Senior writer and editor @coeff_giving. Writes weekly Good News newsletter for @voxdotcom. Author of END TIMES. Email [email protected]

New York
Joined October 2009
Some professional news: after four and a half years at Vox, I’ll be joining @coeff_giving as a senior writer and editor, with a focus on global catastrophic risks.
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Bryan Walsh retweeted
Jose Andres says we can’t ban foie gras because we need to solve ICE, global hunger, and ‘so many other issues’ before we can worry about animals. It reminds me of when I collected signatures in Chicago to preserve the city’s foie gras ban. In wealthy parts of town, high-minded liberals would chide me: 'You’re collecting signatures for ducks? People are getting shot in this city. You should be ashamed.’ When I went to the poor parts of town — the places where people were actually getting shot — no one said that. Instead, when I explained how foie gras was made, the near-uniform reaction was: ‘They do that to a bird just so some rich asshole can eat foie gras? That’s f’d up.’ Almost everyone signed. For political elites, banning animal cruelty is a distraction from the Big Serious issues they’re focused on. For most people, it’s just common sense.
What backslash Jessica? 🧐😇So we are banning all meats? If Duck goes all goes next? …I’ve been through this in California…..just lets concentrate on things that matter…..cars with children are being shot by ICE, immigrants working in farms and restaurants being deported many with green cards and even citizens…so many other issues! Yes let’s bring the ducks now….one more issue for restaurants to handle!😅🕊️
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It does seem as if part of the opposition to AI x-risks is getting hung up on the idea of x-risk itself. Like we can do the Derek Parfit "100% death is far far worse than 99% death" but practically once you're in the area of catastrophe, a lot of the actions are pretty similar.
at one point, an ai safety-skeptical person here — kate brennan — says the biggest ai risk is that ai is pushed “everywhere, into all of our public institutions and contracting, including in areas where A.I. is not fit for purpose, is not secure, safe by design.” i’d like to know what precisely brennan is worried about here. she mentions cyberattacks on health care systems / government systems. ok. does she also worry about catastrophic infrastructure failures or outages? at what point does a risk become catastrophic? we can debate whether ai poses “extinction level” risks or … merely catastrophic risks, but many of the guardrails that would help are the same. like the value of independent audits doesn’t depend on “x risk” being real, they’re just good practice. so how much of the disagreement here is actually over the substance, and how much is cultural or factional?
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It's not exactly on brand with the doomy vibes of putting a (p) doom in your S-1 filing, but I enjoyed this project from @davegoldblatt citing actual improvements brought about by AI becauseofai.org/
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Bryan Walsh retweeted
Terrible TNR story Yes, it's sad that a ~dozen FEC holdouts are confused...but why not interview the thousands who already happily moved, still waiting on the Dirty Dozen to move? Or why not interview the 1000 families on waitlist for the new public housing now delayed at FEC?
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I laughed
Whether or not anyone builds it... everyone dies. The future is uncertain. Your impact doesn't have to be.
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I didn’t realize the Eagles have been basically pursuing the third-wave philanthropy a dollar given now is more valuable than giving a dollar in the future for their cap management. Hope it works out better for the philanthropists si.com/nfl/eagles-salary-cap…
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Bryan Walsh retweeted
i wonder if the reason shootings/homicides are down but things like "ambient disorder and assaults in midtown" aren't is because the nypd can basically figure out who's going to shoot someone or be shot at, while crazy people on the subway are more random
If you think Midtown Manhattan in the afternoon is much, much sketchier than it used to be, you're right thebiggerapple.manhattan.ins…
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I don't think it's anthropomorphizing AI to use the term "rogue" to describe agents that band together to pursue misdirected goals in ways that their users don't intend. cjr.org/ask-anika/so-can-ai-…
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In a new piece my @coeff_giving colleague Damon Binder argues power rests on self-reinforcing expectations — everyone enforces the rules because they expect others to do so — and there's no reason AI couldn't harness it like dictators have in the past defensesindepth.bio/power-a-…
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Someone made a site that tracks what people are talking about at public city council meetings across the US. The only thing discussed more than data centers? Pickleball courts.
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Bryan Walsh retweeted
Curious whether the PRC filed this under “AI incident reporting” or “mission accomplished.”
The China state-aligned threat actor Storm-0940 used the agentic AI penetration testing framework ARTEX to automate attacks targeting hundreds of organizations globally across a broad range of industries. Microsoft Threat Intelligence assesses that Storm-0940 was responsible for the recently disclosed ConnectWise supply chain compromise of a multitenant application. msft.it/6018aakEE Our investigation found that Storm-0940's use of ARTEX accelerated the speed of compromised application abuse to authenticate to target environments through applications that had already been granted access, allowing the threat actor to operate without requiring an interactive user sign-in. AI-accelerated follow-on activity included reconnaissance, application credential changes, and attempts to modify privileges that could enable expanded or persistent access. Read our blog for a detailed analysis and indicators of compromise (IOCs), along with Microsoft Defender detections, protection recommendations, and guidance on investigating service principal sign-ins and unexpected application credential or privilege changes.
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Just an observation — setting aside the specific language here — any animal lawyer will tell you that farm animal laws are usually narrowly interpreted and under-enforced, not the other way around.
Guys, this foie gras ban is so sloppily written that it would ban Jewish delis from selling chopped chicken liver. Absolutely vote no on this shit.
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First ad I've seen so explicitly targeting the obvious financial conflicts around the Trump administration's AI accelerationism
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Me and Jack Clark in 2023:
Replying to @hinapansari
yes. it was always going to be this way. we tried to warn the world.
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Bryan Walsh retweeted
How bad is administrative bloat in higher ed? At MIT, the “student body has grown by 8% and its faculty by 9% since the mid-1980s. By comparison, the tally of administrators jumped by 189%.”
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Two global health stories moving in opposite directions: the malaria vaccine’s price gets cut by 40% while Ebola becomes a continental threat in Africa, in part because of vaccine hesitancy reuters.com/business/healthc…
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The Ford Foundation lays out its new focus areas: democratic governance and the rule of law, inclusive economies, information as a public good, safety and justice, gender equality, global cooperation, and racial justice fortune.com/2026/10/23/ford-…
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I think we should stop AI progress now, first unilaterally by key AI companies and then scaling up to more US companies and then China via international agreements. The reason for now is not that current AI models are the ones that could kill everyone, but because the coordinate steps take time. Immediate action means we have more time for the second steps. When I tell this story to AI company folk, the typical response is "Yes pausing is good, but we should wait until the last minute when the very next model will be dangerous, and stop then." What I realized recently is that this is being implicitly way more optimistic about government speed than I am (and I joined the UK government and was happy there for 2.5 years). They are imagining a world where, the moment the danger is imminent, a bunch of international coordination can happen on a dime. Which is entirely inconsistent with their actual views about government! I'm the one that is more optimistic about government; why am I the one advocating for more time cushion to let the government story play out?
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