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Fun fact! If you ask a bunch of social-science grad students—spefically St. Antony's College, Oxford—to design an electoral system they will go for ranked-choice, as we did in 1997 for student government positions. So I was elected Social Secretary (yes really) by RCV.

Here's some advice: ask Americans not "do you support ranked-choice voting?" (what's that?) but "would you like to not only vote for the candidate you like most, but have a second vote against the one you hate most?" Landslide.

Interesting. Wonder what fed-up Europeans in multiparty systems would say.... (I imagine Trump populists are only fond of the status quo because they're in power; like right-track/wrong-track, views of the economy etc the party whose guy is in the WH is happier about all status-quo issues.)

Great news: you can use the em-dash again. We studied a lot of AI prose, a lot of our own, and that of other journalistic outfits and books. The analysis found that today's models uses the em-dash slightly less than we do. www.economist.com/culture/2026...

How to spot AI writingLarge language models like long words and em-dashes—or do they?www.economist.com

Graeme was a total mensch, in many ways out of place at The Economist. I enjoyed many a laugh at a smoke break with him. The genius behind so many of our unforgettable covers will be irreplaceable.

There is so much life-and-death stuff that we simply haven't had the time to focus properly on the corruption. I wonder if this level of norm-breaking can be turned around. Anyone know a good recent historical parallel, of a relatively clean country that went off the rails and came back?

3 of 4 World Cup quarterfinals are between countries with imperial pasts: Belgium was part of the Spanish Netherlands. England was part of the North Sea Empire under Danish kings along with Norway, and the Norwegians tried to conquer it in 1066. And of course Morocco was a French protectorate.

How silly of me not to know @begus.bsky.social was here, now properly tagged for this great piece of work.

Very cool: Gašper Beguš of Berkeley has used an LLM to build incredibly detailed constructed languages, from phonotactics to morphology to grammar HIs paper: aclanthology.org/2026.acl-lon... Some press: spectrum.ieee.org/conlangs-ai-... And some languages! conlangcrafter.github.io

ConlangCrafter: Constructing Languages with a Multi-Hop LLM PipelineMorris Alper, Moran Yanuka, Raja Giryes, Gasper Begus. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.aclanthology.org

This week we ask an uncomfortable question: are we always wrong? Some have proposed betting against any Economist prediction. Have a look and see if you think that would build a strong portfolio. [Sadly gift links are not available for our interactives] www.economist.com/interactive/...

Is The Economist always wrong?We used artificial intelligence to test the accuracy of our forecastswww.economist.com

This is a great read, and after 8 years living in the UK I learned a new meaning of “chippy”.

A writer friend whom I will not embarrass was asked by his sister-in-law if he used AI to write. He snapped: "would you use a robot to have sex with my brother?" She was shocked. But I remember this story often, and the two kinds of people it reveals. *Most people are the sister-in-law*. 🧵

Good points here. "Legacy" outlets—ie ones with real standards—quickly retract and apologize for actual fake news. That's uncomfortable for MAGAland types calling everything fake news. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

A Tough Day for NPRAre there any lessons to the newsroom’s Supreme Court error?www.theatlantic.com

Kavanaugh's opinion scrupulously avoids any pronouns at all for the litigant B.P.J. in the trans athletes case. (Note the repetition of B.P.J. in every instance that would call for a pronoun here.) Sotomayor's opinion uses "she".

News! Economist Education and I have developed a new course, Essentials of Business Writing. It's a self-guided course that teaches anyone who writes for work the fundamentals of clear, vivid storytelling as we see them in The Economist's style book. education.economist.com/courses/esse...

Essentials of business writingA practical short course designed to help professionals write clearer, sharper and more effective everyday business documents.education.economist.com

These are so great. You can really see how one early change—PIE has something like gwihwos, Latin keeps the first /w/ sound, Germanic instead keeps the g turning it into /k/—gets you relatives as different as “quick” and “vivid”.

The plot thickens: the TVE executive apologizing for subtitling the Andalusian mom is himself Andalusian, and says "it hurts me doubly" as a result for the station's "great mistake". But here's the thing: while having a southern accent he is perfectly easy for someone like me to understand.

Oof. The Spanish national broadcaster is apologizing for having subtitled in interview with the mother of member of the men's World Cup team, because of her Andalucian accent.