Since roughly one month I’ve been attending the master programme in political science, first semester, and I must admit it’s delightful.
Book review: The creativity code
Marcus du Sautoy is a British mathematician, who’s published several books on mathematics, appeared on TV and is highly regarded as an educator. He released a book in 2018 called The creativity code: How AI is learning to write, paint and think (du Sautoy is very fond of the word code in general, like in human code and creativity code), where he writes and ponders on the meaning of artificial intelligence and its implications for culture.
Book review: The Russo-Ukrainian War
This is the second book of Serhii Ploky I review, a very contemporary, and initially, personal account of The Russo-Ukrainian War, beginning a few days prior to the full-scale invasion and war. The book provides historical insights, and retrospect accounts of Ukraine’s position in the Soviet Union, the aftermath of the Cold War and the beginning of the 2000’s, with the Orange Revolution, EuroMaidan and first invasion of 2014-2015 at its focus. All this, puts the war into a context and provides the reader with a coherent comprehension of what has happened prior to the war beginning last war and why Ukraine is attacked by Russia.
The debate on refugee espionage
Refugee espionage, according to Swedish law, is when a person unlawfully, secretly and systematically, over time, gathers information about someone else in order to provide a foreign power this information. It’s been part of Swedish law since the 1940’s and Sweden is one of the few countries to actually prohibit this action. How does the Swedish parliament and media debate refugee espionage since 2014, when the law was revised?
The emperor is all but draped in paper
When Prigozhin’s Wagner troops began their sprint towards Moscow on Friday/Saturday, they were 25.000, 5.000 of them being a vanguard. Vladimir Putin is said to have a security apparatus of hundreds of thousands of men. But yesterday, we witnessed boys with weapons and police officers in Moscow. Not security forces. Perhaps they were unseen. Perhaps they were not, because it’s a sham, a paper machier construction.
Sustainable war or Pandora’s Box in Russia?
Ukraine has proved to be a very tough opponent for Russia. The Ukrainians have been able to kill and injure hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers. They’ve also proved to be adept at using the Russian propaganda toolkit against the Russians themselves. It might be that Vladimir Putin opened the Pandora’s Box with this war: a sustainable war he cannot end and cannot limit.
More on the history of Ukraine
Lately I discovered that Yale University has released the entire series of lectures from a history class from the autumn of 2022 with Timothy Snyder: The Making of Modern Ukraine.
Book review: Chip war
Once every couple of years (or months) you come across a topic you’ve never really been interested in, or perhaps haven’t even heard of. Or it’s a topic in the back of your head, that you’ve never been able to verbalize properly before. Suddenly it falls within scope and it is the only thing your mind is focused on for some time. After listening to The Ezra Klein Show with Chris Miller about his book Chip war, this has been the case for me.
Book review: How to lose the information war
Nina Jankowicz’s second book is focused on Central and Eastern Europe and, as the title implies, information warfare, directed by Russia.
In the hands of the tech elite
It’s obvious, if you start to look under the hood, how the tech industry (I’ll generalize now) believes itself to be an elite, swaying people to believe them, follow them, be like them. They all want to solve problems, for themselves, for society. But mostly for themselves.