Friday 1 May 2026 Cryptography is often imagined as a branch of mathematics, an austere discipline of prime numbers and abstract proofs. Yet in practice it is something far more consequential: a political instrument of the first order. States do not merely use cryptography to protect secrets; they shape, regulate and sometimes subvert it in order to exercise power. The history of modern governance may be read, at least in part, as a contest over who may conceal information, w

Friday 1 May 2026 The recent Ukrainian ballet Mavka emerges not merely as an artistic production but as a cultural act of resilience. Created and staged in Lviv National Opera during the full-scale war, it belongs to a broader movement of wartime artistic renewal sometimes described as a “Ukrainian breakthrough” in national culture. That such a work has been conceived, rehearsed and performed under conditions of existential threat is itself part of its meaning. The ballet doe

Friday 1 May 2026 The aspiration to make machines understand us has always been more ambitious than the aspiration to make them answer us. In the present age of large language models, this distinction has acquired a practical urgency. Systems built upon statistical patterns in language, such as those emerging from the lineage of transformer architecture, have demonstrated extraordinary fluency. Yet fluency is not understanding, and understanding in the human sense is insepara

Friday 1 May 2026 The temptation, when confronted with a fresh statement from the Kremlin, is to read it as a signal of impending transformation. Yet the history of this war suggests that such signals are more often instruments of theatre than of policy. The remarks of Dmitry Peskov yesterday — that Russia may declare a ceasefire for Victory Day without even requiring Kyiv’s consent — belong to this tradition of unilateral gesture, calibrated symbolism and limited military ut