Miss Otter

Gleanings from IJF26 #3

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have to spend a few words about the journalist who was, for me, the star of this edition of the festival: Carole Cadwalladr. I’ve been following her on Substack for a while now, and it was a real pleasure to find her at the festival. I admire her enormously — for her courage, her irony, her indomitable spirit. CC is the journalist who blew the lid off Cambridge Analytica, and not long after that experience she was let go by the new owners of the Observer. CC is also the one who coined the fantastic, razor-sharp, and very much of-the-moment expression “broligarchy” — what a word. She entered the festival with one of those classic lunchtime interviews (if you can hold out against the hunger, they’re often real gems), where she also told the story behind “broligarchy” — and then moderated a great panel on the expansion of big tech’s sphere of influence beyond the purely technological. I’d recommend both sessions; links below.

Gleanings from IJF26 #1

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Following this panel, I learned things I didn’t know and had confirmation of others I’d intuited or suspected about the Israeli media landscape. The first key piece of information: content produced by Israeli journalists is subject to a military censorship system. Some of the restrictions are reasonable — it’s forbidden to specify the exact location hit by a missile, since doing so would allow whoever fired it to adjust their aim with the next one. From there, though, the step toward self-censorship is short: the majority of the Israeli population leans centre-right, and the war has significantly intensified their patriotism. Writing things that don’t align with the feelings of your majority audience costs you listeners, readers, approval. Then there’s Gaza. Israeli citizens don’t know what their government and army have done inside Gaza, because their journalists are not allowed to report on it. Nor do they know which articles they read have been subject to censorship — because indicating that is also forbidden.

Gleanings from IJF26 #2

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday morning, AI came up from several angles: on one side, the workers employed to develop it — Brazilian workers, underpaid, subcontracted on behalf of unknown clients, bound by extremely strict NDAs, doing repetitive, low-quality tasks; on the other, AI used to assist workers — for instance, an AI system for social workers designed to determine which children are most at risk of being removed from their families (you can imagine the horrors a racially biased system might produce in that context). And then: journalists and outlets investigating AI, alongside those who are not — out of opportunism or other reasons. And journalists who have never covered technology, now finding themselves having to report on AI’s impact in their own areas of expertise, given how pervasive the tool has become. Links to the panels below. https://www.festivaldelgiornalismo.com/programme/2026/beyond-the-hype-covering-ai-across-beats https://www.festivaldelgiornalismo.com/programme/2026/so-you-want-to-report-on-the-tech-industry-but-arent-a-tech-reporter

What I already knew about social media, explained better

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:14:04 +0100

In 2014, Nate Silver had one million followers on Twitter and every link he published drove real traffic to his site. In 2025, he has three million, but the traffic social media brings to his Substack has become irrelevant. Those two numbers alone tell the story of a decade.

The title of his piece is “Social media has become a freak show” — which is more or less what we all think. Except Silver backs it up with data, and from the very particular vantage point of someone who used social media as an editorial channel for fifteen years, with millions of readers on the other end.

Island hopping with ashes, bones, and words

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:42:04 +0100

Malta is located at about 90 kilometres from Sicily. You can’t see it from the horizon unless you reach higher ground. Getting there by canoe takes over twenty-four hours, which means navigating through the night, steering by the stars.

An article by Michael Marshall published this week in Internazionale, an Italian weekly review, reports what happened when archaeologist Eleanor Scerri excavated Latnija cave in northern Malta: she found hearth ash, stone tools, deer bones bearing butchery marks. Radiocarbon dating places these traces at 8,500 years ago, a full millennium earlier than previously thought. But the real shift is something else: these were hunter-gatherers, the people the scientific community had long assumed incapable of crossing open sea. The study, published in Nature in 2025, forced a rewrite not just of Malta’s prehistory but of the entire chronology of Mediterranean seafaring.

Is this war a pretext?

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:06:39 +0100

“One of the pleasures of talking with a colleague is that we can indulge ourselves a little bit by talking about the past. There’s a long history of this kind of alchemical transfiguration of democracy by way of war.”

Timothy Snyder says this to Ruth Ben-Ghiat in a conversation, and that sentence stopped me: two American historians allowing themselves the luxury of talking about the past precisely while the present is taking a turn that the past can help us recognise. Worth following.