Life Against Entropy

Most of us move through life with a quiet certainty that being alive is self-evident. We grow, think, love, worry, plan. We distinguish instinctively between what lives and what does not. A person is alive; a stone is not. A dog is alive; a machine is not. The line feels obvious, until someone asks us to explain it.

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The Legacy of Press Freedom

At this year’s Mabel Strickland Memorial Lecture, international negotiator and mediator Nomi Bar-Yaacov argued that democracies are entering a period in which the crisis extends beyond censorship or attacks on journalists alone. As wars multiply, trust in institutions weakens, and information becomes increasingly mediated through algorithmic systems, the deeper problem may be that societies are losing their ability to agree on what is true in the first place.

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