From the 18th century onwards, female authors gained unprecedented prominence, from Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters in the West to the rise of significant women writers in Qing-era China (1644–1912). The increasing prominence of female Chinese authors was driven by Dream of the Red Chamber, an 18th-century masterpiece by Cao Xueqin, widely considered the…
Vietnam’s new law regulating artificial intelligence could become Southeast Asia’s first real test of whether governments in the region are ready to move from voluntary guidelines to binding regulation, a shift analysts say could reshape how companies deploy AI across the region. The legislation, which took effect on Sunday, introduces a risk-tiered model where AI…
UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher has warned that the war in Iran and wider region is having a “massive impact” on civilians, describing it as “a moment of grave, grave peril”. He also voiced concerns about “secondary impacts” of the violence, saying the conflict risked fuelling an increase in extremism and polarisation in the Middle…
F1: The Movie, KPop Demon Hunters and Becoming Led Zeppelin were among the motion picture winners at Saturday night’s Cinema Audio Society Awards. Elsewhere in the television categories, The Studio, Adolescence and The Pitt were the big winners. The awards ceremony was hosted by Chris Hardwick Saturday night at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills,…
The just-published Anthropic paper by Massenkoff and McCrory is a genuinely careful, well-intentioned and much-needed piece of work. The authors build a thoughtful exposure measure, draw on real usage data, apply a clean difference-in-differences framework and find limited employment effects to date. Every step is methodologically defensible. The conclusion they reach is probably entirely accurate…
A push by a coalition of telecom operators, device makers, and industry groups to bring $40 smartphones to market — a price point seen as key to getting tens of millions more people online — is gathering momentum, but questions remain over whether manufacturers can produce such ultra-low-cost devices at scale. This week at Mobile…
The Iran war exploded further late on Saturday as pillars of flame rose above an oil storage facility in Tehran and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised “many surprises” for the next phase of the week-old conflict. Iranian state media confirmed the strike as video footage showed the horizon glowing against the night sky. Israel’s…
