Slow Read No. 5
14/09/2026 · 18 pieces
Sent before the per-theme emails: one edition covering every theme.
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01 ★★★★★ Added 14/09/2026
The World Map According to the BRICS: What the New Delhi Declaration Reveals
Original title: La carte du monde selon les BRICS : ce que révèle la Déclaration de New Delhi
Works through the New Delhi Declaration clause by clause rather than reporting the summit itself, mapping how the bloc’s own language describes a parallel financial and technological order to the G7’s. Argues the document reads less as aspiration than as a working blueprint, with specific commitments on payments infrastructure and critical minerals that will outlast this week’s summit coverage.
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02 ★★★★★ Pick of the week Added 14/09/2026
Things Seen in Taliban Country
Original title: Choses vues au pays des talibans
On-the-ground reporting from inside Taliban-run Afghanistan: daily administration, the informal economy, and how ordinary Afghans navigate a state that runs on patronage rather than published rules. The value is observational rather than argumentative, which is the rarer and more valuable thing on this list.
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03 ★★★★★ Added 14/09/2026
Private Leverage, Public Costs
Traces how hedge funds’ Treasury basis-trade leverage has grown large enough that its unwinding now regularly forces central bank intervention, effectively socialising the risk of a trade whose profits stay private. Uses repo market data to show the mechanism rather than asserting the danger.
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04 ★★★★★ Added 14/09/2026
Long Live the Short King: Why 4-hi HBM Wins
Works through the physics and economics of high-bandwidth memory stack height, arguing that as inference workloads become bandwidth- rather than capacity-constrained, shorter four-high HBM stacks deliver better cost-per-bandwidth than the taller stacks the market has been pricing as premium. Technical, and directly relevant to anyone pricing AI infrastructure.
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05 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
The War Against Trump on Tehran's Walls
Original title: La guerre contre Trump sur les murs de Téhéran
Field reporting on the anti-American graffiti and street propaganda covering Tehran’s walls, read as an official messaging campaign rather than spontaneous sentiment. Notes the gap between the street’s staged anger and quieter conversations the reporter had with residents.
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06 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
What does the US takeover of the Bab el-Mandeb coastline reveal about its Middle East position?
Original title: Qu’est-ce que la prise de contrôle des côtes du détroit de Bab el-Mandeb révèle de la position américaine au Moyen-Orient ?
Reads the US move to secure the Red Sea coastline around Bab el-Mandeb as a return to basing politics rather than a counter-terrorism footnote, tracing which regional partners gain leverage and which lose it. Places the manoeuvre inside the longer pattern of chokepoint control that has shaped Middle East strategy since Suez.
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07 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Can the US battery market untangle from China?
Examines whether the US battery supply chain can meaningfully separate from Chinese processing and cell manufacturing, concluding near-term substitution is possible for a handful of chemistries but that refining capacity is the harder bottleneck to reshore. Grounds the policy debate in the metallurgy rather than the trade rhetoric.
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08 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Taiwan Plays its Chips Card
Argues Taipei is using its concentration of advanced chip manufacturing as explicit diplomatic leverage in trade and security talks with Washington, rather than treating it only as a vulnerability to be protected. Traces how that leverage shapes Taiwan’s approach to reshoring commitments made under US pressure.
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09 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Second Place Was Never Enough: China is Chasing AGI
Argues Beijing’s AI policy has shifted from a catch-up posture to an explicit AGI race, tracing the shift through state lab funding and recent leadership statements rather than model benchmark comparisons. Positions the change as a doctrine shift with implications for export-control strategy, not just an industry trend.
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10 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
How Putin Is Ruining the Russian Economy
Original title: Comment Poutine est en train de ruiner l’économie russe
Applies Russian central bank and trade data to argue the war economy’s stimulus effect has run its course, with inflation, labour shortages and a shrinking civilian sector now compounding rather than offsetting each other. Argues the strain shows up first in regional budgets rather than Moscow’s headline numbers, which is why it is easy to miss.
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11 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
God told them to sell crypto. Their investors lost everything.
Investigates a cryptocurrency scheme marketed through religious framing, following investors who lost money to a token with no underlying product, and the promoters who kept recruiting after the warning signs were public. Reported rather than moralising, with named sources on both sides of the losses.
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12 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Disaster and Constraint
On how climate disaster financing in the Himalayan region is constrained by the same institutions meant to fund adaptation, arguing shrinking multilateral aid budgets are pushing the financing burden onto instruments never designed for it. Uses recent glacial flood events as the case study rather than the subject.
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13 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
The Century of Jihad
Original title: Le siècle du djihad
Takes a century-long view of jihadist movements rather than the latest incident, arguing the ideological throughline has outlasted every organisational form built to carry it, from the Muslim Brotherhood through al-Qaeda to Islamic State’s territorial and now diffuse phases. Uses that longevity to argue against treating any single group’s defeat as an endpoint.
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14 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
Susan Shirk on China and the U.S.’s Common Problem: Their Leaders
Interview with the veteran China scholar arguing that both Washington and Beijing are now driven more by domestic leadership incentives than by a coherent strategic doctrine toward each other, which makes the relationship harder to predict than Cold War-style bipolar models suggest. Draws on her decades inside US China policy.
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15 ★★★★☆ Added 14/09/2026
GWOT at 25 with Wesley Morgan
A 25th-anniversary transcript with a war correspondent who covered Afghanistan and Iraq, assessing what the war on terror actually built and broke in the region’s institutions and in US strategic culture. Long-form and retrospective rather than tied to any anniversary news peg beyond the date itself.
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16 ★★★☆☆ Added 14/09/2026
Latency Scaling Differences for GPT and Claude Models
Benchmarks how response latency scales with context length differently across GPT and Claude model families, isolating an architectural difference that speed-focused product comparisons usually miss. Narrow in scope, but the kind of independent measurement most AI commentary simply assumes rather than tests.
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17 ★★★☆☆ Added 14/09/2026
China wants to end the war in Iran its own way
Original title: La Chine veut mettre fin à la guerre en Iran à sa manière
Traces Beijing’s preference for a negotiated end to the Iran war through its own diplomatic channels rather than joining a US-led process, reading it as protection for oil imports and Belt and Road commitments rather than principled non-alignment. Argues China’s leverage lies in reconstruction financing rather than mediation.
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18 ★★★☆☆ Added 14/09/2026
Merz's speech against the AfD
Original title: Le discours de Merz contre l’AfD
Publishes the substance of Chancellor Merz’s parliamentary speech against the AfD, arguing it marks a shift from treating the party as fringe to naming it a structural threat to German democratic institutions. Situates the speech against the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt result and asks whether rhetoric alone can do the work Merz is asking of it.
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