OUR PICKS25 Years After 9/11, What Are We Failing to Imagine Now? | Conspiracy! How 9/11 Broke America’s Brain | Many AI Researchers Think the Machines Could Kill Everyone, and more

25 Years After 9/11, What Are We Failing to Imagine Now?  (Colin P. Clarke and Clara Broekaert, Foreign Policy)
The counterterrorism community struggles with how technology might be applied to novel use cases.

How Counterterrorism Has Empowered Donald Trump’s Imperial Presidency  (Economist)
After 25 years, it may be time to reform the policies 9/11 inspired

Conspiracy! How 9/11 Broke America’s Brain  (Garrett M. Graff, Wired)
Crackpot theories were once the stuff of shortwave radio, but September 11 unleashed the Age of Alex Jones.

Court Strikes Down Trump Order to Keep an Aging Coal-Burning Plant Running  (Claire Brown and Brad Plumer, New York Times)
The 64-year-old Michigan power plant was set to retire. Then the Trump administration intervened in a way that overstepped its authority, a court ruled.

A Reservoir of Last Resort Is Running Dry in Wyoming  (Economist)
Competing water uses in the American West are getting harder to manage

America Has Forfeited Its Greatest Strength  (Ali Soufan, The Atlantic)
Osama bin Laden wanted to eradicate faith in American power. Twenty-five years later, his dream is on the verge of coming true.

Why So Many AI Researchers Think the Machines Could Kill Everyone  (Will Knight)
A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely “spooking people” inside big labs.

The AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s ‘Crunch Time for Humanity’  (Maxwell Zeff, Wired)
Jacob Coxon talks to WIRED about the “mini Manhattan project” inside Anthropic, the problem with alignment, and why AI labs have just a few years left to make their systems safe.