Good morning.

Late on Friday night, Poland’s president was flying to Senegal when he ordered his plane to turn around.

Back in Warsaw, a few hours earlier, the head of the country’s Constitutional Tribunal had been suspended. Riot police now surrounded the court. One of his supporters had cut through the chain on its gate with an angle grinder. Inside were judges recently elected by parliament, whom the court’s leadership had until then refused to let take their seats.

Shortly before 1 a.m., President Karol Nawrocki arrived. At the entrance, Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska tried to stop him. “You will not come in,” she said.

He got through anyway.

In the corridor, she tried again: “We are judges of the Constitutional Tribunal.”

“You are not,” the president replied.

That exchange sums up the crisis. Two camps now claim the same court, and neither recognizes the other.

How it came to this

The Constitutional Tribunal is Poland’s highest authority on constitutional questions. It can strike down laws and block a government’s reforms.

From 2015 to 2023, Poland was governed by Law and Justice (PiS), a nationalist party that reshaped the court through disputed appointments. The EU’s top court later ruled that several of those appointments were irregular, and that the Tribunal no longer qualified as an independent court.

In 2023, Donald Tusk, a pro-European centrist and former president of the European Council, returned to power promising to undo the damage. The Tribunal stood in his way. So did President Nawrocki, a PiS-backed nationalist elected in 2025.

This year, parliament elected new judges. Nawrocki refused to swear in five of them. The Tribunal’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, a PiS-era appointee, refused to let them work. His post also protects him: a constitutional judge can be prosecuted only if the Tribunal itself agrees.

On Friday, the justice minister asked the Tribunal to lift his immunity. That same evening, Korwin-Piotrowska, one of the excluded judges, struck back. Citing her seniority, she suspended Święczkowski and declared herself the court’s acting head. Tusk’s government backed her, and the police secured the building.

The problem

The new judges have a strong case. Their method is much weaker.

To remove Święczkowski, Korwin-Piotrowska borrowed a rule written for ordinary courts, never designed for the Constitutional Tribunal. Her defenders say there was no other way: a court president who blocks his colleagues, and controls the body that rules on his own immunity, cannot be untouchable.

Even fierce critics of the old regime are uneasy. Marcin Matczak, a liberal law professor who calls Święczkowski the worst possible person to lead the Tribunal, says the legal basis for removing him “is nonexistent for a million reasons.”

There is an irony here. In 2017, the PiS government removed Korwin-Piotrowska from a senior court post by fax. She refused to accept it and kept working. Nine years later, it is her opponent who refuses to accept his removal.

Eight judges, eight votes

On Tuesday, Korwin-Piotrowska convened the Tribunal’s general assembly. Eight judges came, all chosen by the current parliament. The law requires at least ten. So the eight decided that some of their absent colleagues should not count, and voted unanimously that eight was enough.

Outside, Święczkowski was turned away at the gate again. He dismissed the meeting as “a social gathering.” “See you in a few months,” he told the police officers, “but in a different situation.”

Late on Tuesday, after a tense national security meeting with the president, Tusk offered Nawrocki a private, one-on-one meeting this week. “This is not about anyone triumphing or humiliating anyone,” he said. Then he posted: “Things are heading in the right direction.” The president’s chief of staff replied that they would — once the police left the Tribunal and the “legal judges” returned.

Why it matters

Every democracy that inherits a court packed by its predecessors faces the same dilemma. Play by the old rules, and the court stays in their hands. Bend those rules to free it, and you hand your opponents the argument they have been making all along: that you don’t respect the law either.

Many Poles seem tired of both sides. In a poll published Tuesday, the largest group said neither the government nor the president was right. Among Poles in their thirties, it was 72 percent.

Poland may eventually settle who controls its Constitutional Tribunal. The harder question will remain: who still has the authority to decide?

— TB

I like Formula 1. No, I love F1!

I almost never miss a race, I regularly go to the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, and I could recite the drivers’ and constructors’ standings almost by heart.

Over the past 20 years, this sport has given me the kind of champions I admire most: the ones you know are going to win, who always deliver, and who somehow never let you down. Two in particular:

Lewis Hamilton

Nothing destined this kid from a more than modest background to excel in such an expensive sport. We all know the story of his father, Anthony, who went as far as holding down three jobs at once to pay for his son’s karting weekends.

Seven world titles later, Sir Hamilton is still chasing an eighth. And if he gets it, it will be in red this time, at the wheel of the most prestigious car on the grid: the Ferrari. It would be the classiest way to leave the sport. He would walk out through the most prestigious door and become the greatest legend in F1 (for those who think he isn’t already), and many of us, so many of us, dream of witnessing it.

Max Verstappen

F1’s supposed bad boy, whom I have never found “bad” at all.

At 18, because Red Bull had just brutally demoted Daniil Kvyat after a clash with Sebastian Vettel at the Russian Grand Prix, Max Verstappen found himself at the wheel of a top team’s car.

He didn’t know the team, he didn’t know the car, but he seized his chance, took advantage of the collision between the two Mercedes and held off Kimi Räikkönen’s faster Ferrari all the way to the chequered flag to claim his first F1 victory!

The whole paddock was left speechless. Niki Lauda later said he “had never seen anything like it, and that this boy would one day be world champion”. Four titles later, Max won again in Mexico City on Sunday.

If you want to understand who Max Verstappen is and why I like this driver so much, watch the races at Interlagos in 2016 and Interlagos in 2024.

So let’s be honest: I am not a Kimi Antonelli fan, and I wouldn’t have bet a euro on him at the start of the season. Even Toto Wolff didn’t expect him at this level so soon. But I like him enormously, as everyone does, I think: what he gives off, his calm, his closeness to his family, his relationship with his father, his apparent simplicity… these are values that speak to me.

And Antonelli grew up watching Hamilton and Verstappen.

In 2018, at Monza, he was twelve and one of the grid kids (the children who have the privilege of accompanying the drivers onto the starting grid). He was assigned to Hamilton. A photograph shows the seven-time champion shaking his hand on the starting grid. Six years later, when Hamilton left for Ferrari, that boy inherited his seat at Mercedes.

According to Mercedes, he also inherited a long handwritten message from Lewis on the wall of his room. It told him that if he took care of the team, the team would take care of him. Words from a champion to a future champion.

It’s also worth remembering that his first steps at a racetrack began in a stack of tyres! At seven, he was too young to be allowed into the F1 paddock at Hockenheim. So his father Marco, a sportscar driver who runs his own small team, hid him among the tyres and wheeled him in on a trolley, with an umbrella on top.

Those trips to the paddock with his father also gave him the chance to meet a young Max Verstappen.

The road wasn’t straight either. In his rookie season, at 18, he lost his confidence and, by his own account, hit rock bottom. But he managed to pick himself up.

This year, he won nine Grands Prix and was so fast that before the start in Monaco, Verstappen advised him to wait one second when the lights went out. “Two,” added Hamilton. “Two seconds, okay,” replied Kimi, laughing.

Marco Antonelli wasn’t supposed to be in Mexico City. His own team was racing its season finale at Mugello. He flew out anyway. And it was a good thing he did!

On Sunday, Verstappen won, Hamilton finished second and Antonelli third, but it was enough. At 20, he became the youngest world champion in history, more than three years younger than the previous record holder (Vettel, at 23, in 2010), and the first Italian champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953.

In May, in Montreal, Hamilton and Verstappen had already lifted him up on the podium after his win. On Sunday, I watched Lewis wave Max over to do it again, this time for a champion.

Eleven world titles lifting a twelfth. And twelve, as it happens, is the number Kimi races with, in tribute to Ayrton Senna.

It was the perfect podium.

Antonelli said he would never forget that day.

Neither will I.

— TB

Last night, I was at the Grand Rex in Paris for the premiere of George Michael: THE FAITH TOUR, a restored film of his 1988 concerts at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy.

I’d been waiting for this film for two years. And I had a very personal reason.

In 1988, I was there.

George was 24. He had just left Wham!, the duo he had formed with his friend Andrew Ridgeley. He was already a star, of course, but his solo career was only just beginning. The man who would become one of the greatest voices in pop music was still finding himself.

His first solo album, Faith, had made him a phenomenon.

CD players were only just becoming widespread; Faith and Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly were my very first two CDs.

Last night, I went with family and friends, including my daughter, who has just turned 15. Almost forty years later, seeing this concert again with her felt a little unreal. And wonderful.

I wasn’t expecting a miracle from a concert film nearly forty years old. I was wrong.
Ok, the cinematography is very 1980s, but the concert footage is really well done. They had invested considerable resources for the time: fourteen 35mm cameras and filming over both nights in Paris. And above all, that voice. Absolutely breathtaking.

No digital effects. No spectacular staging. Just a young man with an extraordinary voice, on stage in front of an audience that adored him.

Before the screening, we even got a little karaoke to warm up the crowd. Freedom! ‘90.

Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford: the five supermodels from the legendary January 1990 cover of Vogue, photographed by Peter Lindbergh, reunited in a music video directed by another young man who was still relatively unknown. A certain David Fincher, the future director of Seven, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network and Gone Girl.

In short, if you loved the George Michael of the 1980s, the one behind Careless Whisper and I Want Your Sex, go and see this film. You’ll be 15 again ❤️

— TB

$5,000 if Republicans win. $1 million if you catch someone cheating.

Both offers are real, and both come from Donald Trump.

The first, a “Trump dividend” for every adult citizen, was made in Dallas in September, on one condition: his party must keep the House and the Senate. It is at least the fourth time this term he has promised Americans a check. None of the first three has arrived. At a rally in Texas last week, he suggested spending this one at Mar-a-Lago, then had second thoughts: “For $5,000, the most you’ll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert.”

The second offer came on Truth Social eight days before the vote. A few days earlier, Trump said he had personally ordered a Justice Department lawsuit to block Alaska from certifying its Senate race if the Republican loses. The argument: a second candidate named Sullivan may have confused voters. (Republicans say Democrats recruited him as a spoiler; the Justice Department has opened a criminal inquiry into that too.) On Sunday, a federal judge threw the lawsuit out. She found the Justice Department lacked standing, and had offered no workable way to investigate those votes without violating the secret ballot. The department said it would appeal.

Trump is not on Tuesday’s ballot. He has never behaved more as if he were. “Please pretend I’m on the ballot,” he keeps telling his crowds.

The scoreboard

He promised gas under $2 a gallon. It is $4.17.

His approval was 32% in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll. That is barely above his record low of 31%, set two weeks earlier.

In NBC’s final poll, 64% of voters, including a third of those who voted for him, say he has fallen short of their expectations.

Democrats lead by nine points among likely voters in the same Reuters/Ipsos poll. Nate Silver’s model gives them a 95% chance of taking the House. The Senate is closer.

Why it matters to him

“You got to win the midterms,” Trump told House Republicans in January. Otherwise: “I’ll get impeached.”

He may be overestimating the danger, and underestimating it at the same time. Impeachment needs only a House majority, but removal takes two-thirds of the Senate, and nobody expects that. Justice Department policy bars prosecuting a sitting president, and the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling shields his official acts.

What a Democratic House would have is something duller and more dangerous: subpoena power. The power to demand documents, put witnesses under oath and hold hearings on live television, from January 3.

Both sides are ready. Robert Garcia and Jamie Raskin, in line to chair the Oversight and Judiciary committees, have already sent document-preservation letters to companies and contractors. And on Sunday, Reuters reported that the White House has spent months preparing for exactly this. Stephen Miller and Russell Vought have been mapping out what Trump could do by executive power alone, while White House lawyers study, in one official’s words, “where he could push the limits of his authority.” Asked how comfortable Trump would be governing that way, one person familiar with the plans answered: “very comfortable.”

In a Fox News poll, voters’ top concern was government corruption: 60% said they were extremely concerned, narrowly ahead of inflation. Asked about corruption after voting early in Florida, Trump said it was happening in cities run by Democrats.

So what would the committees ask about?

The paper trail

A Reuters investigation found that the Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion from four crypto ventures since returning to the White House. Over the same period, more than a million outside investors suffered losses of a similar size, including paper losses.

Days before the inauguration, an entity tied to Sheikh Tahnoon, the UAE’s national security adviser, quietly bought 49% of the family’s crypto firm for $500 million, the Wall Street Journal reported. A fund he chairs then used the family’s stablecoin to settle a $2 billion investment in Binance. The administration later approved the sale of some 500,000 advanced AI chips to the UAE, including to a company linked to Tahnoon. Binance’s founder received a presidential pardon. Each step can be explained on its own. Explaining them together is what hearings are for.

On the new White House ballroom, Trump said: “It’s being paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine.” The donor list obtained by the Washington Post shows $333 million. His name isn’t on it. (The list does not cover in-kind gifts.)

On October 8, Trump awarded Elon Musk the National Medal of Science and called him “our modern-day Thomas Edison.” Since July, Musk had given $276 million to keep Congress Republican. House Democrats have said they want to look at his government contracts and his time running DOGE. Few laureates have had so much riding on an election.

The White House says Trump has never had a conflict of interest.

The Epstein files

On October 26, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released a report on 11 women; according to its authors, five accuse Trump of rape or sexual assault in Jeffrey Epstein’s presence in the 1990s. The allegations have not been established in court. The Justice Department called the report a last-ditch ploy, and the White House says none of it is true.

What is established is narrower.

A federal jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll (it did not find rape), and in June the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. His $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, over a birthday letter to Epstein that allegedly bears his signature, was dismissed for good on Saturday: the judge found he had not shown actual malice. Trump denies writing the letter; the ruling did not settle that question. And Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted accomplice, has refused to answer Congress’s questions unless Trump grants her clemency. He has not ruled it out.

A year ago, a Bloomberg reporter asked why he wouldn’t release the Epstein files if they held nothing incriminating. His answer: “Quiet, piggy.”

With subpoena power, Democrats could demand the files. Getting them would be another battle.

The war and the pump

On February 28, the U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran. It has cost more than $47 billion, by a Pentagon estimate, and about $2,000 per household in higher costs, according to Moody’s chief economist.

October 8: “We will not be attacking Iran at any time prior to the Midterm Elections.”

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Washington had told Gulf allies to prepare for a “short, intense” campaign after them.

Trump’s forecast, in September: “I think the war is going to end immediately after the election.” The war, it seems, is waiting for the midterms too. Meanwhile, Iranian negotiators spent the weekend in Doha, and Marco Rubio says Trump would prefer a diplomatic solution.

In September, Trump signed new sanctions on Russian energy into law. On October 9, he lifted them on Russian diesel, to bring prices down before the vote (we covered it here). The Russian fund now handling the payments is one the U.S. Treasury once called Putin’s “slush fund.” It wants its own sanctions lifted. The administration is considering it.

A Democratic House could investigate what the war has cost, question officials under oath about the diesel deal, and use its leverage over future spending.

The party is doing the math

In 41 of 62 competitive races, Reuters found, Republican candidates have broken with Trump or played down their ties to him. Last week, the White House cancelled rallies in Kansas and Iowa, two states he won comfortably, then reinstated them.

Behind closed doors, House Republicans are already sizing up who would lead them in the minority: Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise or Jim Jordan. “How sad we have members bidding for MINORITY leadership positions,” one of them texted Axios. JD Vance says he will discuss 2028 with his family after the midterms.

In fairness

Polls underestimated Trump in 2016 and 2020. Among MAGA Republicans, his approval is still 95%. His supporters point to real results: Nicolás Maduro in a Manhattan courtroom, a stronger U.S. military foothold in Greenland, tax cuts they can feel. And the Justice Department says FBI and ICE agents will not serve as poll monitors on Tuesday.

But Trump has said he will respect the result “if they’re honest.” In January, he told The New York Times he regretted not having the National Guard seize voting machines in 2020.

Tuesday will not decide whether Donald Trump stays in the White House. It will decide whether he keeps a Congress that asks no questions, and whether, for the first time since January 2025, someone else gets to read the files.

Keep watching.

— TB

P.S. Later this week, once the votes are counted: The Receipts. What he promised, what he delivered, whoever wins. Subscribe so it lands in your inbox.

An election that ended an era. A screenplay that finally reached a screen. And a week of anniversaries: a statue, a submarine, a book, two letters and a phone call in Paris.

Subscribe now

🎬 SUNDAY 25 — The AI scene

On Thursday, I promised you a little experiment. On Sunday afternoon, I kept my word.

Over a rainy dinner in Paris, a friend turned the opening scene of one of my screenplays, optioned four times and never made, into twenty seconds of AI-generated film. One prompt, one attempt, about ten minutes.

The result isn’t perfect, but I still find this one-shot pretty sexy!

→ I Wrote the Scene. AI Shot It.

🇷🇸 SUNDAY 25 — Serbia

At 11:52 a.m. on November 1, 2024, a station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad, killing sixteen people. Two years of student-led protests followed. No one has yet been convicted.

On Sunday night, Aleksandar Vučić, who had dominated Serbian politics for 14 years, conceded defeat to a movement born in the aftermath of their deaths.

Since then: the official count gave the Student List about 140 of parliament’s 250 seats. In Novi Sad, where the canopy fell, it won 63 percent of the vote. The movement has not yet said who will be prime minister.

Tomorrow marks the second anniversary of the tragedy. At 11:52, Novi Sad will stop again.

→ Sixteen People Died at a Train Station. Then Serbia Rose Up.

🗽 TUESDAY 27 — Lady Liberty

The story of the people who made the Statue of Liberty: a Frenchman imagined her and never saw her. Ordinary citizens of both countries paid for her. Immigrants assembled her. An American poet gave her a voice, and a loyal friend made sure that voice survived.

→ The French Gift America Almost Didn’t Want

⚓ WEDNESDAY 28 — The submarine

In October 1962, the U.S. Navy tried to force a Soviet submarine to the surface. What the Americans didn’t know: B-59 was carrying a nuclear torpedo.

→ The Man Who May Have Saved the World — and Nobody Knew

📖 WEDNESDAY 28 — Gulliver

Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift published a book “to vex the world,” and the world handed it to children.

→ The Book That Was Never Meant for Children

💻 THURSDAY 29 — The first message

In 1969, the first message sent over ARPANET was meant to be “LOGIN.” The computer crashed after two letters: LO. The internet had just been born.

→ The Internet Began With Two Letters

🇪🇺 FRIDAY 30 — Suez

Seventy years ago, the Suez crisis ended in humiliation for France and Britain. Yet a German chancellor saw a possible revenge: Europe. Four months later, six countries signed the Treaties of Rome.

→ “Europe Will Be Your Revenge”

That’s all for this week.

On Monday, on the eve of America’s midterms, we’ll look at what the vote could change for Donald Trump, his family and his party.

— TB

Good morning.

This week, an op-ed in Deia, a daily newspaper in Bilbao, Spain, went back seventy years to describe France’s place in Europe today. It quoted a German chancellor speaking to a French prime minister: “Europe will be your revenge.” He said it in Paris, on the day a phone call from London ended the Suez expedition. The story of that day explains a great deal about the Europe we live in now.

What happened

On October 29, 1956, Israel invaded Egypt’s Sinai under a plan secretly agreed with Paris and London. Britain and France followed. Officially they came to separate the combatants. In reality they wanted to retake the Suez Canal, which Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had nationalized in July.

Washington had not been consulted, and it was furious.

On November 4, Soviet tanks rolled back into Budapest to crush the Hungarian uprising. The next day, Moscow threatened London and Paris with rockets.

That week, Konrad Adenauer was due in Paris. The West German chancellor had planned the trip well in advance, to break a deadlock in European talks on a common market and an atomic energy community. His advisers urged him to cancel. He was 80, and he went anyway.

The overlooked part

On November 6, French Prime Minister Guy Mollet and his foreign minister, Christian Pineau, were going through the Soviet threat with their guest when the phone rang. It was Britain’s prime minister, Anthony Eden. The pound was under severe pressure and Washington was refusing to help, so Britain was accepting a ceasefire. Mollet wanted more time, and the argument went on into the night. But France could not fight on alone.

The blow was personal.

Mollet was a former English teacher and an Anglophile. Only two months earlier, he had raised with Eden the possibility of a union between France and Britain.

Adenauer’s response is preserved in the French diplomatic record. Europe, he said, could not rely on a world run by Washington and Moscow. Europeans had to unite, though not as a superstate. Once the American election was over, they should ask Washington what it really wanted. That day was Election Day in the United States, and Eisenhower would win in a landslide that night.

Then the chancellor told Mollet: “Europe will be your revenge.” And: “Naturally, England must be one of these European countries.”

Konrad Adenauer had been removed as mayor of Cologne by the Nazis in 1933 and detained by the Gestapo in 1944. Twelve years later, the German chancellor was standing by France.

Suez did not create Europe. But it gave a project that was already under way a new sense of urgency. The talks had begun in 1955, and in September Mollet had already called a common market “a good thing in itself, even for France.”

In Paris, the two leaders settled disputes that had been blocking a deal. Weeks later, a U.S. State Department memo noted that their meeting had removed the main remaining obstacles to the atomic treaty. As Pineau later put it: “And now, we must build Europe.”

Why it matters

With the canal blocked, Europe discovered how much of its oil depended on that single waterway. Britain rationed petrol. The Netherlands banned cars on Sundays, and children roller-skated down empty streets.

Egypt paid a very different price. Hundreds of people were killed in Port Said. Nasser kept his canal and became the hero of Arab nationalism.

Jean François-Poncet, then a young member of the French negotiating team, later summed up the lesson each country drew. France concluded that only a united Europe could stand up to the superpowers. Britain concluded the opposite: stay close to America. Eden resigned in January. Britain joined the Community in 1973, and left in 2020.

Four months after that phone call, on March 25, 1957, it was raining in Rome. In a Renaissance palace on the Capitoline Hill, ministers from six countries signed the treaties creating the European Economic Community and Euratom, the foundations of today’s European Union.

What they signed was mostly blank paper.

Albert Breuer, one of the organizers, later explained why. Cleaners had thrown out the typing stencils, mistaking them for rubbish. The students hired to assemble the volumes went on strike, demanding 200 more lire an hour. Only the first and last pages had been printed in time. The texts were complete by the time the treaties were formally sealed.

Mollet was not among the signatories. He would have liked to sign, but at their insistence he let Pineau and Maurice Faure put their names on the treaties he had fought for.

The pages were filled in later. Europe is still writing new ones.

— TB

Late on the evening of October 29, 1969, Charley Kline sat in Room 3420 of Boelter Hall at UCLA, a large, nearly empty lab with lime-green walls and a computer too big for any elevator in the building. He was 21, a programmer who liked working at night, when nobody else needed the machines.

Some 350 miles north, at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Bill Duvall was waiting at another computer.

The two men were connected twice: by an experimental network called ARPANET, and by an ordinary telephone line, so they could check whether anything actually arrived.

The task sounded modest. Kline would log in to the Stanford machine from Los Angeles. In 1969, it was closer to science fiction. When the Pentagon’s research agency looked for companies to build the network, IBM and AT&T didn’t even bid. Both thought it couldn’t be done.

Kline typed L.

“I got the L,” Duvall said.

Kline typed O.

“I got the O,” Duvall said.

Kline typed G.

The system crashed.

The Stanford computer was supposed to make things easier: type LOG, and it would add the IN itself. It never got the chance.

So the first message sent between two computers on ARPANET was not a grand declaration. It was a word cut off by a machine designed to finish it for you.

LO.

About an hour later, Duvall found the bug and the full login went through.

There was no camera, not even a tape recorder. The only record was a single entry Kline wrote in the lab’s logbook.

Leonard Kleinrock, the professor who ran the UCLA lab, has often said they should have prepared something better. Samuel Morse had “What hath God wrought.” Three months earlier, Neil Armstrong had his giant leap. They had half of a login.

Later, Kleinrock found the reading that stuck: LO, as in lo and behold. He is 92 now.

By December 1969, ARPANET connected four research institutions. Twenty years later, at CERN in Geneva, a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web. Today, an estimated 6 billion people, roughly three-quarters of humanity, use the Internet.

As for that night, nobody opened champagne.

Kline went home to bed.

Duvall stopped on the way for a burger and a beer. Years later, a reporter asked whether that was how he had celebrated.

No, he said. He was hungry.

— TB

Three hundred years ago today, on October 28, 1726, a London publisher released the travels of a ship’s surgeon named Lemuel Gulliver. There was no author’s name on the title page. There was a reason.

That summer, a manuscript had reached the publisher, Benjamin Motte. According to one account, it was delivered by a stranger in a hackney coach who vanished into the dark. The covering letter came from Gulliver’s cousin, a Mr. Richard Sympson, and asked £200. Neither Gulliver nor his cousin existed.

The real author was Jonathan Swift, an Irish clergyman, dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, and a man who knew what happened when words offended the powerful.

Two years earlier, Swift had published anonymous pamphlets attacking a British-backed scheme to introduce copper coins into Ireland. The authorities offered £300 to anyone who could identify the author. His printer was jailed. The scheme was eventually abandoned, and Swift became something of a national hero.

He understood the risks of putting his name on a book.

So he had the Gulliver manuscript recopied to conceal his handwriting. Motte, nervous, quietly toned down the most dangerous passages.

Because Gulliver’s Travels was not an adventure story. It was an attack.

In Lilliput, tiny politicians win office by dancing on a tightrope, and an empire goes to war over which end of an egg to crack. In Laputa, scientists try to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. And on his last voyage, Gulliver meets wise horses and filthy human creatures called Yahoos, then comes home unable to bear his own family.

But perhaps the most revealing scene takes place in Brobdingnag, the land of giants.

Gulliver proudly describes European civilization to its king. He even offers to teach him how to manufacture gunpowder, explaining how easily it can destroy armies and cities. A generous gift, Gulliver thinks. The king is appalled. He would rather lose half his kingdom than possess such a secret.

Gulliver considers him hopelessly naive.

That was Swift’s genius. He didn’t need to tell his readers what was wrong with their world. He simply made them look at it from somewhere else.

Swift said he wrote the book “to vex the world rather than divert it.”

The world refused to be vexed: the first printing sold out in a week. His friend John Gay reported that the book was “universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery.” The nursery won.

I know. I was one of those children. I loved Lilliput. Nobody told me it was about politicians.

For three centuries, the book kept escaping its author.

Children took it first. Georges Méliès filmed Lilliput in 1902, Hollywood animated it in 1939, Jack Black played Gulliver in 2010. Almost every adaptation keeps the little people and drops the dark ending.

Programmers took the eggs. In 1980, computer scientist Danny Cohen borrowed Big-Endians and Little-Endians to name a quarrel over the order in which computers store and transmit bytes. Engineers still use the terms.

The internet took the Yahoos. Yahoo!’s founders said they liked the word’s meaning: rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.

Japan took the flying island. Hayao Miyazaki borrowed Laputa for his 1986 film Castle in the Sky.

And then there is Mars.

In Laputa, Swift’s astronomers have discovered two small moons circling the red planet. In 1726, nobody had seen any. In August 1877, the American astronomer Asaph Hall found two: Phobos and Deimos.

Swift hadn’t discovered them. He had imagined them in a satire of scientific pride. But today, Phobos has a crater named Gulliver, and Deimos has one named Swift.

The man who set out to vex the world ended up on a moon he had imagined to make fun of it.

Happy 300th, Gulliver!

— TB

On October 28, 1962, sixty-four years ago today, Nikita Khrushchev announced that Soviet missiles would leave Cuba, and the world exhaled. Almost nobody knew that the night before, out in the Atlantic, another nuclear crisis had come and gone.

What happened

In Washington, President Kennedy and his advisers worried about Soviet submarines approaching Cuba. How could the Navy force them to surface without starting a fight by accident? The answer was small practice charges dropped into the water: a knock on the door, not an attack. On October 24, the procedure was sent to Moscow.

Nobody passed it on to the men who would hear the knocking.

Far out in the Sargasso Sea, the Soviet submarine B-59 was in trouble. It had left the Arctic on October 1, one of four diesel boats sent secretly toward Cuba. Now American destroyers had kept it underwater for hours, and its batteries were nearly dead. Inside, temperatures reached 113 to 122°F, hotter still in the engine room. Men fainted at their posts. There had been no word from Moscow in days.

Then the explosions began. To the Americans above, they were signals. To the crew below, they sounded like war. One officer later compared it to sitting inside a metal barrel while someone pounded it with a sledgehammer.

And there was something the Americans didn’t know: B-59 was carrying a nuclear torpedo.

According to Vadim Orlov, the radio-intelligence officer aboard, the exhausted captain, Valentin Savitsky, decided the war might already have started and ordered the weapon readied. “We will die, but we will sink them all,” Orlov remembered him shouting.

The overlooked part

Also aboard was Vassily Arkhipov, 36, chief of staff of the submarine brigade. He knew what nuclear meant up close. A year earlier, he had served on K-19, the Soviet nuclear submarine whose reactor failed at sea in July 1961, the accident Hollywood later turned into K-19: The Widowmaker. Eight crewmen died of radiation within weeks.

In Orlov’s account, Savitsky calmed down after talking with Arkhipov and the political officer, Ivan Maslennikov, and chose to surface. Other witnesses place the most dangerous moment after that.

When B-59 came up that night, Savitsky and Arkhipov climbed onto the conning tower into chaos. Planes roared 20 or 30 meters overhead. There were blinding searchlights, cannon fire, destroyers cutting across the bow. Arkhipov later said the captain could not even understand what was happening. Several crewmen remembered him ordering an emergency dive and calling for the nuclear torpedo.

Then, according to Ryurik Ketov, who commanded another submarine in the brigade, the narrow ladder below was blocked by the signals officer and his gear. For a few moments, Savitsky couldn’t get down. In Ketov’s telling, Arkhipov then realized the planes were firing past the boat, not at it. The Americans were trying to talk. He called the captain back and calmed him down. The order never reached the torpedo room.

Historians still debate the sequence, and the famous tale of a two-to-one vote is not supported by the records.

What is certain is this: an American fleet was trying to avoid a fight, a Soviet captain feared one had begun, and a nuclear weapon was never fired.

Why it still matters

The next day, B-59 slipped away. No medals awaited at home; the commanders were criticized for having been forced to surface at all. Arkhipov kept serving and became a vice admiral. When a Moscow newspaper revealed the story in 1995, he was furious. In his only public account, in 1997, he described the lights and the noise, and said nothing about his own role. He died the following year. The story only drew wide international attention in 2002, at a conference in Havana.

On October 27, 2017, his daughter Elena and grandson Sergei flew to London to accept an award in his name. Elena said her father never saw what he did as heroism, only as what he had to do.

Perhaps that is the truest version.

The Americans thought they were sending a message. The Soviets thought they were under attack. Between those two readings lay a nuclear torpedo, and, on a conning tower in the dark, a man who may simply have read the signal right.

— TB

On October 28, 1886, New York woke up to rain and fog. It didn’t matter. Around a million people turned out. As the parade passed Wall Street, traders hurled ticker tape from their windows, starting one of the city’s most famous traditions. Then the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi unveiled his masterpiece too early. When Senator William Evarts paused mid-speech, Bartholdi mistook it for his cue and released the French flag covering her face. Cannons roared, whistles blew, and the speech was never finished.

One man was missing: the Frenchman who dreamed her up died three years earlier.

The idea first took shape in France in 1865.

Édouard de Laboulaye, a law professor who led France’s anti-slavery society, wanted to celebrate the Union’s victory, the end of slavery and the friendship between two republics. The young sculptor Bartholdi would bring that vision to life. Fascinated by colossal monuments, he had proposed a giant torch-bearing woman for Egypt’s Suez Canal in 1869. Egypt declined.

Then came the war of 1870.

Bartholdi helped defend his hometown, Colmar. France lost, and Alsace became German. In 1871, he crossed the Atlantic to promote a monument to liberty, having just seen his own homeland pass under foreign rule. He chose a small island in New York Harbor that every arriving ship had to pass.

The deal was simple: France would pay for the statue, America for the pedestal.

Gustave Eiffel, years before his tower, designed her iron skeleton. Her arm and torch were shown in Philadelphia in 1876, her head at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878. Parisians watched her rise above their streets before she was taken apart, packed into 214 crates and shipped to New York in 1885.

What’s overlooked

America wasn’t ready for her. Fundraising for the pedestal dragged on for years, and Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco let it be known they would gladly take her.

The New York Times bristled: in 1882, it wrote that a million New Yorkers would rather see the statue “smashed into minute fragments” than standing in Boston Harbor. If New York had to lose her, she should go somewhere more modest, like Painted Post, New York, or Glover, Vermont.

Two years later, New York’s governor, Grover Cleveland, vetoed $50,000 in state funds for the pedestal. When she arrived in 1885, the French gift lay in her crates, waiting for somewhere to stand.

She was rescued by an immigrant. Joseph Pulitzer, born in Hungary and now publisher of the New York World, reminded his readers that the statue was “not a gift from the millionaires of France to the millionaires of America, but a gift of the whole people of France to the whole people of America.” He promised to print the name of every donor, however small the gift.

More than 120,000 people gave over $100,000, most of them a dollar or less. Children sent their pennies. The pedestal was finished, and the statue was reassembled by a crew made up largely of new immigrants, building the monument that would one day welcome people like them.

As for Governor Cleveland, by 1886 he was President Cleveland, and he dedicated her.

Her big day also had its contradictions.

Liberty was a woman, yet only two women were invited onto the island. Suffragists chartered a steamer, sailed into the water parade with protest banners and called the statue “a gigantic lie.” At her feet, almost invisible from the ground, lies a broken chain, Laboulaye’s tribute to emancipation. Black newspapers of the time pointed out that, for many Americans, it was not yet a reality.

Why it matters

Her most famous words weren’t there at all. In 1883, Emma Lazarus, a young New York poet who worked with Jewish refugees fleeing persecution, wrote a sonnet to help fund the pedestal. She called the statue the “Mother of Exiles.” Lazarus died in 1887, aged 38, and the poem was forgotten. In 1901, her friend Georgina Schuyler came across it in a bookshop and campaigned for two years to put it on the monument. The bronze plaque went up in 1903. A French tribute to liberty was becoming an American promise of welcome.

That is what makes this gift extraordinary. A Frenchman imagined her and never saw her. Ordinary citizens of both countries paid for her. Immigrants assembled her. An American poet gave her a voice, and a loyal friend made sure that voice survived.

Few nations have ever given another country the symbol it would come to see itself in. Fewer still have seen their gift embraced so completely that many forget where it came from.

Tomorrow, she turns 140.

Happy birthday, Lady Liberty. From Paris, with L❤️VE.

— TB

At 11:52 a.m. on November 1, 2024, the sun was shining in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city. Outside the railway station, people were doing what people do at railway stations.

Two sisters were on their way to their grandparents’ for the family slava, the feast of their patron saint. A woman in her seventies had come into town to have a cast removed from her leg; she sat down on a bench to wait for the bus. Vasko Sazdovski, a 45-year-old scientist who designed software for robots that spray weeds in blueberry fields, was heading home to North Macedonia. Stefan Hrka, 27, was there too.

Then the station’s concrete canopy came down on them.

Fourteen people died that day. Two more died later in hospital, the last of them a 19-year-old high school student, Vukašin Crnčević, in March 2025. The youngest victim was six.

On Sunday night, almost two years later, the man who had dominated Serbian politics for 14 years conceded defeat to a movement born in the aftermath of their deaths.

What happened

The station, built in 1964, had just been renovated by Chinese contractors as part of the Belgrade–Budapest high-speed railway. It was ceremonially opened twice. The first time was in March 2022, during an election campaign, when President Aleksandar Vučić arrived by high-speed train with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. The second was in July 2024.

Within hours of the collapse, officials insisted the canopy had never been part of the renovation. Videos of the opening ceremonies, still online, told a more complicated story.

Court-appointed engineers later explained what happened. About 40 percent of the steel wires holding the canopy to the roof were no longer working, eaten away by corrosion. Over the decades, including during the renovation, new layers had been added without removing the old ones, until the canopy carried roughly 23 extra tons. Routine inspections could have caught the corrosion. Prosecutors say none were ordered.

The station had also been open to passengers for months without an operating permit. The official notice that construction work was underway took fifteen days to travel from the ministry to the building inspectors. It reached them on November 1, at 3 p.m., three hours after the canopy fell.

Then the students stepped in.

KRVAVE SU VAM RUKE!

YOU HAVE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS!

A protest stencil in Serbia. The red hand became the symbol of the movement that followed the Novi Sad collapse in November 2024.

Within weeks, they had shut down their universities, and ordinary citizens kept them supplied. Every day at 11:52, traffic stopped across Serbia for a silence that grew with the death toll: fifteen minutes, then sixteen. One for each life.

In January 2025, ruling-party activists in Novi Sad beat a group of students and broke a young woman’s jaw. The prime minister resigned.

On March 15, 2025, an independent count put the crowd in Belgrade at up to 325,000, the largest protest in Serbia’s history. Eighty students cycled 1,300 kilometers to Strasbourg to hand letters to European institutions. Others ran in relays to Brussels. Arriving in Strasbourg, they sang “Freed From Desire,” the 1990s dance hit that had become the movement’s anthem.

By the European Parliament’s count, more than 10,700 protests took place in over 630 towns in just eight months.

Overlooked

Two years later, no one has been convicted.

Prosecutors charged 13 people over the collapse, including former construction minister Goran Vesić. After rounds of appeals, no trial date has been set. The defendants deny wrongdoing.

Then there is the money. In August 2025, Serbia’s organized crime prosecutors arrested a former infrastructure minister, Tomislav Momirović, among others. They allege that contract amendments made the state pay a second time for work it had already paid for, costing the budget $115.6 million and handing the Chinese consortium at least $18.8 million in unlawful gains. The suspects deny the charges.

And the money kept flowing. According to the Serbian weekly Radar, the government paid the same consortium more than €70 million for the railway project after the collapse. Radar asked why the authorities never invoked a performance guarantee worth up to $116 million. Two of the consortium’s staff are among the defendants; the companies themselves are not. Some victims’ families were compensated with public money.

The investigators ran into walls of their own. The organized crime office’s chief prosecutor said police were not cooperating with the financial inquiry. His office had also charged a sitting minister over forged papers that cleared the way for a Trump-branded hotel backed by Jared Kushner, who later withdrew; the minister denies wrongdoing. In January, parliament passed judicial laws that the chief prosecutor warned would “decimate” his office. Lawmakers amended them in June, but the Council of Europe’s legal advisers said the position of its prosecutors still wasn’t settled.

And just before leaving the presidency in September, Vučić pardoned 49 people, including 11 he said had taken part in attacks on students.

Why it matters

In May 2025, the students stopped asking institutions for answers and started demanding an election. “Is there justice in Serbia?” the cardiologist Ilija Srđanović asked at a rally in Novi Sad in September. The state’s answer, he said, had been that no one was guilty.

Vučić resigned the presidency on September 27 to run for prime minister. Many Serbians credit him with new highways, railways, schools and hospitals. He accused foreign powers of financing the protests.

The students answered with a list of 250 candidates: doctors, professors, actors, farmers. Not one of them is a student. Srđanović led it. Don’t mistake them for a Western-friendly mirror image of Vučić, though: their candidates have taken a hard line on Kosovo, floated a referendum on EU membership and signaled continuity with Russia. What united them was the canopy.

Then came Sunday.

Turnout was close to 70 percent, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia. Shortly after 9:30 p.m., Vučić appeared at his party headquarters and conceded. “It is clear that we have lost,” he said. Projections by Ipsos and CeSID gave the Student List 52 percent of the vote and 139 of the 250 seats, an outright majority, against 39.3 percent and 104 seats for Vučić’s coalition. The independent monitor CRTA reported similar figures. The official count continues. Vučić blamed independent media, unnamed European countries and an “American deep state.”

Car horns filled Belgrade. Crowds chanted “Aleksandar is gone.” In Novi Sad, people gathered on Liberty Square to dance the kolo under fireworks.

“Dear Serbia, tonight the voice of the people is being heard,” said a Belgrade University professor speaking for the students.

The same railway runs to Budapest, where, after Orbán lost power in April, the new transport minister called the project “riddled with errors at every level” and promised to open its files. Hungary’s reckoning has already begun. Serbia’s is just starting. Vučić’s party still runs almost every town hall in the country, and international observers will present their findings on Monday afternoon.

The movement had no leader, a Serbian analyst said last year. But it had, in his words, a “mother.”

On November 2, 2025, a year after her son Stefan died, Dijana Hrka sat down outside the Serbian parliament and stopped eating. She started at exactly 11:52. She slept on wooden pallets, next to a fenced-off tent camp of Vučić supporters that Belgraders had nicknamed “Ćacilend.”

“I need to know who killed my child,” she had told the crowd in Novi Sad the day before.

She ended her hunger strike after sixteen days.

On Sunday night, less than an hour after Vučić conceded, crowds walked into that camp, tore down its fences and pulled up its tents. Dijana Hrka told a Serbian TV channel she was shaking. “This is a victory for all of us, a victory for our children,” she said. “This is just the beginning.”

She is still waiting for an answer.

Next Sunday, November 1, it will be two years. At 11:52, as they have every month since, people in Novi Sad will stop again.

— TB

There’s a 20-second video waiting for you further down.

But here’s a small request: don’t watch it yet.

First, read the screenplay, then the AI prompt.

I’d love you to experience those twenty seconds just as I did.

On Thursday, I wrote about how AI is changing the movies and promised to share a little experiment of my own.

INT. RESTAURANT, PARIS — NIGHT

Last week, a friend and I came out of a late business meeting. It was raining, so we ducked into a restaurant for a quick dinner and somewhere dry to sit.

Stéphane knows me well. He knows how much I love cinema, he likes my screenplays, and for months he’s been trying to convince me that I could make films. On my own! Before our food even arrived, he pulled out his MacBook, took the opening scene of one of my screenplays, and used Claude AI to turn it into a prompt for Higgsfield, an AI video generator.

One attempt. Then we waited. About ten minutes…

A little context: cinema has always been a passion of mine. I watch a lot of films. I read screenplays. I love being on sets, and sometimes even shoot stills for friends’ productions. Alongside my professional life, I’ve helped write TV series, written and co-written feature films, contributed to several web series, and done some script doctoring. I write because I love it — as you may have noticed here.

And this wasn’t just any screenplay. Four different production companies in France and England have optioned it. Four times, I hoped it might become a film. Four times, it didn’t happen.

So when my friend showed me those twenty seconds, he wasn’t simply showing off a new toy. He was showing me the opening scene of a film I’d been running in my head for years.

Here’s the experiment, in three parts.

1. The screenplay

Here’s the scene we gave Claude. If your French is rusty, don’t worry: the prompt that follows is in English. The scene is set inside a limousine speeding through London at night. Here’s the original page, as I wrote it:

2. The prompt

Claude compressed my 30-second scene into instructions for a 20-second shot — lighting, camera movement, characters, dialogue, sound. Here’s the prompt it produced:

Single continuous shot, no cuts. Night. Interior of a black stretch limousine driving fast through a big British city. Cinematic 35mm film look, shallow depth of field, warm amber interior light, city lights streaking past the tinted windows. Slightly handheld camera that sways with the car's movement.

CHARACTERS (all fictional, original):
- NICK, 25, musician, messy dark hair, open shirt, leather jacket, heavy-lidded tired eyes, slumped in the middle of the back seat, holding a glass bottle.
- A brunette woman on his right and a blonde woman on his left, in party outfits, exhausted after a long night, laughing and drowsy.
- STAN, 40s, weary driver, phone pressed to his ear.

ACTION AND DIALOGUE:
0–4s: The camera starts on Stan driving fast, phone to his ear. STAN (reassuring): "Relax, we'll be there in five minutes!" He accelerates.
4–9s: The camera slowly turns toward the back seat. The limo takes a sharp turn; Nick sways clumsily from side to side, bumping into the women. NICK (hoarse, grumpy, barely audible): "Bloody hell… slow down…"
9–14s: Muffled voice from the phone: "How is he doing?" Stan glances in the rearview mirror. Close on Nick, eyes half-closed, head lolling.
14–17s: STAN (flat, unconvinced): "He'll be fine."
17–20s: Nick takes another sip from the bottle. The blonde has fallen asleep on his shoulder. The car speeds on into the night.

AUDIO: engine roar, tires screeching on turns, muffled phone voice, traffic outside. Dialogue in English, British accents.

Compare that with the French.

Among other changes: Jack Daniel’s becomes “a glass bottle.” “Défoncés” becomes “exhausted after a long night.” The swearing softens, and some of it is cut altogether. London becomes “a big British city,” and Nick stops drooling.

Before a single frame was generated, the AI had already rewritten parts of my scene.

3. The result

So. You’ve seen the original screenplay. You’ve read what the AI was asked to create.

Now, press play.

This is what appeared on Stéphane’s MacBook, about ten minutes later:

Watch it once for the atmosphere. Then watch it again for the details.

The faces. The lighting. The city streaking past the windows. For a moment, I felt I was watching a real movie.

Of course, I spotted what was wrong right away: “He’ll be fine” is Stan’s line, but Nick says it. The dialogue doesn’t always sync perfectly with the lips. Stan never turns around to see what’s happening in the back. The Jack Daniel’s looks like some big, ordinary beer. Both women suddenly fall asleep. And so on.

But admit it: it’s pretty sexy, isn’t it? Can you feel the Guy Ritchie vibe?

My favourite detail: Claude had removed the drool from my screenplay. Yet when Nick takes a drink, liquid runs down his chin. Somehow, it came back.

But here’s the thing: this was a single attempt. One prompt, one generation, no corrections.

And here’s what strikes me most: unlike a traditional film shoot, fixing these mistakes doesn’t mean bringing back an entire crew, booking a studio, recalling the actors, and shooting everything again. Most can be addressed by refining the prompts, adding more precise instructions, generating new versions, or fixing things in the edit.

It will take time, patience, and a lot — a lot — of attempts. And money. But for the first time, I can see a way forward, and I love where it leads.

What next?

Twenty seconds is one thing. Ninety minutes is another. Keeping the same faces, the same voices and the same light, scene after scene, for an entire film: that will be much harder.

About that money. I suspect making this film to the standard I want would still cost tens of thousands of euros. A serious investment, certainly — but for an independent filmmaker, a feature film is finally within reach.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Producers and studios aren’t going anywhere. They have the experience to bring a film from production all the way to distribution. Their know-how, and above all their networks, are things AI simply can’t replace. And they, too, will quickly find brilliant ways to use these new tools. But for people like me, something extraordinary may be happening. For the first time, we might be able to “direct” our own films.

Since that rainy evening in Paris, I haven’t stopped thinking about it...

What if I tried to make the first five minutes?

Not a trailer. Just five proper minutes of the film. Perhaps a chance to show you the false starts, the discoveries and the work behind them.

Stéphane’s advice for now: binge on tutorials and spend a few hundred euros on tests.

Maybe one day there’ll be another 89 minutes and 40 seconds to show you.

If you’d like to help me get this little adventure off the ground, share this story with your readers, and with anyone who loves cinema, writing, or simply a good story ❤️

Share

Keep watching.

— TB

Quite a week at Continental Wire. Here’s what you may have missed.

🎉 SUNDAY 18 — The Police Crashed My Daughter’s Birthday Party

Three police officers. A house full of teenagers. And a father who decided the party wasn’t over.

A little departure from European news: my daughter’s surprise 15th birthday party in Paris took an unexpected turn. The police arrived, the teenagers panicked, and I made what was probably a questionable parenting decision.

After all, you only turn 15 once.

→ PROJET X

🇫🇷 MONDAY 19 — France’s protest

France has a long tradition of taking its political disagreements into the streets. But the recent wave of unrest went well beyond an ordinary demonstration.

Violence, arrests, damaged public buildings and an increasingly tense political atmosphere raised an uncomfortable question: where does the French tradition of protest end, and something more dangerous begin?

→ In France, Protest Is a Tradition.

🇬🇱 TUESDAY 20 — Greenland

Greenland sits on potentially valuable mineral and energy resources, yet its economy still depends heavily on fishing. With Washington, Europe and China increasingly interested in the Arctic, this vast island has become strategically important far beyond its small population.

But turning geological potential into economic prosperity is another matter.

→ Greenland Has Oil, Gold and Rare Earths. It Exports Fish.

🇦🇱 WEDNESDAY 21 — Albania’s flamingos

What began as an environmental controversy has developed into a much larger battle involving property, investment and Albania’s institutions.

It is a story about a country eager for development, but also about the political and legal questions that arise when powerful economic interests collide with public opposition.

→ It Started With Flamingos.

🎬 THURSDAY 22 — AI movies

Artificial intelligence is making it possible to generate film sequences that once required actors, crews, cameras and substantial budgets.

For someone who has spent twenty years writing screenplays, the possibilities are fascinating. But making a convincing 20-second scene and directing a feature-length film are two very different challenges.

And I may be about to find out just how different.

→ Movies Just Got Cheap to Make. Good Ones Didn’t.

🇭🇺 FRIDAY 23 — Hungary’s banker

For twelve years, György Matolcsy ran Hungary’s central bank. On Wednesday, prosecutors came for him over a public fund once endowed with about $820 million.

A $92,000 bathroom, an unfinished university campus and a son wanted by police: the story ran on the day Hungary marked the 70th anniversary of its 1956 revolution. Both men deny wrongdoing.

Since then: a Budapest court ordered Matolcsy held in pretrial detention. His son is still at large.

→ Orbán Lost Power. Then Prosecutors Came for His Banker.

🇫🇷 FRIDAY 23 — “Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres”

How do you infiltrate a high school group chat? Reportedly, not like this.

→ “Bismillah mon frère”

✈️ SATURDAY 24 — Concorde

There was a time when passengers could leave Paris or London and reach New York in about three and a half hours.

Concorde was more than an airplane. It embodied an extraordinary European technological ambition and a belief that the future would always be faster.

More than two decades after its retirement, the world is still flying slower.

→ The Future Used to Fly at Mach 2

That’s all for this week.

It’s also been my first month on Substack. I’ve genuinely enjoyed writing these stories, and I think I’m finally finding my cruising altitude.

To everyone who has sent me a word of encouragement, left a like or restacked an article: thank you. It means a lot ❤️

I read every message. Every share helps more people discover Continental Wire.

Share

And one more thing: remember that AI filmmaking experiment I mentioned on Thursday? I’ll share the scene with you this afternoon.

— TB

Good morning.

In the 1990s, I worked in an office building near Paris Charles de Gaulle airport. Every morning at 11, a deafening roar rolled over the building. Nobody needed to ask what it was. My father worked for Air France at Roissy, so I knew exactly: Concorde, leaving for New York.

Twenty-three years ago today, on October 24, 2003, Concorde’s final commercial service ended at Heathrow. Air France had already stopped in May. Since then, no airline has carried a single passenger faster than sound.

A machine that beat the clock

Concorde was born of an unlikely marriage. In 1962, France and Britain, not always the best of friends, signed a treaty to build a supersonic airliner together. Even the name started a quarrel. Charles de Gaulle suggested “Concorde” in 1963; the British preferred “Concord.” In 1967, Britain’s technology minister, Tony Benn, accepted the French “e,” explaining that it stood for excellence, England, Europe and entente.

On March 2, 1969, test pilot André Turcat lifted the first prototype off the runway in Toulouse.

What followed still sounds like science fiction. With its drooping nose and slender delta wing, Concorde cruised at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound: about 1,350 miles per hour, more than twice as fast as an ordinary jetliner. It flew nearly 60,000 feet up, high enough for passengers to see the curve of the Earth. Aerodynamic heating made the aircraft grow up to ten inches longer in flight.

And because it outran the time zones, it did something no airliner has done since.

On its inaugural Paris–New York service in 1977, Concorde left Roissy at 11:12 a.m. and landed at JFK at 8:47 a.m., local time. You arrived before you left.

In 1985, Phil Collins played Live Aid at Wembley, boarded Concorde, and performed again in Philadelphia that same day. In 1996, a British Airways Concorde crossed from New York to London in just 2 hours, 52 minutes and 59 seconds, a record that still stands.

Inside, it was cramped: four seats to a row, tiny windows. Nobody paid for the legroom. Presidents, CEOs and rock stars paid for time.

The price of speed

The miracle was technical, not economic.

Development was initially estimated at around £160 million. By the time Concorde entered service in 1976, the bill had exceeded £1 billion. The 1973 oil shock made its enormous fuel consumption even more expensive. That same year, the United States banned civil supersonic flight over land because of the sonic boom, sharply limiting its potential routes.

Noise was a problem on the ground, too: in its early years at Washington Dulles, Concorde accounted for less than 1 percent of flights but 79 percent of noise complaints.

Only 20 Concordes were ever built, and just 14 carried paying passengers: seven for Air France, seven for British Airways. Air France tried Rio, Caracas, Mexico City and Washington before concentrating on New York. British Airways experimented with Bahrain and Singapore. In the end, only the North Atlantic paid its way.

While British Airways eventually made money flying it, the taxpayers who funded its development never recovered their investment.

Then came July 25, 2000.

An Air France Concorde took off from Charles de Gaulle airport, bound for New York. A strip of metal left on the runway by another aircraft caused a tire to burst. Flying debris triggered a fuel tank rupture and fire. The plane crashed into a hotel in Gonesse, killing 113 people: 109 on board and four on the ground.

Concorde returned to service in November 2001. But the collapse in premium travel after 9/11, rising maintenance costs and the loss of long-term manufacturer support brought its career to an end.

Joan Collins, Christie Brinkley and Jeremy Clarkson were among the passengers on the final commercial flight, along with Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, who reportedly had also flown on Concorde’s first commercial flight in 1976. Clarkson later called its retirement “one giant leap backwards for mankind.”

Today, the aircraft live in museums. At Le Bourget, near Paris, two stand side by side, and visitors can still walk through one. At Charles de Gaulle, another stands on a pedestal, nose raised as if waiting for takeoff clearance.

In 2023, Air France revived Concorde’s old flight numbers on its New York route.

The numbers returned. The speed didn’t.

America wants the clock back

On Thursday, two days before this anniversary, Colorado-based Boom Supersonic unveiled the heart of the engine meant to power Overture, a planned airliner for up to 80 passengers at Mach 1.7.

In a very 2026 twist, Boom is also developing gas turbines for AI data centers, using technology from the same program. That business could help finance its aviation ambitions.

Washington is clearing the way, too. In July, the FAA proposed replacing its longstanding ban on supersonic flight over land with new noise-based rules. And on Wednesday, NASA’s experimental X-59 was back in the air at Mach 1.4 over California, part of a program to make supersonic flight quieter.

But Overture has not flown, and its timetable has repeatedly slipped. Boom now hopes to carry passengers around 2030. The next Concorde is still a promise, not a plane.

Europe, which pioneered commercial supersonic travel, is largely absent from the race to bring it back.

Near Charles de Gaulle, 11 a.m. now comes and goes in silence.

The future used to make a lot of noise.

— TB

Good afternoon.

A little bonus from France, because sometimes the news is simply too ridiculous to ignore.

French high school students have been organizing their protests on Snapchat. Someone decided to infiltrate their group chats by posing as a teenager. He called himself “Mamadou.” He used Algerian flag emojis. And he opened with this:

“Bismillah, c’est les ténèbres.”

Roughly: “In the name of God, it’s darkness.”

Don’t worry. It makes absolutely no sense in French either.

The teenagers smelled a cop. Then the French TV show Quodidien uncovered an intriguing clue: another suspicious account, proudly named “Moussa-tenebreu,” had forgotten one tiny detail. Its reported location: a police station in Aix-en-Provence.

As undercover operations go, not ideal.

Within days, the phrase was everywhere. And then Greta Thunberg showed up.

Yes. That Greta Thunberg. Apparently, she speaks fluent Gen Z.

He wanted to get into the group chat. He ended up writing its slogan!

— TB

Good morning.

On Tuesday, György Matolcsy posted a video on YouTube defending his record. On Wednesday morning, prosecutors came for him.

For twelve years, until March 2025, Matolcsy ran Hungary’s central bank. Before that, he was Viktor Orbán’s economy minister. Orbán once called him “my right-hand man.”

The 71-year-old spent two nights in a police cell. On Friday morning, he appeared before a Budapest judge considering prosecutors’ request to keep him in pretrial detention. No former governor of Hungary’s central bank had ever been taken into custody.

What happened

Matolcsy is suspected of economic fraud causing significant financial loss and of using a forged document. He declined to answer questions on Wednesday, but his lawyer said he would speak at Friday’s hearing.

The story begins in 2014. The central bank set up a group of foundations and endowed them with 266 billion forints, about $820 million, officially to promote economic education.

Two years later, Orbán’s majority in Parliament tried to keep the foundations’ spending secret. The Constitutional Court said no: this was still public money. Once the books were opened, the public learned that a news site had quietly received about $1.5 million from the foundations. At least ten of its journalists resigned in protest. Six reporters who pressed lawmakers for answers were banned from Parliament, a ban the European Court of Human Rights later ruled a violation of their rights.

The foundations’ asset manager, Optima, poured much of the money into commercial real estate, partly with borrowed money.

Then came February 28, 2025, Matolcsy’s next-to-last day at the head of the central bank. Optima signed a “securities loan” handing control of an asset manager overseeing nearly $615 million to a private equity fund. That fund was run by a company majority-owned by a longtime friend of Matolcsy’s son, Ádám. Prosecutors say the deal was a sham, designed to let Matolcsy keep his influence over the assets after leaving office, so that he and his son could invest them for their own benefit. The bank’s new leadership blocked it and filed a criminal complaint.

Ádám Matolcsy is now wanted by police. According to Telex, he is not in Hungary. In April, he told the news site he would cooperate with any authority that wished to examine his activities.

What journalists found

Hungarian reporters have spent years digging.

A $92,000 bathroom. Renovating the central bank’s headquarters was budgeted at about $170 million. It cost nearly $320 million, with no public tender. The main contractor belonged to a friend of Ádám Matolcsy. The news site 444 had to sue to obtain the invoices, which include a private bathroom for the governor at roughly $92,000. The renovation was paid for by the bank itself, not the foundations, and is the subject of a separate criminal investigation.

An unfinished campus. In 2020 and 2021, the state gave a university foundation in the city of Kecskemét about $440 million for a new campus and district. The foundation lent about $390 million of it, more than 80% of its assets, to Optima. Auditors called the decision unprofessional. The foundation then struggled to get its money back, and the buildings it had started still stand unfinished. The university says it expects to be repaid.

The son’s network. According to Telex, his villa on Mykonos, in a part of the island where comparable properties sell for up to $6 million, is called Villa Nicole, after his wife. Another outlet, Válasz Online, reported that he directed parts of his business network from a Gmail account under a woman’s name: “Petra Kovács.” The account vanished four days after reporters wrote to it.

Both men deny wrongdoing. Matolcsy calls the idea that the money vanished a “false tale.” He says it is invested in 39 office buildings and six shopping centers in twelve Central European cities. Auditors found those holdings should have been written down by about $460 million in 2024. His son says his fortune is legal. Both are presumed innocent.

What actually shifted

For years, Orbán stood by Matolcsy. In 2016, he said heaven and earth would have to collapse before he lost confidence in him. Then Orbán lost April’s election to Péter Magyar, a former insider who has called the affair “the world’s biggest bank robbery.” The police investigation had opened in early 2025, while Orbán was still in power. It has moved much faster since he left.

When two former Orbán ministers were detained in September, Orbán’s Fidesz party cried political revenge. This time, it only asked for an impartial investigation. In March, its then parliamentary leader had already said that if reporters were right about Ádám Matolcsy, he belonged in prison.

Why it matters

After sixteen years of the same government, Hungary is testing whether it can hold its former elite to account without it looking like revenge. In May, investigators seized about $283 million in cash and securities. Seized is not recovered. How much public money actually comes back is the real measure.

What comes next

The judge’s ruling on his detention, due by Saturday morning.

On November 5, a parliamentary committee expects to question Matolcsy.

Today, Hungary marks the 70th anniversary of its 1956 revolution. Students took to the streets against Soviet rule, tearing the communist emblem from the center of their national flags. The flag with a hole, pictured above, became a symbol of resistance. Within two weeks, Soviet tanks crushed the uprising. Some 2,500 Hungarians died and about 200,000 fled.

Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa, the EU’s two most senior leaders, are in Budapest for the ceremonies, alongside Moldova’s president and former NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg.

On the day Hungary celebrates its most famous fight for freedom, its courts face a quieter test.

Keep watching.

— TB

Good morning.

This year, a start-up released two feature-length films without a camera, a set or a single human actor on screen. Both were made by Higgsfield AI, a San Francisco-based company. Neither played in cinemas. Both are online.

On Tuesday, The Guardian examined what these films can and cannot do. Its findings raise a question bigger than robots replacing actors: what happens to cinema when making images stops being expensive?

What happened

The first film, Hell Grind, is a 95-minute action fantasy. The equivalent of shooting and post-production took two weeks, not counting the script. It cost about $500,000, according to The Wall Street Journal, $400,000 of it in computing power. It was shown at the Cannes Film Market in May, not in the festival’s official selection. Its characters, The Guardian notes, seem able to show only one emotion per 15-second shot.

Three months later came The Cully Hill Boys, a crime caper running nearly two hours, made in a month for about $2 million, according to Higgsfield. This time, The Guardian found it genuinely funny. Its three leads are AI-generated likenesses of real personalities.

In three months, the technology went from stiff to watchable. That speed is the news.

Both films are, in effect, feature-length advertisements for Higgsfield’s tools. Neither has yet shown that audiences will pay to watch a fully AI-generated feature.

What it still takes

Nobody typed “make me a comedy.”

The Cully Hill Boys began with a script by a human screenwriter, Tim Planagan. The team built reference images to keep each character’s face consistent, then generated the film in segments of about 30 seconds. Each segment was described in a prompt of about 4,000 words, partly drafted by another AI: movement, lighting, camera, emotion. Then the scenes were regenerated, again and again.

Filmmaker Zack London compares directing an AI performance to working a marionette: a glance, a blink, a quiver of the lip, one string at a time. Ask for an emotion and the model tends to overact like a soap opera. Actor Tye Sheridan, who co-founded the AI company Wonder Dynamics, asks whether these tools are built for great performances or “designed to cut to an average.”

For now, larger-than-life characters are easier to generate than subtle ones. Think Guy Ritchie rather than Olivia Colman.

How the industry is answering

Hollywood is not blocking AI. It is absorbing it. Netflix says generative AI was used on roughly 300 of its titles this year, mostly in post-production; on one documentary, 17 minutes of footage were made twice as fast and at half the cost. It also bought InterPositive, the AI company co-founded by Ben Affleck.

Actors are negotiating protections. Under the contract SAG-AFTRA members ratified in June, producers must negotiate with the union before using synthetic performers, and have committed to favoring humans unless AI brings “significant additional value.”

Europe is drawing firmer lines. In May, France’s culture minister announced plans to limit public film funding to works with human authors, and dubbing subsidies to human performances, while still allowing AI as a tool. That matters on a continent where most viewers in France, Germany, Italy and Spain watch Hollywood films dubbed, and where dubbing actors are leading the fight against voice cloning.

A French start-up, Inevitable, is betting on a middle road: real actors filmed in motion capture, then transformed by AI. It says it can produce a 90-minute feature in four months for €250,000. For now, that is a promise, not a proven track record.

So the real choice may not be human or synthetic actors. It may be how much human performance survives inside the image.

The overlooked part

The debate is usually framed as humans versus machines. The deeper shift is economic. AI is pulling apart two things that used to move together: what a film costs to make, and what it is worth.

For a century, spectacle required money. Crowds, explosions, elaborate sets and distant locations kept most aspiring filmmakers out. If spectacular images become cheap, that barrier falls. Far more people will be able to make a film. That does not mean far more people will watch one.

Money never guaranteed success anyway. The Blair Witch Project was shot for about $60,000 and became a worldwide phenomenon. But when anyone can generate spectacle, spectacle stops being rare. What stays scarce is a story worth following, a performance worth believing, and an audience willing to give it two hours.

I find that more exciting than frightening. Last Friday, a friend showed me what Higgsfield could do with a scene I had written. The dialogue didn’t always come out of the right character’s mouth, and there were plenty of visual inconsistencies. But the result of that single attempt surprised me. The prompt itself had been written by... another AI. We’re not quite ready to fire the actors.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about HSBC and the two ways a company can use AI: do more with the same people, or the same with fewer. Cinema now faces that choice. Studios are already using AI to cut costs. Some filmmakers who could never raise the money may finally get their stories onto a screen. Actors, dubbing artists and crews will have to defend their place.

AI cinema, The Guardian suggests, is still waiting for its Matrix: the film that turns a technology into a story people need to see. Higgsfield is due to announce the winners of its $1 million AI film competition in the coming days.

And now, a little experiment

I have loved cinema all my life, and I have been writing screenplays for twenty years. But getting from the page to the big screen is extraordinarily hard. That is why I am thinking about “directing” my first feature with the help of AI.

=> On Sunday, I’ll show you a single 20-second scene from what may one day become a 90-minute movie: the script, the prompt, and what came out.

The images look like Guy Ritchie. I’ll admit it: I was impressed. But a 90-minute feature would take the equivalent of 270 clips like that, all matching perfectly, one after another. That’s another story.

You can judge for yourself.

Keep watching.

— TB

Good morning.

On Albania’s southern coast, near Vlorë, flamingos gather in the thousands on the Narta lagoon, inside a protected landscape of dunes, pine forest and sea-turtle nests. For local families, the Zvërnec peninsula is the free beach of their childhood. “This is our land,” a 34-year-old software engineer told NPR this summer, on the sand where he grew up swimming. “Public land is for everybody.”

Offshore lies Sazan, a former Cold War military island. In 2021, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner saw it from a friend’s yacht. “We swam to the island,” she later recalled on a podcast. “We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top.”

That swim became a business plan.

The promise

In February 2024, Prime Minister Edi Rama’s majority amended the law on protected areas to allow five-star resorts inside them. Weeks later, Kushner posted renderings of luxury villas on the Albanian coast. That December, a Kushner-linked company won “strategic investor” status for a Sazan project valued at roughly €1.4 billion ($1.6 billion). On the mainland at Zvërnec, Kushner now puts the potential investment at about €4 billion.

Rama sold it as Albania’s ticket to the “Champions League” of global tourism.

The money

In November 2025, a company owned by Qatari investors signed a preliminary deal to buy about 103 hectares at Zvërnec for €5.5 million. In April 2026, it completed the purchase of the same land, from the same seller, for €122 million. That is the ground beneath the €4 billion project.

Twenty-two times more, in five months.

A new property-revaluation law may have cut the seller’s tax bill by about €12 million, according to Albanian outlet Kapitali. That alone does not explain a 22-fold price increase.

Prosecutors have frozen about €110 million of the sale. According to case files reviewed by Reuters, they suspect the seller, a Miami-based businessman wanted in Albania on a drug-money laundering warrant, of forging the deeds. He denies wrongdoing. Reuters found no indication that Kushner or the investors knew of the suspicions.

The bulldozers

In late April, a barbed-wire fence went up around the beach. Bulldozers followed, with a permit for preparatory works but no construction permit. Environmental groups say they cut seven to eight kilometers of roads, felled pines, flattened dunes and destroyed at least one sea-turtle nest.

Kostaq Konomi, 81, an olive grower, walked down to land his family has claimed for generations. The state had taken it once already, under communism. In 2013, an Albanian court ruled in the villagers’ favor. That decision remains under appeal.

Now he found razor wire and men in black uniforms who would not let him in.

“I was ready to get a rifle and start shooting,” he told Reuters.

The spark

On May 30, private guards dragged a protester across the fenced beach while police looked on. The video went national. Rama called the guards’ behavior “disgusting” but would not budge: “There is no chance that this investment will be stopped as long as I am in this office.”

Albanians named their movement the Flamingo Revolution: inflatable pink birds, banners reading “Albania is not for sale.”

Brussels noticed. The European Commission made repealing the 2024 protected-areas amendments a condition for closing the environmental chapter of Albania’s EU accession negotiations. The amendments are still on the books.

The uprising

On October 13, students angry about tuition fees and crumbling dormitories joined the wider protests. On Saturday, October 17, protesters threw petrol bombs, police fired rubber bullets, and fire reached the Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, October 20, the eighth straight day of clashes, university lecturers marched alongside their students. Their union called a boycott of classes in all public universities, starting today. The movement that began on a protected beach is now reaching into the country’s classrooms.

Rama refuses to resign. He acknowledges real concerns about living costs and young people’s prospects, but calls the unrest “a hybrid war.”

Kushner, whom Trump named an envoy for peace in February, says he is a minority partner at Zvërnec and that approvals are not complete. In Serbia last year, his firm withdrew from a Belgrade hotel project the day officials were indicted over its site’s lost heritage protection. No comparable wrongdoing by Kushner has been established in Albania.

If it stops

The project is stalled, not cancelled. Even if the investors walked away tomorrow, the dunes would stay flattened, Konomi’s land would remain tied up in court, and the law that opened protected land to luxury resorts would still be waiting for the next developer.

That is why the flamingos became a revolution. Albanians are no longer fighting a hotel. They are fighting the way their country is governed.

Keep watching.

— TB