Sign in

Shashank Joshi

@shashj.bsky.social
67K followers 144 following 124 posts

Incoming Washington bureau chief at The Economist. Previously defence editor for eight years. Visiting Fellow at Department of War Studies, KCL. For speaking engagements: chartwellspeakers.com/speaker/shash…

PostsRepliesMedia
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
A new phase in US coercion of Canada. 'if the new tariffs come into force on August 19th, Canada will be the first country ever to be subjected to tariffs under Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, a law passed in 1930" www.economist.com/the-americas...
economist.com
Donald Trump’s bullying of Canada is endless
Canadians are starting to turn against Mark Carney’s pragmatic response
915752
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
A big debate a couple of weeks ago, sparked by Musk, on whether US or European cities are safer. My colleagues look carefully at the data. "Personal robberies with a use of force happen about as often in both regions, even if London and Paris do especially badly." www.economist.com/graphic-deta...
economist.com
Is Europe safer than America?
A novel dataset provides some surprising answers
69625
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun @eaterofsun.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
File under "Really quite disturbing" If the preliminary data for the past few weeks are confirmed, we are now very close to a new world record, and seeing an alarming rate of change climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_dai...
Plot of daily sea surface temperature between 60ºN and 60ºS. Day for day the temperature has been at a record height siince June 3rd. The as yet provisinal data for the past couple of weeks reaches 21.16ºC-- just a smidge below the all time record of 21.17ºC set in early 2024, when an El Nino event was at its peak.
09242
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Ian Kearns @ianpkearns.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
If you want to get close to what the war in #Ukraine is really like, worth listening to this fascinating conversation between @shashj.bsky.social and Jack Watling of @rusi.bsky.social War in Ukraine: has the tide really turned? www.economist.com/insider/insi...
economist.com
War in Ukraine: has the tide really turned? | The Economist Insider
The war in Ukraine is in flux. The country's deep strikes inside Russia have drawn a lot of attention. But Ukraine is also improving recruitment while pioneering new tactics that could eventually brea...
0372
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
4822151
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
For @economist.com subscribers: I spoke to Jack Watling on the latest episode of Inside Defence. We talked about Ukraine, what people misunderstand about drone warfare and the vital role played on the modern battlefield by the ancient art of digging. www.economist.com/insider/insi...
economist.com
War in Ukraine: has the tide really turned? | The Economist Insider
The war in Ukraine is in flux. The country's deep strikes inside Russia have drawn a lot of attention. But Ukraine is also improving recruitment while pioneering new tactics that could eventually brea...
4585
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Peter Sloman @pjsloman.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Fair play to John Healey, who managed to time his 5.5-week break from government to coincide exactly with the World Cup
141468233
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
For the 'just a stochastic parrot' brigade. 'A mathematician has cracked an 87-year-old conundrum with the help of AI and announced the solution unceremoniously in a tweet. The finding is the most difficult mathematical problem yet solved by AI, say experts.' www.newscientist.com/article/2580...
newscientist.com
AI's solution to 87-year-old riddle takes mathematicians by surprise | New Scientist
Mathematicians have been trying to prove the Jacobian conjecture for nearly a century, but now the Claude Fable 5 AI has apparently found a counterexample that disproves it
127413
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
A farewell to Fable. I got it to make a Guess-Who inspired game which gives you a series of clues to guess the purged PLA or American general. Admittedly niche. shashj1.github.io/guess-hu/
1452
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
I wrote on Hegseth's plan to screen all troops over 30 for low testosterone. It is unusual—I don't think any other military does it—but it is not crazy. Universal screening is not recommended in the general population, but military personnel are distinctive. www.economist.com/united-state...
economist.com
Pete Hegseth’s testosterone-screening plan is unusual, not crazy
Soldiers seem to be at particular risk of hypogonadism
16305
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
James Cameron @jjjcameron.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Maybe NATO should just not have summits for 2027 and 2028. Low-key constructive work to transfer more responsibility to Europe can continue without giving Trump a platform to beat up on allies and undermine deterrence further.
611213
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Alexander Martin @alexmartin.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Britain’s cyber agency laid out plans on Tuesday for what it called “a national scale, sovereign defense capability” that would use agentic AI systems to discover and fix cybersecurity weaknesses across government networks and critical national infrastructure.
therecord.media
Britain plans to build autonomous AI 'Cyber Shield' to defend nation
The capability, called Cyber Shield, is designed to counter a threat the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said could see attackers “move at machine speed and greater scale, reducing opportunities...
3185
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Carnegie Russia Eurasia @carnegierussia.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
On July 9, join us online for an important conversation with Senior Fellow @michaelkofman.bsky.social on Russia's military power after Ukraine, moderated by The Economist's @shashj.bsky.social. RSVP here: carnegieendowment.org/events/2026/...
0264
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Another Fable experiment. An interactive visualisation of Charles Joseph Minard's famous 'Carte figurative' showing Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812, with some Tolstoy mixed in. shashj1.github.io/minard-1812/
3525
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
I asked Fable to produce an interactive tool that explains simply how neural networks work, taking users through the history of the technology at the same time. Pretty magical, in my view. jazzy-duckanoo-9271fa.netlify.app
912719
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
I wrote this week on the whiplash of American AI policy: the unpredictable zig-zag of restrictions, where AI governance might be headed in this administration, and the broader implications of locking down and restricting cutting-edge models. www.economist.com/business/202...
economist.com
Donald Trump’s AI regime is opaque, unpredictable—and unsustainable
The administration now controls who gets access to the best models
3425
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun @eaterofsun.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Lede:
L.P. Hartley’s novel “The Go-Between”, written in the 1950s but set in 1900, made that summer’s heatwave perhaps the most famous in English literature. As Leo, the 12-year-old protagonist, becomes more deeply enmeshed in the events that will lead to his breakdown, the heat weighs on him ever more heavily. It is made all the worse by the fact that at first he delights in it, even urging it on: “The thermometer stood at eighty-four: that was satisfactory but I was confident it could do better.”

On June 25th thermometers all over Europe were doing considerably better. AFP, a news agency, calculated that 380m Europeans experienced temperatures above 30ºC (86ºF) that day. That included 63m people in France—94% of the population. On June 26th World Weather Attribution, an international scientific collaboration that looks at the degree to which climate change is responsible for various sorts of weather, concluded that this was the most severe heatwave on record in its study area (broadly speaking, western Europe).
1273
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun @eaterofsun.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
My round up of @economist.com's heatwave coverage (gift link) www.economist.com/europe/2026/...
economist.com
Europe can’t stand the heat
Oliver Morton, our planetary affairs editor, on why the continent is warming faster than any other—and adapting too slowly
910932
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Jon B. Wolfsthal @jonatomic.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
My latest on where the MOU and talks with Iran leave the US. It is not pretty. The bottom line is Iran has every incentive to drag out the talks and is getting paid without having to do anything on the nuclear issue. open.substack.com/pub/thinking...
open.substack.com
Iran Can Do This All Day
Thoughts about strategic and nuclear challenges over the next few months
44611
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
"... even AI models marketed as having conservative views, including Elon Musk’s Grok, offered by his company SpaceX, cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...
13718
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Today I interviewed German army chief Lt-Gen Christian Freuding. We talked about German rearmament, the future of the Lithuania bridge & debates over the timeline of the Russian threat. @economist.com subscribers can tune in to Inside Defence in an hour. www.economist.com/insider/insi...
economist.com
Is Germany war-ready? | The Economist Insider
Germany’s army chief has his work cut out. Lieutenant General Christian Freuding has been charged with overseeing the rearmament of the country’s land forces—part of a once-in-a-generation mission whi...
27910
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Florian Flade @florianflade.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
„Le Monde has learned that the latest ongoing investigation, led by (…) France's counterintelligence agency, targets an individual accused of preparing to blow up a SNCF transformer used to regulate rail traffic...“ www.lemonde.fr/en/france/ar... #Sabotage #DGSI #France
lemonde.fr
Russia's shadow looms behind several sabotage and espionage attempts on French soil
At the beginning of June, counterintelligence agents arrested a man while he was filming a drone prototype in a factory near Toulouse. Other investigations are targeting individuals suspected of prepa...
07123
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
Boom. "We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024" arxiv.org/abs/2606.19777
arxiv.org
Have Data Centers Raised Your Electric Bill? Causal Evidence from the United States
We estimate that data centers caused average retail electricity rates to fall modestly in the United States from 2015 to 2024 using an instrumental variables approach. Despite prevailing sentiment, th...
8353
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
I’m delighted that Alex Turner will succeed me as defence editor of The @economist.com. Alex, who is currently an army officer, is highly experienced, an accomplished military historian and an excellent writer. He will be a fantastic journalist. www.economistgroup.com/press-centre...
economistgroup.com
The Economist Group - Alex Turner appointed as defence editor of The Economist
The Economist has today announced the appointment of Major General Alex Turner as its next defence editor.
1117015
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
I wrote with my colleague Henry Tricks on the Fable/Mythos cut-off. www.economist.com/business/202...
economist.com
Donald Trump’s blocking of Anthropic is capricious and chaotic
America’s closest allies are shellshocked
310122
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Trump is nominates Jay Clayton for DNI. Clayton was chair of the SEC & is now US Attorney for the Southern District of New York; the latter role would give him at least some national security experience. Far likelier to get confirmed than Pulte.
5585
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
X is sadly awash with Nazis, but this site is doing its level best to amass an impressive number of extremely unpleasant people.
3533318
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Al Carns on a bit of a political kamikaze mission today. What's much more damning is that his critique isn't just about money, but also the inadequate - in his view - level of "transformation" on tech.
4422
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Big claim from a Ukrainian drone maker about a test two years ago: "We just launch it and we know...everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead. There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing." www.newscientist.com/article/2529...
38316
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Pudding-brain theory of defence spending. A world in which the UK has no allies or is content to abandon them. Would take about three seconds of Googling to learn about the UK battle group in Estonia, and another three seconds as to why it needs to be there.
1727128
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Wow. UK defence sec'y John Healey resigns. His resignation letter says DIP settlement he was given "falls well short of what is required for defence and the country" and that UK would be spending just 2.68% of GDP in 2030.
33375124
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
While you're waiting for the DIP, please enjoy this DIP Mad Libs generator. stirring-pika-6d5081.netlify.app
6301
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Ulrike Franke @rikefranke.eu · 08/06/2026
How did they not come up with something better in the MONTHS they had to prepare the FCAS cancellation?! No plan B on the fighter; French press (and others) report it was Berlin which ended it; Spain (the third partner!!) nowhere to be seen. They didn’t even manage to end this mess correctly 🤯
1022926
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
"In the code of America’s greatest generals, hatred of war has been as foundational as grim awareness of the necessity to prepare for it." www.economist.com/united-state...
economist.com
Donald Trump says Pete Hegseth loves war. That should disqualify him
How did standards for military leaders fall so low?
414429
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Very sorry to see that Sir Alex Younger has died of cancer, aged just 62. Younger's wife 'was shocked that he had never told his mother he was a spy, and so he did. “Yes, darling, so was I,” his mother replied.' www.thetimes.com/uk/obituarie...
thetimes.com
Sir Alex Younger obituary: long-serving head of MI6
Charming and self-effacing British spy chief with an inner steel
521042
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
How the hell does this guy get near a clearance?
1218039
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Steven Murdoch @steven.murdoch.is · 02/06/2026
For 19 years, GPS satellites have secretly broadcast a “numbers station” in their signals. We decoded 12M messages: a 2011 flash where 31 satellites flipped in hours, “ghost” substrings repeating years apart, and a “TEXT” prefix spreading now. lsc-pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/...
lsc-pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com
Inside GNSS Media & Research • May/June 2026 • 62
621985
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
I wrote on Bill Pulte, Trump’s appointment as director of national intelligence, despite having no relevant national-security experience & with vanishingly low odds of being confirmed by the Senate. Another indignity for the US intelligence community. www.economist.com/united-state...
economist.com
The fading influence of America’s spy co-ordinator
Bill Pulte’s appointment as director of national intelligence reflects the office’s declining stature
511029
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Hm. 'In an interview with a far-right website ahead of the summit, Bovino — who didn’t wear his controversial coat — referenced Nazi Germany’s lead general Erwin Rommel as an inspirational figure' www.politico.eu/article/afd-...
politico.eu
AfD, Vox mingle with ex-US Border Patrol chief, white nationalist leader at ‘remigration summit’
Gregory Bovino and Jared Taylor flew in to support activists once deemed too toxic even by European far-right parties.
914943
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Johnathan Perkins @johnathanperk.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
I.C.E. maintains a strict dress code for people seeking to visit their loved ones caged at Delaney Hall. It’s clear the strict rule is useful pretext to deny visitors entry. #ICE #DHS
32878400
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Bored of waiting for the DIP? Try the Choose-Your-Own-DIP-Adventure simulator for UK defence spending trade-offs. An entertaining (and hopefully not too libellous) way to put Opus 4.8 through its paces. singular-faloodeh-dea45f.netlify.app
36110
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Bored of waiting for the DIP? Try the Choose-Your-Own-DIP-Adventure simulator for UK defence spending trade-offs. An entertaining (and hopefully not too libellous) way to put Opus 4.8 through its paces. singular-faloodeh-dea45f.netlify.app
36110
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Christopher Clary @claryc.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
"street prices for cocaine remain between $60 to $100 per gram in many U.S. cities, about where they were before the boat strikes began, according to Nabarun Dasgupta, an addiction scientist at the University of North Carolina." www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/w...
nytimes.com
Boat Strikes Have Failed to Curb Flow of Cocaine to U.S., Experts Say
46926
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Alex Selby-Boothroyd @alexselbyb.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
"May you live in bellicose times." Lovely if depressing chart www.economist.com/interactive/...
Chart from The Economist showing the number of armed conflicts between states, 2010-25
15413
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
If I’m sitting at 35% approval the thing I definitely want to do is to cause apocalyptic levels of chaos at all of America’s largest airports
2023410487
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
I wrote our cover story this week, a valedictory essay on the changes in war & warfare over my eight years as defence editor. It’s a reflection on the growth & limits of battlefield transparency, the lessons from different wars & the utility of force today www.economist.com/interactive/...
617235
Reposted by Shashank Joshi
James Cameron @jjjcameron.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Norway will participate in France's "forward deterrence" nuclear initiative. Norway will also sign a mutual defense treaty with France, known as the Narvik Agreement. www.tv2.no/nyheter/plan...
tv2.no
«Plan B» tar form: – Et taktskifte i samarbeidet
PARIS (TV 2): Norge vil være med på Frankrikes atomparaply-initiativ i et nytt forsvarssamarbeid.
713136
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Anne Keast-Butler, GCHQ's director, said today that "new intelligence" shows that "almost half a million Russian soldiers have been killed" in the Ukraine war. That is a remarkable number—not least because SIS' Richard Moore gave a figure of 250,000 Russians killed just eight months ago.
512938
Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 25/05/2026
738242