We thrive when we feel connected, when we feel centered, when we’re spending our time on things that help us spend time well. Unfortunately, that’s not what contemporary media is designed for. How does it want us to spend our time? Engaged with it as much as possible. How does it want us to feel? Dependent. What’s that doing to our capacities—to think our own thoughts, feel our own feelings, live in our lives? Suppressing them and replacing them with infinite drama and endless forgetting. That’s the business model. And that’s why, for so many of us, there can seem such little leeway between making a good effort to try to keep up with the world and feeling depleted by it.

The Signal is different. It’s a different experience. And our new member’s despatch, out every Friday, is key to that experience—a weekly briefing on major developments in the world and the questions they raise. Belonging to The Signal as it does, the member’s despatch doesn’t tell you what to think; it leaves you feeling oriented, so you can think for yourself. Then, it leaves you altogether—to all the important things you have to do in your life other than read about current affairs. Until we see you next time.

—John Jamesen Gould

This week …

  • Developments: The United States holds unusual talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia over the future of the war in Ukraine; the acting deputy United States attorney general, Emil Bove, and the U.S. Justice Department suddenly drop corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams; the M23 rebels take more ground in Congo; Russia attacks the Chernobyl nuclear plant with a drone-borne warhead while world leaders gather at the Munich Security Conference; and Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates work up alternatives to the U.S. president’s proposal to resettle all Gazans. + U.S. Marine Corps shrinks its presence in Okinawa, Japan; astronomers lower the risk estimate on the YR4 asteroid smashing into Earth in 2032; and Birkenstocks are apparently not art.
  • A closer look: Why can’t Europe get its act together?
  • Contentions: Is the American presidency too powerful? Is the U.K.’s net-zero strategy politically viable? + How much of a fix is the U.S. Democratic Party really in?
  • 5 W Main: Why has the idea of economic inequality become so politically salient again? Considering Branko Milanovic’s 2023 book, Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War.
  • Features: How is AI changing global energy consumption? Nicholas Kumleben on the sudden transformation of the power industry—and its implications for climate change. + What’s the Trump administration doing to the U.S. federal bureaucracy? Francis Fukuyama on the real drivers of waste in the American civil service and the peril in attacking it politically.
  • 111MHz: Music from Ale Hop x Titi Bakorta, Horsegirl, Horsebath, White Magic for Lovers, and Lolly Hayes.
  • Weather report: Catania, Italy …