Latest from Coffee House

Cockburn

Is Abdul El-Sayed racist?

In his failed 2020 presidential campaign, “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg famously scored 0 percent with black voters in multiple polls.⁠ Abdul El-Sayed, in his bid to be senator for Michigan, is not doing quite so badly. But the evidence suggests he does have an issue with African-American voters, who make up around 12-13 percent of his state’s electorate. In the Democratic primary, his opponent Haley Stevens carried the black vote by large margins, and a Fox News poll suggested he enjoys only about 75 percent support among black voters, which is weak compared to, say, the 87 percent of black Michiganders who voted for Kamala Harris. In a very tight race

John Power

Is AI a bubble?

The news is full of speculation that we are about to see a bursting of a “bubble” in AI. “Will the AI bubble pop?” asks the Sun. The New York Post predicts that the entire market is about to “burst,” with a market correction to follow. But it isn’t just tabloids getting carried away – the IMF is concerned about an AI correction, as are luminaries from the financial world such as Ray Dalio and Michael Burry. Burry, who famously predicted the 2008 financial crisis, has denounced Anthropic and OpenAI (the creators of Claude and ChatGPT) as “bubble companies.” And there is already some evidence in the stock market of worries about AI infrastructure spend.

Elisabeth Dampier

Is this email hack an attempt to destroy the AfD?

Hundreds of thousands of private emails from Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have been hacked and published online, exposing the inner workings of the party and raising the possibility that members could be harassed. The party has confirmed that unidentified hackers had accessed their private information, which allegedly consists of 421,179 emails, amounting to 281 gigabytes of data, according to the tabloid newspaper Bild.

Gavin Mortimer

The dark horse who stands to benefit from France’s riots

Marine Le Pen is the political winner from the anarchy that erupted in France at the weekend. A poll conducted in the 48 hours after the nationwide riots found that the leader of the National Rally is the only figure whose approval rating has increased. Le Pen is now up to 38 percent, a popularity not seen since Francois Mitterrand enjoyed widespread support in the 1980s. According to Frédéric Dabi, one of France’s leading political scientists, Le Pen is regarded as “the representative of the party of order, the party of those who can no longer tolerate the chaos.” Her nearest rival is Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the far-left La France insoumise, the party that much of the country holds responsible for stoking disorder in recent weeks.

Toby Young

Look me up on Wikipedia and see how biased it is

When I read that Sandi Toksvig, the British television presenter, is raising money for an alternative to Wikipedia, my heart soared. It’s “deeply biased,” she told the Cheltenham Literature Festival, explaining that her new version – to be called Mappa Mundi – would be produced in collaboration with Cambridge University. It would be “a home for the vast amount of knowledge that is currently sidelined or deleted,” she said. She’s absolutely right. Wikipedia has long suffered from a left-wing bias, something documented at length in a report by David Rozado for the Manhattan Institute in 2024.