Kevin Schoenmakers

Wanted: Pandas, Dead or Alive | China Books Review In 1928, the eldest two sons of President Theodore Roosevelt set out to capture or kill a giant panda. Their hunting trip accidentally contributed to the cause of wildlife conservation.

Kevin Schoenmakers on panda hunters in the China Books Review...

chinabooksreview.com/2025/10/02/p...

Article reads: Woman named as Archbishop of Canterbury in historic first The 63-year-old archbishop-designate is married to Eamonn Mullally, with whom she has two children. Originally from Woking in Surrey, she was the UK's chief nursing officer from 1999 to 2004.

This article manages to name her husband before it names… her.

I wrote about the first panda's brought to the US, almost 100 years ago.

It’s always interesting when politicians say hate and violence have no place in this country. It was founded on those principles.

But what makes this parallel feel most apt is how nervous I am about drawing it. The comparison seems straightforward: The person who was murdered was a representative of a hateful ideology, the person thought to have killed him was a deluded young man who may have tried to oppose that hatred in the most destructive manner imaginable. And yet something in the transformed landscape of this country tells me I’m not supposed to say so.

Oof. From M Gessen, writing about the nervousness they feel drawing parallels between our time and the Nazi era.

"The comparison seems straightforward ... And yet something in the transformed landscape of this country tells me I’m not supposed to say so."

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/21/o...

The story of 2025 is China's solar growth🤯

Forgot one:

“Demand that your local leaders build complete networks of sidewalks and protected bike lanes.”

If BuzzFeed News still existed we would’ve pubbed this in a heartbeat

Quiz: Who Said It? Trump Comedy Crackdown Chief Brendan Carr or CCP Head Censor Zhang Rongwen?

(and then all the quotes would be Carr)

‘Vladimir Putin is responsible for the murder of my husband’ Navalny’s team obtained evidence he was poisoned in Arctic prison, widow says — Meduza After Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny died in a prison in Kharp, in Russia’s Far North, on February 16, 2024, his team managed to secure samples of his biological material and send them…

Tests on biological samples secured by Alexey Navalny’s team after his death in a Russian prison confirm he was poisoned, his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, said today.
meduza.io/en/feature/2...

Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlie Kirk and the pundits and politicians sanitizing his legacy.

MAGAnomics Isn’t Working A dismal jobs report affirms earlier warnings about the economic impact of Donald Trump’s tariffs, immigration restrictions, and DOGE-led firings.

The recent jobs report from the B.L.S. reveals that employment in the U.S. has stalled—and that critics of MAGAnomics were right all along.

My mom and Dr. DeepSeek In China and around the world, the sick and lonely turn to AI.

Not long after DeepSeek R1 launched, I discovered that my mother had started using the chatbot as her virtual doctor.

I worried about her reliance on AI. But over time, I realized Dr. DeepSeek was offering something no human in her life could.

restofworld.org/2025/ai-chat...

excited for America to get its first 'dissident rumor mill claims the leader has died' experience

Trump hasn’t been on the front page of The People’s Daily for at least a week now

The Best Wildlife Photography of the Year

Every year the Natural History Museum in London honors the best wildlife photography from around the world.

See a selection of this year's finalists.

NEW: The first evidence of a solar take-off in Africa☀️✈️

x33 rise in Algeria solar panel imports in the 12 mths to June 2025, compared to previous 12 mths.
x8 in Zambia
x7 in Botswana
x6 in Sudan
x3 in each of Liberia, DRC, Benin, Angola, Ethiopia

🧵

What does Americans read about China? Conspiracy theories.

All are really about America. But China, its agents and its sympathizers, is presented as the cause of the myriad social ills — addiction, violence, poverty and disease — that plague American society.

chinabooksreview.com/2025/08/19/n...

NEW from me: Clean energy growth helped China’s CO2 emissions fall 1% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024. Power sector CO2 fell 3% as growth in solar power alone matched the rise in electricity demand.

it finally happened

www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08...

Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop - Carbon Brief Four common talking points surrounding China’s ongoing coal-power expansion and how and why the current wave of new projects might end.

China is building 95 gigawatts of new coal power plants. That doesn't mean coal power use will definitely rise.

Qi Qin and @laurimyllyvirta.bsky.social explain why in their new piece for @carbonbrief.org

Read more: www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-w...

I recently asked Marcus and two other skeptics to predict the impact of generative A.I. on the economy in the coming years. “This is a fifty-billion-dollar market, not a trillion-dollar market,” Ed Zitron, a technology analyst who hosts the “Better Offline” podcast, told me. Marcus agreed: “A fifty-billion-dollar market, maybe a hundred.” The linguistics professor Emily Bender, who co-authored a well-known critique of early language models, told me that “the impacts will depend on how many in the management class fall for the hype from the people selling this tech, and retool their workplaces around it.” She added, “The more this happens, the worse off everyone will be.” Such views have been portrayed as unrealistic—Nate Silver once replied to an Ed Zitron tweet by writing, “old man yells at cloud vibes”—while we readily accepted the grandiose visions of tech C.E.O.s. Maybe that’s starting to change. If these moderate views of A.I. are right, then in the next few years A.I. tools will make steady but gradual advances. Many people will use A.I. on a regular but limited basis, whether to look up information or to speed up certain annoying tasks, such as summarizing a report or writing the rough draft of an event agenda. Certain fields, like programming and academia, will change dramatically. A minority of professions, such as voice acting and social-media copywriting, might essentially disappear. But A.I. may not massively disrupt the job market, and more hyperbolic ideas like superintelligence may come to seem unserious.

Continuing to buy into the A.I. hype might bring its own perils. In a recent article, Zitron pointed out that about thirty-five per cent of U.S. stock-market value—and therefore a large share of many retirement portfolios—is currently tied up in the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies. According to Zitron’s analysis, these firms spent five hundred and sixty billion dollars on A.I.-related capital expenditures in the past eighteen months, while their A.I. revenues were only about thirty-five billion. “When you look at these numbers, you feel insane,” Zitron told me. Even the figures we might call A.I. moderates, however, don’t think the public should let its guard down. Marcus believes that we were misguided to place so much emphasis on generative A.I., but he also thinks that, with new techniques, A.G.I. could still be attainable as early as the twenty-thirties. Even if language models never automate our jobs, the renewed interest and investment in A.I. might lead toward more complicated solutions, which could. In the meantime, we should use this reprieve to prepare for disruptions that might still loom—by crafting effective A.I. regulations, for example, and by developing the nascent field of digital ethics.

The appendices of the scaling-law paper, from 2020, included a section called “Caveats,” which subsequent coverage tended to miss. “At present we do not have a solid theoretical understanding for any of our proposed scaling laws,” the authors wrote. “The scaling relations with model size and compute are especially mysterious.” In practice, the scaling laws worked until they didn’t. The whole enterprise of teaching computers to think remains mysterious. We should proceed with less hubris and more care.

Loved this piece from Cal Newport in the New Yorker about what if AI doesn't get much better than it is today, and not just because he quotes me
www.newyorker.com/culture/open...

dimsums.blogspot.com/2025/08/afri...

I was interviewed about protected intersections on the Outspoken Cyclist podcast: outspokencyclist.com/2025/08/show...

Ha, that’s a cool concept!

Which is right next to: www.fotomuseumdenhaag.nl/en

Kunstmuseum Den Haag The Kunstmuseum is a modern palace of the arts. Step inside this enchanting building, wander through its beautiful daylit galleries and discover that special work of art that touches you personally.

The seaside, maybe. And in case the exhibitions look good to you: www.kunstmuseum.nl/en

'Dutch-style' intersections keep pedestrians and cyclists protected from motor vehicles as they cross or turn.

Design features include corner islands, physically separated lanes that carry through the junction, and dedicated signal timings for non-motorised users.

www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

The increasing intermittency of….nuclear power stations:

Source: Financial Times | “Heatwaves test Europe’s electricity system as air conditioning use soars” on.ft.com/4fsSclS

American Book Center View details about American Book Center in The Hague, Netherlands on Apple Maps. Address, driving directions, images, nearby attractions and more.

maps.apple.com/place?addres...

This sounds familiar. This must mean the economy of the US is going to grow by 5% next year, and the year after, and also the year after that.