cédé à Trump
The antitrust scholar Barry C. Lynn argues that despite two years of pressure, the durable institutions of American federalism, courts and state-level regulators have quietly resisted the more sweeping parts of the Trump administration’s agenda, in ways that rarely make national headlines. A structural account of institutional resilience rather than a running scorecard of any single fight.
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18 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Why Does the Left Like Putin?
Original title: Pourquoi à gauche on aime Poutine ?
Two Russian left-wing exiles explain why a strand of the Western left continues to read Putin’s Russia as an anti-imperialist counterweight to Washington, despite the war in Ukraine, tracing that reading back to a specific Soviet-era anti-Americanism that has outlived the Soviet Union itself. Neither interviewee shares the sympathy they are describing, which keeps the piece analytical rather than polemical.
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19 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
The Emir and the Enlightenment
Original title: L’émir et les Lumières
Mohamed Amer Meziane traces how Gulf ruling families have selectively absorbed Enlightenment-era ideas of sovereignty and reason to legitimise absolute rule, rather than simply resisting them as Western imports. An intellectual history more than a policy piece, useful for reading Gulf state rhetoric with more precision than “modernising autocracy” allows.
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20 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
Xi Descends on DC
An interview with Julian Gewirtz, formerly the Biden National Security Council’s China director, on what Xi Jinping’s state visit protocol reveals about how each side is managing the relationship’s underlying instability. Particularly sharp on how AI policy coordination and succession politics in Beijing are shaping the visit’s substance behind the ceremony.
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21 ★★★★☆ Added 28/09/2026
In Iran, is Khamenei winning the war?
Original title: En Iran, Khamenei est-il en train de gagner la guerre ?
The Iran scholar Vali Nasr argues Tehran already considers itself the winner of the eight-month conflict, since the war has validated Khamenei’s decades-old doctrine of resistance regardless of the military cost, while Washington’s demand for a clear-cut victory leaves it unable to accept anything less than capitulation. He expects further escalation before genuine negotiations, driven as much by Israeli and domestic political pressure as by battlefield logic.
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22 ★★★☆☆ Added 28/09/2026
Russian economy: oil production to fall in 2026 to its lowest level since 2009
Original title: Économie russe : la production de pétrole va tomber en 2026 à son niveau le plus bas depuis 2009
Russian crude output is forecast to fall to 494 million tonnes in 2026, its lowest level since 2009, with seven refineries offline since early September after sustained Ukrainian drone strikes rather than the “scheduled maintenance” Moscow cites. Short, but the specific figures make the sanctions-and-strikes mechanism concrete rather than asserted.
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23 ★★★☆☆ Added 28/09/2026
Europe must regain Africa
Original title: L’Europe doit retrouver l’Afrique
A former Portuguese defence minister argues the EU has ceded African partnerships to China, Russia and Gulf states by treating the continent mainly as a migration and security problem, and sets out where European capital and institutions could still compete on infrastructure and education financing. A position piece, but one that names the specific programmes it thinks are underfunded rather than gesturing at renewed engagement in general.
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24 ★★★☆☆ Added 28/09/2026
The Real Significance of the Trump-Xi Summit
Reads Xi’s reception in Washington as more significant for the protocol and symbolism Beijing secured than for any substantive agreement reached, arguing Xi will treat the visit domestically as confirmation of peer-power status regardless of what was actually settled. The article’s own page repeatedly failed to load this run, so this summary leans on the publication’s own editorial description rather than the full text.
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25 ★★★☆☆ Added 28/09/2026
WarTalk: Potemkin Pacific, Midterm Budget Woes
A discussion of why the US Navy’s declared Indo-Pacific posture outstrips its actual deployable readiness, and how post-midterm defence budget pressure is likely to widen that gap rather than close it. Also covers autonomous systems development and reports of US military technology reaching adversaries through Middle East operations, though that section is thinner than the budget argument.
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