When the grid fails, a fuel subsidy can double as an electricity policy. What happens to the people who rely on it when the state removes it before building anything to replace it?
Latest
There are no apolitical girls in war
To understand the war in Sudan requires looking far beyond its borders, without losing sight of the people who believed that another Sudan was possible.
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
Death as liberation
Ousmane Sembène’s and Souleymane Cissé’s debut features end with women who choose death. What is more uncomfortable to confront: their deaths, or the conditions that made life itself unbearable?
TV
From IMF history to astrophysics, Nairobi’s Drunken Lectures turn casual drinkers into an engaged public.
Politics
We are not a novelty
Trans and gender diverse people are routinely told that what they are is new. In South Africa, they have not merely survived history, but they have also shaped it.
The World Cup
Our coverage of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup in North America.
