OUR PICKSColumbia University’s Anti-Semitism Problem | The World’s Deadliest Infectious Disease Is About to Get Worse | Biotech’s Modern-Day Threats, and more
· The World’s Deadliest Infectious Disease Is About to Get Worse
· High-Impact Climate Risks, Low-Probability? Think Again
· Behind the Curtain: U.S. Counterterrorism Policy, October 7th, and the Future Threat Landscape
· Fifty Years after “Asilomar,” Scientists Meet Again to Debate Biotech’s Modern-Day Threats
· Columbia University’s Anti-Semitism Problem
The World’s Deadliest Infectious Disease Is About to Get Worse (John Green, The Atlantic)
By retracting foreign aid, President Trump could make tuberculosis untreatable again.
High-Impact Climate Risks, Low-Probability? Think Again (Isabelle Bond, The Strategist)
In a recent presentation, I recommended, quite unoriginally, that governments should have a greater focus on higher-impact, lower-probability climate risks. My reasoning was that current climate model projections have blind spots, meaning we are betting on best case scenarios.
Irresponsible at best and ‘fatally foolish at worst’, this approach is inconsistent with other security issues—I don’t know many analysts assessing nuclear escalation or a potential Taiwan Strait crisis from the best-case angle.
Globally, January 2025 was the warmest January on record. This included severe heatwaves across Australia, with maximum temperatures as high as 17 degrees C above average.
This warming was unprecedented and, importantly, unexpected. This is an ever-increasing climate-related trend—reality continues to outstrip scientific expectation. Given this, my use of the term ‘lower-probability’ was itself, in hindsight, an example of this best-case mentality: designating high impact climate events as low probability is likely, at best, a dangerous underestimate.
Behind the Curtain: U.S. Counterterrorism Policy, October 7th, and the Future Threat Landscape (Christopher P. Costa, Georgetown Security Studies Review)
The terrorism threat landscape is an extremely complex phenomenon that evolves on a daily basis. In turn, appropriate solutions and countermeasures are also subject to change.
Fifty Years after “Asilomar,” Scientists Meet Again to Debate Biotech’s Modern-Day Threats (Jon Cohen, Science)
Risks and benefits of mirror life, AI, synthetic cells debated at anniversary of the landmark 1975 meeting.
Columbia University’s Anti-Semitism Problem (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic)
If the bullying of Jewish students had happened to any other group, the institution would be appalled.
