One of the things I want to explain in my forthcoming book on Leo Strauss and his influence on the American right is how some of his students (and students of students) ended up embracing the figure of Donald Trump and advocating for him or another likeminded Republican president to rule as a 'Red Caesar.' I hope to show both that this way of thinking about present-day politics partially follows from certain assumptions they inherited from Strauss (along with certain moral convictions they erroneously thought his writings validated) and that Strauss would not endorse such judgments himself. The term 'Red Caesar,' which journalists covering the American right began to cite in the aftermath of the insurrectionary uprising of January 6, 2021, comes from a 2020 book by Michael Anton with a characteristically measured and not-at-all-hysterical title of The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return. Anton is, of course, the author of the notorious 'Flight 93 Election' essay from September 2016 that advocated, in pretty incendiary terms, that all conservatives should enthusiastically vote for Trump. Nothing less than the continued survival of the country was at stake, Anton claimed. By 2020, after serving as a national security official during the first Trump administration, Anton had begun speculating about situations in which a breakdown in the capacity for self-governance in the United States had proceeded so far that a dictatorial seizure of power would become necessary....

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At first glance, Demis Hassabis, a co-founder of the DeepMind AI lab, seems a familiar type: the missionary entrepreneur and out-of-the-box scientist who emerges as the right person for a particular moment. In this case, that moment was when hardware and software and data aligned to make superintelligence possible. But Hassabis is hardly a conventional figure. He has devoted his life to creating a technology that he thinks has the potential to destroy the world. Hassabis agreed to talk with me about his quest, because he believes that societies will never trust inventors unless they understand what makes them tick. For almost three years, as I worked on my book The Infinity Machine, we met regularly at a pub near his home, in North London. We would climb a shabby wooden staircase to a room on the second floor, sit with cappuccinos under a once-grand chandelier, and spend two hours talking: me with an obsessively detailed list of topics to get through; Hassabis with his sparky riffs on intelligence and life, computer science and neuroscience, philosophy and movies. Through every conversation, the question of motivation hung in the air like the image of the mushroom cloud over Los Alamos....

Of every 1,000 people the measles virus infects, it may kill as few as one to three. In a way, this can seem merciful. But the mathematics of measles is also unforgiving. The virus is estimated to infect roughly 90 percent of the unimmunized people it encounters; each infected person may pass the infection on to as many as 12 to 18 others. In large part owing to an ongoing outbreak in South Carolina, the United States is watching those risks unfold in real time. As of last Thursday, the CDC is reporting 982 cases of measles. That count is expected to break 1,000 this week; a tracker run by researchers at Johns Hopkins University that many experts consider more reliable has ticked past 1,000 already. By the numbers alone, another death seems inevitable, and inevitable soon. Probabilities aren't guarantees, of course. So far, 2026 may be seeing some improvements over 2025, when the U.S. documented more than 2,200 measles cases'more than in any year since 1991. This year, just 4 percent of measles cases have led to hospitalization, compared with 11 percent last year. Several factors could be contributing to that discrepancy, including how hospitals in South Carolina are reporting measles admissions or of more mild cases being diagnosed to begin with; experts aren't yet sure....