111MHz: ‘Lose the Minus.’ In 1994, London’s Seefeel became the first guitar band to sign to Warp Records—home of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. Back now from a 13-year hiatus with a new album, Everything Squared, this track is just a bass line and some shimmering guitar, drenched in reverb. Sarah Peacock’s vocal tones are like mood lighting.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Magliabechi’s: Foreign Agents. Elected in 2021 promising to fight crime, Eric Adams became this September the first-ever mayor of New York City to be indicted on federal charges. Prosecutors say Adams took luxury travel perks and illicit political contributions from Turkish officials—which he then used to extract some further US$10 million for his mayoral campaign from the city’s coffers via its matching-funds system. Enterprising stuff.

As a news item, “corrupt politician” might seem unremarkable, but Adams is only the most recent, glaring case. The former Democratic senator from New Jersey Bob Menendez chaired the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee until last year, when he was indicted for having conveyed sensitive information to the Egyptian government in exchange for envelopes stuffed with cash.

The incompetency of these recent operations is striking: Adams’s people kept theirs going even when they knew they were being watched. When his Turkish contact instructed him to delete their text messages, he promised he would. Perhaps he had a lot on his mind. After Egyptian officials presented Menendez with several bars of gold, he look up their value on Google—repeatedly.

What may be more striking, though, is where the money is coming from: Turkey and Egypt are both countries dominated by single parties, commanded by long-ruling strongmen, who extract and use their countries’ wealth with impunity—not least to develop influence abroad. What’s the extent of that problem?

Much of the answer, it seems, has little to do with self-exposure to criminal prosecution, Adams- or Menendez-style. As Casey Michel shows in his new book Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, there’s a whole legion of lobbyists in Washington working to influence American politics on behalf of kleptocratic states. There’s also no obvious limit of erstwhile congressmen and generals willing to take enormous sums from them, after their time in the government or military, to broker relationships. And that, for the most part, is perfectly legal.

—Gustav Jönsson

Leave it to the authorities. Experts have long played a prominent role in American governance. A century ago, H.L. Mencken noted that New York City employed so many types of experts that it had now put several "general experts" on the payroll.

The trend toward greater specialization has only continued since. Political leaders have become increasingly reliant on policy experts—but meanwhile, these experts have become increasingly political. Whether it’s on climate change or epidemiology, or matters of social justice, experts—leaning on their credentials—now routinely pronounce on politically contentious issues, even issues they’re not experts on. Why is this?

Today, David A. Hopkins explores the question in the context of the sharp decline in trust toward public-policy experts on the American right—and the growing political divide along educational lines in American society as a whole.

—Gustav Jönsson

111MHz: ‘All the Colours Are Singing.’ The experimental guitarist and composer Jessica Ackerley is back with a jazz-fueled ode to painting, titled All the Colours are Singing. It’s the title track of her new LP. Yes, there’s a literal nod to synesthesia here. On this track, she’s supported by string arrangements from Concetta Abbate.

—Brendan Hasenstab

‘Illegal ideologies’ | On September 26, a court in Hong Kong sentenced two journalists, Chung Pui-kuen and Patrick Lam, for “conspiring to publish seditious materials” on their pro-democracy website, Stand News.

Three years earlier, under direction from the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, Hong Kong officials shut down Stand News—which had been investigating what it saw as local-government failures—along with other pro-democracy media outlets.

Authorities arrested Chung and Lam in December 2021, detaining them for almost a year before releasing them on bail. Now Judge Kwok Wai-kin, who’s overseeing their case, has sentenced Chung to an additional 21 months in prison, and Lam—who suffers from a rare kidney disorder—to time served.

Harsh security laws have largely wiped out freedom of expression and other civil liberties in Hong Kong, and many pro-democracy activists have been arrested or fled the country. So why is China still sentencing journalists to jail time?

In July 2021, in the middle of the crackdown, Minxin Pei explored how Beijing had turned Hong Kong into just another Chinese city—taking control over local officials, elections, even textbooks, and leaving the enclave in an atmosphere of fear.

—Michael Bluhm

The most dangerous place in the world. A month ago, a Chinese coast-guard ship rammed into one from the Philippines, tearing a three-foot hole in its hull—after Chinese vessels had been harassing it for months—near a reef in the South China Sea’s Spratly Islands. It wasn’t China’s only confrontation with its neighbors in the area this year, either. Back in June, at another reef in the island chain, a Filipino sailor even lost a finger when a Chinese vessel collided with his dinghy. What’s going on in the South China Sea?

Today, Isaac B. Kardon looks at Beijing’s strategy in this quarter of the Pacific—and the big gamble it’s taking on the United States’ willingness and ability to let China become the dominant naval power there.

—Michael Bluhm

111MHz: ‘Arrayed on the Battlefield.’ The Lagos-based musician and composer who records as Ibukun Sunday is back with a new meditation on battle and conflict. But you may have to listen closely to pick it up, because the layered strings and synths don’t sound like a full-motion battle. Instead, it is the slow-motion struggle in all of us, between virtue and selfishness. From the album Harmony / Balance.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Magliabechi’s: The Wolves of K Street. Last Sunday, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, vetoed a bill that would have introduced stricter regulation of large AI systems. The bill proposed that systems costing more than $100 million to build—more than any current systems—had to meet heightened safety requirements. For example, companies would have had to program a “kill switch” to prevent potentially calamitous harm.

Newsom said the bill would have stifled innovation in the state that’s home to most of America’s large tech companies; its sponsors said it would have ensured safety in a rapidly expanding but little-regulated industry. And tech companies fiercely lobbied both sides—Google, Meta, and OpenAI, heavily against the bill; the Amazon-backed firm Anthropic and Elon Musk, for it.

From lawmakers’ perspective, the question is how to regulate AI companies. But from the AI companies’, it becomes: How to influence lawmakers?

And there’s been a marked rise in AI companies lobbying American politicians. The Financial Times reports that OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, has expanded its international lobbying team from three in early 2023 to 35 this summer, with the aim of reaching 50 by the end of 2024. But OpenAI is running behind its competitors when it comes to lobbying the U.S. government—while it spent $340,000 in the first quarter of this year, Google spent $3.1 million and Meta, $7.6 million.

It’s part of a larger trend, too. The non-governmental organization OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics, reports that AI lobbying has “skyrocketed” this year. Back in 2015, there was only one organization in America lobbying on AI issues. By 2022, the number was 158. Last year it reached 460. And only in the first quarter of this year, OpenSecrets identified more than 90 organizations that lobbied on AI issues for the first time.

More money than ever is spent lobbying American politicians—on AI as well as other issues. And as Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins show in The Wolves of K Street, that money is spent on increasingly involuted lobbying campaigns. If in the past, lobbyists bought political leverage in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, today, they orchestrate “shadow lobbying” campaigns that engineer seemingly spontaneous public outcries, which in turn pressure politicians to kill or promote bills that would harm or favor the client’s corporate interests.

As the AI industry grows, and public concerns over it grow in tandem, the industry’s lobbying efforts are expanding with them—in both size and complexity. Which is apt to make Newsom’s veto just one victory in one early battle over AI regulation.

—Gustav Jönsson

Stuck in a moment. Since the 1980s, China’s economy has grown more than any other in the world—but those days might be over. It barely advanced at all in the second quarter of this year. Chinese people are losing jobs and spending less—and they tend to have a much darker view of the economy now than they did just a few years ago. Foreign investors are leaving, and forecasts look less rosy. What’s gone wrong?

Today, Victor Shih lays out the critical problems that have emerged from all these years of rapid expansion—and the enormous national debt that’s complicating Beijing’s efforts to solve them.

—Michael Bluhm