Inside the Proud Boys Clubhouse

01 • 25 Minute Read

Esquire

Jen Golbeck

Jen Golbeck spent a weekend at the North Carolina clubhouse of the Cape Fear Proud Boys. What she found contradicted nearly every claim they make. They call themselves anti-racist while twelve members flash white-power symbols. They emphasize Western chauvinism but honor the Lumbee Tribe's victory over the KKK. They describe themselves as harmless while boasting of violence. What emerges is not a militia, by their measure. But what does it mean when an organization's core tactic is intimidation, yet feels persecuted when the country takes it seriously?

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02 • 15 Minute Read

Aeon	Raúl Zepeda Gil

Organised Violence Is a Trade, Whether Legal or Illegal

Raúl Zepeda Gil interviewed imprisoned young men in Mexico who work for cartels, using the same word they'd use for any job: chambear, to work. A 16-year-old sent part of his salary to pay for his mother's medical bills. Governments and cartels recruit identically: promising respect, wages, and purpose. Both create specialists in violence. Yet society treats soldiers' capacity for killing as heroic sacrifice while condemning cartel members as deviant. The question isn't why young men choose criminal violence. It's whether we can imagine a world where they don't have to choose.

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03 • 35 Minute Read

The Atlantic

Spencer Kornhaber

What AI Will Do to Art

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst position themselves as realists about AI's role in art, not doomers or evangelists. They believe it can restore creativity to daily life, freed from influencer culture. But Kornhaber watches other AI works in their Venice exhibition fail to move him. When media is infinite, the essential question shifts from "Can AI create this?" to "Why should anyone care?" Their vision requires navigating power dynamics they barely control, in an industry shaped by corporate decisions far beyond their reach.

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04 • 30 Minute Read

The Guardian

Robert P. Baird

The Philosopher Inside Google DeepMind

When Iason Gabriel joined DeepMind in 2017 as its first philosopher, he asked: How do you choose values to encode in AI when humanity disagrees about everything? Most alignment research assumed you picked values first, then programmed machines to pursue them. Gabriel argued the harder problem was choosing those values. His work predicted many crises large language models have created. Now, as DeepMind insists AGI arrives in three to five years, Gabriel leads a team investigating how superintelligent machines will reshape economics, politics, and relationships. Yet inside a company racing for dominance in a US-China AI arms race, how much weight do philosophical questions actually carry?

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