From traders’ credit circles to self-built water networks, Africa’s urban majority keeps finding ways to thicken city life. Can these popular economies still decouple the future from capital’s calculations, even as they open new frontiers for capture?
Latest
Is "khawa khawa" a North African myth?
Political rivalries increasingly overshadow the bonds between Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians, as social media amplifies the contradictions of Maghrebi identity.
Artificial Intelligence
The extinction pitch
Warnings from researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI that their own products could end humanity distract from the real damage AI is already doing.
The grid inside the grid
Africa’s new AI factories promise digital sovereignty. Their electricity deals may instead create private power islands inside public systems.
The stories shaping Africa’s AI future
From leapfrogging optimism to warnings of a new extraction economy, the frameworks now defining Africa’s AI moment will decide who gets to shape the future and who is shaped by it
My mother’s buried story
AI tools are built on Eurocentric datasets. For Brazil’s Afro-descendants — whose histories were already marginalized from literature, academia, and media — it poses the threat of industrial-scale erasure.
Culture
Who gets to speak for Eritrea?
A diaspora vote won Snit Tewoldemedhin the People’s Choice Award at Miss World. But the freedom to choose is exactly what Eritreans at home don’t have.
TV
From IMF history to astrophysics, Nairobi’s Drunken Lectures turn casual drinkers into an engaged public.
Politics
Brazil’s racket society
As Bolsonarismo outlives Bolsonaro, what does Brazil reveal about where politics everywhere is heading?
The World Cup
Our coverage of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America.
