In the dark

Recently: Why is France stuck in political crisis? Matthias Matthijs on the increasing political fragmentation across Europe.

Today: The FBI releases photos but still apparently has few answers about the killing of Charlie Kirk. Americans struggle not to reach conclusions. Qatar reconsiders mediation after Israel’s strike inside its capital. Nepal's army negotiates from charred government buildings. & Brazil convicts its former president and Trump’s ally Jair Bolsonaro.

+ Why are people’s cognitive skills declining? Gloria Mark on how consumer technology is making us more error-prone, more stressed, and less productive.

& New music from Sofia Kourtesis ...

Fragments and photos

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation released images on Thursday of a person of interest in Wednesday’s murder of the American political activist Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University.

Plausibly, the FBI describes the subject as a “college-age man”—wearing dark clothing and sunglasses—and confirms that investigators have recovered the murder weapon, a Mauser 30/60 bolt-action rifle, from a wooded area near UVU, along with a spent cartridge, several unfired rounds, and footprint evidence.

They’ve otherwise disclosed little about leads, forensic analysis, or the full scope of their investigation—though their announced $100,000 reward for information in the case suggests they reckon they’re going to need to rely significantly on public help.

Everybody knows

Meanwhile, political commentators, security analysts, and elected officials have reached varied conclusions—vastly more consistently in their confidence than substance—about what Kirk’s shocking and terrible assassination says about American society … despite there yet being virtually no available information as to the shooter’s identity, motive, or planning.

Many figures broadly on the right, including the President of the United States, have characterized the attack as issuing directly from an increase in hateful political rhetoric from the left, while many on the left have attributed essentially the same blame to the right—including Charlie Kirk himself. It’s quickly become a widespread meme that the means of his murder is ironic, given Kirk’s claim that some gun deaths are a necessary price of the U.S. Constitution’s right to bear arms—though no one seems seriously to think that even robust new gun-control legislation would really affect anyone’s access to a Mauser 30/60 bolt-action rifle.

The interpretive rush, as FBI agents were still collecting shell casings and processing surveillance footage, suggests how easily the need for immediate meaning can displace tolerance for investigative uncertainty in a fraught, traumatic moment like this. It may in any event be worth underscoring: On the questions of who killed Charlie Kirk and why, no commentators yet know anything at all about what they’re saying.

Qatar reconsiders

Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani —a member of Qatar’s ruling family, who now occupies the dual positions of prime minister and foreign minister—said on Wednesday that his country is reviewing its role as mediator in Gaza-ceasefire negotiations following Israel’s strike on Hamas leadership in Doha the previous day.

The reported attack killed six people, including a Qatari security officer, while Hamas officials were reviewing a U.S. ceasefire proposal. It’s the first time Israel has conducted military operations on Qatari soil.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded on Thursday by telling Qatar to “expel Hamas or bring them to justice,” while Qatari officials said they are forming a “collective response” with regional allies and, notably, began publicly questioning their partnership with the United States.

The immediate question is whether ceasefire negotiations can survive after an attack inside the borders of their principal mediator. A longer-term question appears to be what effect the attack might have on Qatar’s global alliances and disposition.

Governing from ashes

Nepal’s army is negotiating with youth protesters to select an interim leader following Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s resignation on Tuesday, with the country’s former Chief Justice Sushila Karki among the candidates reportedly under consideration.

The discussions follow a death toll from anti-corruption demonstrations of at least 30, while key government buildings remain charred from fires protesters set while storming both Parliament and the Supreme Court earlier this week.

Kathmandu’s main airport has reopened after being closed during the violence, but the government complex at Singha Durbar—which houses multiple ministries—sustained significant damage from the fires.

Can an interim government actually govern when critical institutions of state have been literally burned down? The immediate challenge facing any new leadership is going to be establishing basic administrative functions while operating from buildings that protesters destroyed in their demand for change—creating the peculiar situation of trying to restore order from the physical wreckage of the system they’re meant to inherit.

Conviction and consequences

Brazil’s Supreme Court convicted former President Jair Bolsonaro on Thursday of attempting a military coup to overturn his 2022 election loss, including plans to assassinate President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It’s the first conviction of a leader for a coup attempt in Latin America’s largest democracy.

The 4-1 ruling is despite months of escalating U.S. pressure, including Trump administration tariffs on Brazilian goods and sanctions against Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who led the prosecution—and was himself, believe it or not, a target in the alleged assassination plot. Bolsonaro, 70, faces up to 40 years in prison, though he’ll remain free during appeals and has been under house arrest since August for violating court orders.

Notably, Brazil has defied significant American diplomatic and economic pressure with this verdict, but the practical consequences remain unclear—whether Trump will escalate his trade war, whether Brazil’s relationship with Washington will suffer lasting damage, or whether the conviction will meaningfully strengthen Brazilian democratic institutions against future authoritarian challenges. Or all three.

• From the August 3 member’s despatch, read “The things you can do with tariffs.”

Addled

—Gustav Jönsson, Gloria Mark

Have you ever walked into a room to get something and then, by the time you got there, forgotten what it was you wanted to get? Does that seem to be happening more often than it used to?

It seems like something strange has happened over the last few years: Human intelligence has started to decline. Results from large-scale international tests show the average person in high-income countries now has lower levels of literacy, numeracy, and critical reasoning than in the early 2010s. While the trend is similar in most countries, it’s especially dramatic in some. In the United States, for example, the share of adults with low scores in literacy increased from 19 percent in 2017 to 28 percent in 2023, while the share with low scores in numeracy climbed from 29 percent to 34 percent.

This can’t be good. What exactly is going on?

Gloria Mark is a professor at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Attention Span. Mark says it’s not just that people can’t read or count as well as they used to; these days, they can’t even keep focus on what they’re supposed to be reading or counting. Our attention spans, she says, have become remarkably short—and it’s causing us to feel more stressed, make more mistakes, and burn ourselves out trying to keep up with the increasingly hectic tempo of our digital lives.

What’s worse, there’s now growing evidence that generative artificial intelligence—particularly consumer AI software like ChatGPT—is accelerating the decline in our cognitive skills. Instead of using tech to think smarter, we’re essentially being used by it to outsource our own thinking. Still, Mark says, there’s a lot people can do to create resiliency and better navigate a world of growing distraction …

Meanwhile

Read John Jamesen Gould on what’s ahead at The Signal … + Hywel Mills, with an update on our migration to Ghost …

‘Nitzan and Aminaa’