On Friday November 17, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was fired. OpenAI is the artificial intelligence company formed to engineer an AGI (artificial general intelligence), an automated system that could reason as well as Homo sapiens, before, presumably, overtaking the old dullard. Ambitious! 

Sitting in the lobby of Moscow's Metropol hotel at some moment in the mid-'90s, a client and I (I was working in finance at the time) gazed at those wandering by—hard-looking men involved in who-knows-what business, sleek women involved in we-knew-what business, some wealthy "new Russians" sporting haute couture and ostentatious disdain for Soviet drabness—all stock characters in Weimar Moscow. The two men deep in conversation at a neighboring table were under investigation in a financial scandal then making headlines in the U.K. "What is this, Casablanca?" asked my client, who had never been to Russia before. "Pretty much," I replied.

The industrial revolution is not yet canceled, but it has become “problematic.” When delegates arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, for Conference of the Parties 26, the 2021 edition of the U.N.’s climate jamboree, Britain’s then–prime minister, Boris Johnson, welcomed them with a speech in which, after some by-the-numbers apocalypticism (crops withering, locusts swarming, wildfires, cyclones, Miami underwater), he turned his attention to the industrial revolution: “It was here in Glasgow, 250 years ago, that James Watt came up with a machine that was powered by steam, that was produced by burning coal. . . . We’ve brought you to the very place where the doomsday machine began to tick.”

When reading Ekaterina Pravilova’s original, fascinating and meticulously researched “The Ruble” it is a good idea to keep in mind its subtitle: “A Political History.” For Ms. Pravilova’s multi-layered account of the evolution of the paper ruble from its inception in the mid-18th century until the post-revolutionary reforms in the early 1920s goes beyond the merely monetary. “The biography of the ruble,” explains Ms. Pravilova, “is a history of the Russian state, written in the language of money.” Regardless of the type of political system in place, she writes, “money does not simply reflect an existing (or imagined) social and political order but creates it; it is not a consequence or an attribute but an integral and constitutive part of any regime.” Ms. Pravilova, a professor of history at Princeton, shows that the ruble has been, above all, a symbol and an instrument of centralized, autocratic and imperial power.

After Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutineers had taken control of Rostov-on-Don, Vladimir Putin appeared on television to appeal, above all, for unity. At a time when “Russia is waging a hard fight for its future,” the mutiny was “a stab in the back of our country and our people.” So far, so predictable, but what came next was less so…

The Collaborators, the dark, engrossing, and occasionally brilliant new book by the Dutch writer Ian Buruma is not about collaboration—at least not in the way it’s implied in the book’s subtitle. Not really. To be sure, a good portion of its narrative unfolds in countries or territories under foreign occupation during the Second World War (or its Asian preamble), societies reset where new rules had, as well as new rulers, replaced the old, creating undeserved opportunities for, or forcing unwanted choices on, those who lived in them. Buruma draws up a taxonomy of the types of collaborator and touches on the reasons they behaved in the way they did. Some were on the make, others were ideologues, still others told themselves they were the lesser evil, and the list goes on….

Increasing criticism of ESG (an often incoherent investment “discipline” under which actual or portfolio companies are scored in part by how they score against various environmental, social, and governance measures) and the pushback against it in certain (red) states are worrying those in the ESG ecosystem who have done so well politically and economically (or both) out of it. Newspapers such as the Financial Times complain about elected politicians meddling in topics such as ESG, even though ESG is nothing if not political. Billionaires such as Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer have issued warnings that those who oppose ESG just don’t understand capitalism, as has (more or less) Al Gore, climate change “prophet” and profiteer.

Poland is, as it was in 1920, on the West’s front line, even if this time the conflict — cyberattacks apart — is across its border and it has NATO at its side. Back then, Western assistance consisted mainly of some French matériel, a large detachment of French officers, and a smaller collection of Brits. Led by Józef Piłsudski, the father of a reborn Poland, Polish forces launched a counter-attack against the Bolshevik army that was nearing Warsaw. The result, named after the river running through the city, was the “Miracle on the Vistula.” The invaders were routed, Poland was saved, and the Red Army was stopped from spreading Lenin’s revolution to a dangerously fissile Germany.

America’s support for Ukraine has removed any remaining doubts that the Cold War’s two leading adversaries are embarked on a new version of that contest. And Beijing is now in a very different position. After China’s break with the USSR in the early 1960s, the relationship between Moscow, Washington, and Beijing evolved into an intricate triangular dance in which the distance between the three vertices was always shifting.

Forty years on, the nature of that dance has changed, and not to America’s advantage. Thanks to its growing economic, technological, and military power, China has now emerged as America’s most formidable challenger…

With the pushback against ESG (an investment “discipline” under which actual or prospective portfolio companies are measured against various environmental, social, and governance benchmarks) gathering momentum, its proponents have finally had to mount a credible defense of a once seemingly irresistible concept that, up to now, has had no need of one.

That’s not proving easy…