The New York Times: “ISIS Women and Enforcers in Syria Recount Collaboration, Anguish and Escape”

The Organization also cast a long shadow over her marriage. Though Aws had always wanted a baby, Abu Muhammad asked her to take birth control pills, still available at Raqqa’s pharmacies. When she pressed him, he said his commanders had advised fighters to avoid getting their wives pregnant. New fathers would be less inclined to volunteer to carry out suicide missions.

This was one of the early, devastating moments when Aws saw that there would be no normalcy or choice; the Islamic State was a third partner in her marriage, there in the bedroom. “At first, I used to keep bringing it up, but it really upset him, so I stopped,” she said.

Azadeh Moaveni

More reports about the harsh lives of women under ISIS rule – this time we’re talking about ‘collaborators’, women who tried to adapt and work within The Organization and ultimately couldn’t live with those kinds of compromises. Judging by the way it insists on inhabiting and controlling every aspect of human life – including the private relationship between husband and wife – ISIS really is becoming the Fascist state of the 21st century.

The New York Times: “A Dream of Secular Utopia in ISIS’ Backyard”

It occurred to me then that his generation, a whole lost segment of Syria’s youth, has been forced to become either refugees or warriors. And for those who choose the latter, their only options are different flavors of militancy: the Islamic State, Assad’s regime, the Kurdish revolution. Syrians have endured an endless cycle of extreme conditions over the past four years, and so, perhaps, it should be no surprise that only the most extreme ideologies, no matter how brutal or utopian, are thriving.

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“Everyone has to choose a side now,” Derik said. “ISIS has chosen the side of slavery. We’ve chosen the side of freedom.”

“We’re fighting for our ideas,” Shaker said. “Ideas, like people, die if we don’t fight for them.”

Wes Enzinna

Surrounded by enemies, from Syrian rebels to ISIS fighters to the hostile Turkish army, a community of Kurds is trying to build a better way of living, based on tolerance and education and inspired by the philosophy of their former leader, Abdullah Ocalan. While the odds are against them, I hope their social experiment succeeds, if only to serve as an example to the rest of the warring Middle East factions. 

Neal Stephenson – Anathem

În anul 3689 de la Reconstituție, lumea mathică de pe Arbre se pregătește de serbarea Apert‑ului Decenal, Ziua Deschiderii Porților în care timp de zece zile frații și surorile au permisiunea de a vizita lumea seculară și de a se întâlni cu rudele rămase în afara zidurilor. În abația Sfântului Edhar, departe în nord la poalele munților, Fraa Erasmas se bucură de asemenea de ocazia de a‑și vizita ruda, tânăra Cord. Dar ultima zi a Apert‑ului declanșează o serie de evenimente neobișnuite: la așezământ sosesc doi Inchizitori din capitală și imediat după plecarea lor observatorul astronomic este închis. În curând, ordinea milenară dintre zidurile așezământului e tulburată întâi de o Evocare – rit prin care un adept este chemat de Puterea Seculară pentru a asista la o problemă urgentă de stat – apoi de o Anatemă – expulzarea din Ordin pentru încălcarea cu bună știință a Disciplinei. Zdruncinat de anatemizarea mentorului său, fratele Orolo, Erasmas se hotărăște să afle cauza acesteia, ajutat de prietenii săi dintre adepți, ajungând astfel în mijlocul celor mai semnificative evenimente din istoria planetei.

Anathem e un roman pe cât de lung, pe atât de complex, dar cumva reușește să nu plictisească cu dimensiunile lui. Secretul stă probabil în bogăția lumii imaginate de autor, astfel încât chiar și în capitolele finale sunt lucruri noi de descoperit. Lumea Arbre este în mare un echivalent al Pământului, cu animale, plante și oameni, dar în care istoria a luat un curs diferit. Cu milenii în urmă, în urma unor evenimente catastrofale, oamenii de știință rămași s‑au izolat benevol în așezăminte similare mănăstirilor, izolându‑se de tumultul lumii pentru a se dedica teoriei pure și experimentelor. De‑a lungul secolelor, aceste ordine au păstrat și extins cunoașterea din vechime, în timp ce în afara lor lumea s‑a zbuciumat, trecând prin nenumărate cicluri de înflorire și decădere, de la epoci de aur la perioade apocaliptice. În ciuda izolării, furia din afară s‑a revărsat de câteva ori asupra ordinelor mathice, distrugându‑le aproape în întregime în trei ocazii. Nu e o idee complet originală – un roman clasic care folosește mănăstirile ca depozitar al cunoștințelor trecute este Cantică pentru Leibowitz, iar tema se regăsește oarecum în recentul Wool al lui Hugh Howey – dar Neal Stephenson o dezvoltă foarte bine aici, obținând un fundament solid pentru restul poveștii.

The New York Times: “A Family Team looks for James Bond’s Next Assignment”

At that point, a Sony operative arrived and put Ms. Broccoli out of her misery, insisting that an agreed-upon hourlong interview had to end early. But a reporter had (at least) one more question: Does Ms. Broccoli consider herself a feminist and, if so, does she look back on some of the “Bond girls” and wince?

I am absolutely a feminist, she said. If you think about the women in the recent films, they’re far more interesting and complex than they once were. Bond has changed, too, in how he deals with women.

She added: Women still have a long way to go. There are not enough women in positions of power in the film industry. And now there are all these questions about women in Hollywood not being paid equally. When that happens, it’s outrageous.

Brooks Barnes

Interesting look behind the scenes of Bond movies, Hollywood’s longest-running franchise. I am by no means a hard-core fan – the only time I saw a 007 movie in cinemas was this year with Spectre – but I also got the sense that the role of women has begun to change in recent movies. The supporting characters also got more space in Spectre, expanding the roles of M, Q and Moneypenny beyond their classic, by now almost archetypal figures. With a strong woman in charge and a change of lead actor in sight, I think this old series might still hold surprises for fans in coming years.

Backchannel: “How Elon Musk and Y Combinator plan to stop computers from taking over”

I want to return to the idea that by sharing AI, we might not suffer the worst of its negative consequences. Isn’t there a risk that by making it more available, you’ll be increasing the potential dangers?

Altman: I wish I could count the hours that I have spent with Elon debating this topic and with others as well and I am still not a hundred percent certain. You can never be a hundred percent certain, right? But play out the different scenarios. Security through secrecy on technology has just not worked very often. If only one person gets to have it, how do you decide if that should be Google or the U.S. government or the Chinese government or ISIS or who? There are lots of bad humans in the world and yet humanity has continued to thrive. However, what would happen if one of those humans were a billion times more powerful than another human?

Musk: I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there’s not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower.

Steven Levy

There’s certainly some validity in the concept that dangerous technology should be developed under constant public scrutiny, but that’s where real problems start. First we need to assume the public can understand the issues and has the power to prevent hazardous developments – but on a subject as complex as artificial intelligence I highly doubt anyone but a couple of experts can grasp the full implications. Scientists have been warning about the negative effects of climate change for decades and political institutions have just started to take action – such delayed response would prove ineffectual when dealing with rapidly evolving algorithms of AI precursors.

BuzzFeed: “How to get your Green Card in America”

How does it feel? It feels like you’re a pardoned turkey. You are one of the fewest few, one of those who get to keep the life they have built. Look around at your life, at the scaffolding of routine, the gray couch that you saved for, the business you’re working to start, the living room you painted that precise shade of Sherwin-Williams yellow, the faces you kiss goodnight. It is that simplest luxury: You get to not be uprooted, at any moment, from all of that.

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And after all these years of alternating between stoicism and hope, I am so angry. I’m grateful for my reprieve and for my family’s, but filled with a retroactive, reverberating fury at the broken system.

I’m furious because true justice is something greater than pardoning turkeys. It is more expansive than letting the odd exception pass through a thicket of expensive bureaucracy and codified racism, and hailing the lucky, made-it-with-an-inch-to-spare few as emblematic of the system working.

Sarah Mathews

Good story (in this case a happy end) about the struggles of immigrants and the unreasonably long waits to get a Green Card. It’s another example of failure in the American system, bogged down by bureaucracy, arcane rules and discrimination.

Fast Company: “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Bold Plan for the Future of Facebook”

In the tech industry, there’s nothing weird about setting goals so lofty that they sound unachievable. Google CEO Larry Page, for instance, is so invested in the virtue of gambling on disparate, wildly ambitious projects—from self-driving cars to smart contact lenses—that he restructured his company around the concept in August, making Google’s core businesses a division of a new idea factory called Alphabet. Zuckerberg, by contrast, isn’t interested in doing everything—just the things he views as deeply related to his company’s central vision, and crucial to it. There are different ways to do innovation, he says, drawing a stark contrast without ever mentioning Page, Google, or Alphabet. You can plant a lot of seeds, not be committed to any particular one of them, but just see what grows. And this really isn’t how we’ve approached this. We go mission-first, then focus on the pieces we need and go deep on them, and be committed to them. Facebook’s mission is to give everyone in the world the power to share and make the world more open and connected, as Zuckerberg says, explaining that he is now spending a third of his time overseeing these future initiatives. These things can’t fail. We need to get them to work in order to achieve the mission.

Harry McCracken

Despite these comments meant to differentiate his company from Google, I see important similarities in the long-term strategies of both companies. Ultimately, at the core both Google and Facebook are advertising companies, so their business model requires that they should better understand users in order to provide better ads. And so both are heavily investing in AI research to make sense of people’s lives, in adjacent technologies to capture their attention for longer, and investing in expanding the user base by bringing better Internet connections to people in the developing world. They may be taking different routes to get there, but their roads run in the same general direction.