From two podcasts I just heard as I walked to the office

Former US Ambassador Chas Freeman: “In an exchange between Ansarallah [Houthis] and the Saudis, the Saudis lose, because they have so much to lose and the Ansarallah has almost nothing to lose.”

Professor John Mearsheimer on Glenn Diesen's podcast which was released on October 17, 2026: "There was always a very important moral dimension to the Fukuyama argument [about the end of history] because the idea is that liberal democracy is a positive end and liberal democrats or countries that are liberal democracies are the good guys and everybody else is the bad guys. We have moral virtue on our side. That was the basic underpinning logic behind “The End of History.” The good guys won. We are morally superior to the rest. But afterwhat happened in Gaza where the West basically is complicit in a genocide, and this is certainly true of the United States, it's hard to make the argument that the West is morally superior to the rest. Not a serious argument."

News is not really about information but part of the entertainment industry and the intellectually brilliant podcasts with which YouTube abounds are also a form of entertainment. They eat up so much time that I have given them up except occasionally in the bath or walking, but even then there's very much to be said for silence and observation, being a flaneur.