Some of the most urgent films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival aren't here to soothe. Together, Orwell: 2+2=5, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and Frankenstein play like sizzle reels of caution, and at their best, they're award-worthy symbols of alarm. These films, the first two of which are documentaries, don't just entertain-they confront fractured humanity, closeness and distance under Israel's siege of Gaza, and a creation we've set loose, growing beyond our control.
See told me sufficient material exists to create AI-powered interactive versions of historical figures like Napoleon, and that researchers are already working on such reconstructions in the hope they will help bring history to life. I mentioned See's prediction to friends and family who all immediately condemned the idea because they fear activists would conduct digital exhumations of history's vilest characters - fascist dictators and the like - to insert their hateful ideologies into contemporary debate.
Criminalization is the default framework people turn to in the United States to restore their sense of order, amid a crisis or emergency, so, when I hear someone suggest something wild, like calling the police on ICE, I understand where they're coming from. But as the Trump administration continues to consolidate power, we need to lose our illusions about the law as a moral instrument. We need more outlaws and less confusion about what the law protects and who it targets.
We are all familiar with the Trump presidential strategy of "flooding the zone." Its premise is that the mainstream media is incapable of running with more than one or two stories at a time. Therefore, if you hit the system on multiple fronts simultaneously this will take the wind out of any opposition. Hence, the Trump regime's accelerating addiction to outrage upon outrage.
Extreme politics and extreme weather go hand in hand, and both have to be confronted if we are to understand and overcome the polycrisis we are living through. Yet few media organisations are examining why the climate emergency is creating a new era of demagogues. Even fewer are scrutinising how those authoritarian leaders are trying to misdirect public attention away from the root cause of our current global malaise.
It's easy to take democracy and civil society for granted when it's all you have known. Americans are aware of the repression and brutality in faraway lands. But for most, autocracy is a word: not a threat, not a way of life. If you are born in an unfree state-like my guest, Oleksandra Matviichuk, and I were-it is a different story. We were both born in the Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, known to you as the U.S.S.R., Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
He then revealed, for the first time, details of his private meeting with Trump at the White House, when Trump pointed out a painting of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the only president to serve more than two terms: He showed me a painting. He said, Turn around.' And I said, Oh, there's FDR.' And I went, Of course.' And he goes, he said, What do you mean?' I said, I know exactly what you mean.' And then he went on and on about the third term.
PSAKI: Trump has surrounded himself with people who already treat him like a dictator. And I was going to try to describe for you just how sycophantic this cabinet meeting today was, how much it would make North Korean leader Kim Jong Un or Russian President Putin blush. But my attempt to summarize this meeting, just no matter how hard I tried, just could simply not do it justice. And this is one of those things you really have to see for yourself.
He enlisted a whole bunch of Ideology-patriarchy; social conservatism; utterly fake upside-down Christianity-in service of those basic motivations, not only to justify his own appetite for and personal acts of sadism and domination but to cast punishment and predation as far out into the world as he could manage. He studied psychology and the Bible so that he could borrow their authority and instrumentalize them to do widespread cruelty more effectively.
Ron Deibert plans to address the merging of technology and authoritarianism at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference, emphasizing the role of big tech in collective insecurity.
"We have crossed a line. We are in a place we did not want to be, but we are there. The thing we were all warning about for the last few years is not coming, it is here."
"Her phone buzzes-no bars. Wi-Fi icon: dead. The protest footage from last night sits trapped in her device like a caged bird with clipped wings. She filmed everything: the tear gas clearing, protesters linking arms, riot shields retreating."
The plea from inside a Russian prison by 11 political prisoners emphasizes the need for a ceasefire or peace agreement with the mass release of political prisoners and Ukrainian hostages.
Costa calls it "one of the fastest religious shifts in human history," with the percentage of Brazilians who identify as evangelical jumping sixfold over the past 40 years, to nearly a third of the population.
