The Odyssey begins in relative mystery. Its first word andra — "man" — is stripped of genealogy, name and social bearings. While the Iliad opens with the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, and tells of the Trojan war, Apollo and the grievance of Chryses, the Odyssey just talks of a mortal. Not a demigod whose anger deforms the whole Aegean. Just a man. And within the same breath Homer adds polytropos, of many turnings, and then plagchthē, meaning he was driven to wander. While

From a converted cathedral to an annulled degree, Erdoğanism shows how procedure can be made to escort power to a destination it wanted all along, and how little the liberal order has to say about it. It has been 2,360 years since Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont and yet, thanks to a particular kebab, his name is still handed to Turkish waiters alongside requests for extra yoghurt. A casual visitor might think this proves the Hellenic conqueror never left Anatolian

Anthropic and the Pope are asking what the human person contains. The question that would actually do the work asks what it receives. In May, in the Vatican's Synod Hall, Christopher Olah stood beside Pope Leo XIV at the presentation of Magnifica Humanitas — the first encyclical of his pontificate, on AI and human dignity. Olah, a Canadian, is one of Anthropic's founders, and the company is understood to have been among the AI labs consulted while the document was drafted, if

A conventional view of the pre-Indo-European West is that it belongs to linguists and cranks. The first shot across the boughs is that it's a double-hyphenated area of study. The second is the overwhelming fact that the evidence is so fragmentary that any claim made about it amounts to a Rorschach test. Meanwhile, there's the half-true assumption that the only people motivated to go back this far are pushed by some agenda, from proving Odin's indigeneity to supplying Atlantis