The case closing itself

Recently: Why is betting everywhere now? Gerda Reith on how it became so mixed up in sports—and then everything else.

Today: Istanbul’s chief prosecutor got a promotion—to the ministry overseeing the trial he built against the country’s most prominent opposition leader. … The legal basis for every U.S. climate rule since 2009 is gone. … &c.

For members: How did the open web go into such “rapid decline”? Michael Socolow on why search engines have gotten worse, old links no longer work, and the internet is increasingly siloed.

+ New music from Courtesy x Erika de Casier ...

A prosecutor’s new brief

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has appointed Akın Gürlek—Istanbul’s chief public prosecutor, who jailed Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and filed a 4,000-page indictment demanding that İmamoğlu serve 2,352 years in prison—as the country’s justice minister. Opposition lawmakers rushed the podium to block Gürlek’s swearing-in; ruling-party members formed a protective ring while he read the oath through the shouts and punches; and one legislator from the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) left with a broken nose. Gürlek got through the oath anyway.

Erdoğan didn’t have to appoint Gürlek; any loyalist could have filled the post. But he chose this specific prosecutor, weeks before this specific trial: İmamoğlu’s first hearing—142 charges, 402 defendants—is scheduled for March 9. The appointment follows a pattern, too: Last March, İmamoğlu was arrested the morning the CHP was set to nominate him for president. The day before, Istanbul University annulled his degree—which Turkish law requires of candidates. Since then, Gürlek’s office has detained hundreds of opposition mayors, seized an opposition television channel, and stacked espionage charges atop the corruption charges. The CHP’s leader called it a “judicial coup.” The prosecutor now runs the ministry the trial runs through.

Meanwhile

• ‘Ashamed before the people.’ Out of nowhere, on the 47th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized to “all those affected” by the regime’s crackdown on nationwide protests, saying the government is “ashamed before the people.” Estimates say security forces killed between 6,000 and 40,000 Iranians in the crackdown. No senior official in the history of the Islamic Republic has ever spoken like this in public. Pezeshkian also declared that Iran is “not seeking nuclear weapons” and is “ready for any kind of verification.” … See “The loyal opposition in Tehran.”
• Seventeen years, undone. On Thursday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rescinded the 2009 “endangerment finding”—the legal opinion that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, and the basis for nearly every federal climate regulation since. The 2009 finding had survived legal challenges, Supreme Court review, and even President Donald Trump’s own first-term EPA. According to Jeff Holmstead—an EPA official in the George W. Bush administration—if the reasoning holds in court, “no future EPA will be able to regulate CO₂ emissions.”
• A lighthouse at the center of the galaxy. Federal immigration agents withdraw from Minnesota after weeks of protests and two citizens were shot dead. … Argentina’s Senate passes President Javier Milei’s labor reform after a 14-hour session—the first since 1984. … Cuba’s nine international airports have no jet fuel through March. … Mexico is sending two Navy ships with fuel and aid. … A radio signal near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way may be a millisecond pulsar—a possible tool for testing Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Feature

‘Profiting from incuriosity’

How did the open web go into such “rapid decline”? Michael Socolow on why search engines have gotten worse, old links no longer work, and the internet is increasingly siloed.

Last May, Matthew Prince, the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, a major internet-infrastructure company, said his firm has tracked a dramatic shift in how tech companies interact with the web: The ratio of how many times they scrape websites to how many visitors they send back has spiked in the last year.

“Ten years ago, for every two pages that Google would crawl, they would send content creators one visitor,” Prince said. “Six months ago, the rate was six pages scraped for every one visitor. Now it’s 15 scrapes for every one visitor.” According to Prince, AI companies send exceptionally few users to external websites. “Six months ago, OpenAI was at 250 scrapes to one visitor. Today, it’s almost 1,500 scrapes to one visitor.”

For its part, OpenAI wants to replace the web as we know it. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, said, “We think that AI represents a rare once-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be about and how to use one, and how to most productively and pleasantly use the web.”

Sites across the web are getting fewer and fewer clicks. The owners of the British newspaper The Daily Mail, for example, say their web traffic has gone into a massive slump over the past year; the number of readers clicking through to the Mail’s website from Google searches featuring AI-generated summaries has, they said, fallen by as much as 89 percent.

Google has long maintained that the web—which originally encouraged users to click through to a wide range of websites—is flourishing. But in September 2025, the company stated in a legal filing that “the open web is already in rapid decline.”

Why would that be?

Michael Socolow is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of Maine. Socolow says the web isn’t just gated off behind paywalls now; big technology companies are systematically killing it—profiting more from funneling users to specific sites, harvesting their data, and selling it to advertisers than from enabling people to browse freely. An open web, in other words, just doesn’t make enough money.

And commercial AI has just supercharged the trend. The big tech companies no longer want to serve as guides to the web; they want to keep users on their own platforms, where AI chatbots provide all the answers in one place. For all the problems with the open web, Socolow says, what’s replacing it isn’t solving them—it’s making them worse …

Books

‘A smattering of hardcore separatists’

Syria’s dictator is long gone. But now what? Rime Allaf, It Started in Damascus: How the Long Syrian Revolution Reshaped Our World.

After years of civil war, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia in 2024. He’d crushed the popular uprising that began in 2011, but having lost whatever popular support he once had, he soon lost key territory, the backing of key allies—principally Russia and Iran—and then the country as a whole. In little more than a week, Assad’s regime crumbled. Rebel forces stormed Damascus, and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader Ahmed al-Sharaa became the new head of government.

But even as Syrians celebrated, many worried that Sharaa might impose a religious tyranny of his own. Before leading HTS, he’d served as emir of the al-Qaeda-aligned Al-Nusra Front under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani. Back in 2017, the U.S. State Department offered US$10 million for information on his whereabouts. Not, on the face of it, the man to fulfill the promises of the Syrian Revolution.

So what are the real prospects for democracy in Syria?

New music

‘You’re Not Alone’

A supremely confident performance from Courtesy, a Danish-Greenlandic DJ and producer, and the Danish singer-producer Erika de Casier. This track reworks their 2023 original, now featuring a drum-and-bass chassis—De Casier’s voice, cool and steady: “Open your mind / Surely it’s time to leave with me.”