September 2026
Behavioural researcher Vanessa Van Edwards argues that people become easier to talk to not by being more impressive, but by replacing scripted fact-gathering with reciprocal exchanges that invite stories, emotion and a genuine turn for the other person. In her framework, conversation should move gradually from safe facts to personal goals and, only when trust permits, to identity and self-narrative. The practical discipline is to match depth to context, listen for cues that someone wants the floor, and avoid treating curiosity as a licence to demand disclosure.
John Coogan and Jordi Hays question whether Apple’s foldable iPhone Duo and Meta’s Muse agent will give consumers meaningful new ways to create and act, or chiefly capture more spending, attention and commerce. Coogan argues that Apple can sell the Duo on status and familiar demand, and that Meta’s advantage may be distribution; Hays doubts that a larger screen or a personal agent necessarily expands human capability. Those consumer-facing bets coincide with Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s resignation and warning that AI companies are racing toward dangerous systems, while Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger said the company did not yet have a plan to solve superintelligence alignment.
Covenant is emerging from stealth with $250 million in funding and a claim that the US and its allies need long-range, heavy-payload cruise missiles that can be bought and produced in far greater numbers. President and Chief Growth Officer Abby Denburg argues that existing “exquisite capabilities” are too costly and scarce to close what she calls the deep precision strike gap. The company’s test is whether it can turn its Anthem prototype into serial production, beginning with planned deliveries from Dallas and a parallel facility in Germany.
Former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan argues that central banks cannot solve a fiscal problem by suppressing the market signals it produces. Rising long-term yields may reflect government deficits and the future cost of accumulated debt, he says, rather than market dysfunction requiring intervention; attempts to push them down risk delaying the fiscal adjustment policymakers must eventually make. Central banks can restore liquidity in a genuine market crisis, Rajan contends, but they cannot make persistent public borrowing sustainable.
Laurie Voss, head of developer relations at Arize AI, argues that frontier models’ capacity to retain simple prompt instructions has risen from roughly 200–300 constraints to thousands in about a year. Re-running and extending the IFScale benchmark, he found that the old compression problem has largely receded, but reliable compliance has not: models now fail through omissions, safety refusals, exhausted reasoning budgets or polished-looking partial answers. His practical conclusion is that teams should verify requirements in outputs rather than assume a fluent response followed the prompt.
A dating coach who describes herself as psychopathic says content about psychopathy brings more women into her inbox, some of whom buy her book or coaching, even as she says she hates them. In conversation with Chris Williamson, she portrays vulnerability, affection and unresolved attachment as forms of leverage, and recounts deriving satisfaction from others’ emotional pain and from cruelty without a grievance. Williamson tests her claims against the distinction between harm framed as retaliation and harm with no stated provocation.
Brandon Waselnuk of Unblocked argues that the main constraint on AI coding agents is not model intelligence but missing organizational context—the accumulated knowledge of conventions, decisions and incidents that human teammates acquire over time. In Unblocked’s same-prompt test, adding a context engine cut token use from 20.9 million to 10.8 million and reduced runtime from two hours and 33 minutes to 25 minutes. He contends that curated documentation and MCP access alone do not solve the problem, because agents need to weigh conflicting, current and permissioned information rather than merely retrieve it.
Hoover Institution’s overview argues that cryptography is the largely invisible trust layer behind modern communications, banking and digital records, while blockchain uses it to create shared ledgers without centralized custodians. That decentralization can reduce reliance on intermediaries but also complicates oversight of illicit finance, taxes and monetary policy, the source says. It further warns that quantum computing and law-enforcement demands for exceptional access could weaken the encryption on which those systems depend.
Historian Andrew Roberts argues that broad economic and social forces set the conditions of history, but individual leaders can still determine its course in moments of crisis. In conversation with Peter Robinson, he presents Winston Churchill’s decision to fight on in 1940 as the clearest case, defends Churchill against recent accusations over war and empire, and contends that historical judgment depends on chronology, intent and close reading rather than political mythmaking.
TBPN hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays argue that AI’s most meaningful advances will be the ones people can see operating in the world, not necessarily headline mathematical achievements such as OpenAI’s claimed Navier–Stokes proof. Coogan treats such proofs as evidence of model capability rather than an immediate engineering breakthrough, while pointing to computer-use agents, 3D generation and robotics as more tangible demonstrations. On jobs, he says current AI layoffs remain small relative to broader hiring tied to data centres, infrastructure and technical roles, postponing rather than disproving concerns about displacement.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman argues that AI should move beyond chat interfaces that require users to choose models, tools and settings, toward systems that can determine how to complete a task while remaining open to human oversight. He presents Astra, OpenAI’s computer-use system, as evidence that agents can now work across software designed for people, while describing the earlier Operator release as a necessary but insufficient deployment that exposed the reliability and speed such systems require. In health, Brockman says the same model depends on earning enough trust to connect the fragmented information held by patients, clinicians and hospitals.
OpenAI has introduced two GPT-Image-2.5 models for different image-production workflows: Sunburst, which it says offers sharper rendering, stronger prompt compliance and greater consistency across successive edits, and Flare, which it says generates images more than 50% faster than GPT-Image-2 at comparable quality. Both models support native transparent backgrounds and are available through the API, ChatGPT and Codex.
Educator Ian Rowe argues that Thomas Sowell’s work offers a practical model for schools serving low-income Black and Hispanic students: maintain common standards, teach students to test claims with evidence, and reject assumptions that race determines educational potential. Drawing on Sowell’s history of high-achieving Black schools and his challenge to race-based leniency, Rowe says Vertex Partnership Academies teaches students to see themselves not as victims but as “architects of their own lives.”
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is preparing to introduce its first foldable iPhone, the product of roughly a decade of development and the company’s largest iPhone design change in years. He argues that limited initial production—seven million to 10 million units—and stronger foldable demand in China make it a strategic premium device rather than a near-term mass-market seller. Apple’s differentiator, Gurman says, is a 4:3 unfolded display designed to resemble an iPad in landscape orientation.
Advisors Capital Management partner JoAnne Feeney argues that Amazon’s expanded Qualcomm relationship is a supply-chain and bargaining move: another chip designer can reduce reliance on Nvidia, improve Amazon’s pricing leverage and give Qualcomm greater confidence to invest in custom-chip capacity. Speaking with Bloomberg’s Riley Griffin, Feeney frames the arrangement as a form of risk-sharing often labelled circular financing, linking buyer demand more directly to supplier investment as AI infrastructure expands.
Journalist Joshua Johnson and entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie argue that loneliness and shallow conversation are not solved by simply telling people to socialize more. Johnson says people need to identify what kind of connection they want and use direct, patient questions to make room for it; Mycoskie argues that friendship and vulnerability often require deliberate structure and unhurried time. Both treat digital contact as potentially useful, while acknowledging that no invitation or conversation can compel another person to reciprocate.
Unnamed speakers argue that the Iran and Ukraine wars could merge into a wider conflict if U.S. domestic politics fails to create an off-ramp after the midterms and regional escalation continues. They identify January 2027 as the key test: a Democratic Congress might seek to end the Iran war, but neither its willingness to curb presidential war powers nor the ability of a U.S.–Iran settlement to restrain Israel, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other actors is assured.
Alejandro-ao shows how Pi can use GGUF models served locally through llama.cpp, keeping prompts, code and data on the user’s machine rather than sending them to third-party APIs. The setup depends on running a local llama.cpp server and choosing a quantized model that fits the available hardware; in his Apple M4 Max example, Hugging Face recommends Qwen 3.8-27B’s Q4_K_M variant. Pi’s `/llama` command then downloads and loads that model, making it available through the standard `/model` selector.
Historian Andrew Roberts argues that Winston Churchill’s decision to keep Britain fighting in 1940 demonstrates why individual judgment can still redirect history, even amid the constraints of geography, economics and public opinion. In conversation with Peter Robinson, Roberts defends Churchill against charges ranging from racism to responsibility for the Bengal famine, while arguing that Churchill understood Nazism’s character more clearly than contemporaries willing to seek accommodation. His broader case is that, as wartime memory recedes, serious study of leaders’ choices is necessary to understand statecraft.
Walter Russell Mead argues that China’s integration into the U.S.-led commercial order is also its central strategic weakness: in a conflict over Taiwan, Beijing’s dependence on imported energy, raw materials and export markets could be turned against it. But Mead warns that American power rests on the open trading system, alliances and institutions that have allowed others to prosper under U.S. leadership—and that Washington, particularly under Donald Trump’s transactional approach, risks eroding its own leverage.
Two Minute Papers host Karoly Zsolnai-Fehér argues that GPT-6 Astra’s most consequential showing is its reported recreation, in under an hour, of a honey-coiling simulator based on a specialist fluid-dynamics paper—not its polished games or 3D demos. He says the result suggests the model can translate niche numerical research into runnable code, while Astra’s own paper presents a more complicated safety profile: stronger instruction-following and refusals alongside lower overall monitorability than GPT-5.6 Sol.
Psychiatrist and ADHD specialist Dr Sasha Hamdani argues that emotional sensitivity is not simply a matter of feeling more than other people, but of how quickly a perceived threat becomes an overwhelming state. In her account, rejection sensitivity and emotional dysregulation can turn ambiguous cues—a delayed text, altered tone or criticism—into physical alarm and self-doubt before deliberate reasoning has time to intervene. The aim, she says, is not to suppress sensitivity but to build the capacity to interpret, regulate and use it without letting it dictate every response.
Susan Burton argues that women leaving prison need a staffed, accountable community—not merely a bed—to avoid being pulled back into the conditions that led to incarceration. Drawing on her own experience of repeated imprisonment, she built a Los Angeles network of 12 homes that combine housing with work, legal and financial support, shared responsibilities and peer relationships. Through the Sisterhood Alliance for Freedom and Equality, Burton is training women to replicate that model, framing stable reentry as family preservation, community repair and public safety.
Psychologist Leanne Ten Brinke argues that there is no reliable visual “tell” for lying or for identifying dark personality traits. Drawing on deception research, she recommends testing consequential claims with open-ended questions, requests for detail and checks on what can be verified, rather than relying on eye contact, fidgeting or first impressions. For dealings with manipulative people, her focus is on patterns over time and on reducing their leverage through clear boundaries, records and outside perspective.