Inside the Taliban’s Luxury Hotel

Can Taliban and non-Taliban work together as colleagues? Today, you can see this big experiment in action inside the Intercontinental in Kabul, the country’s first high-end hotel—and a legendary meeting place over the decades for foreign leaders, elites, and well-to-do Afghans. Even when Afghanistan has spiraled into violence and war, the posh hotel “remained in a world of its own,” writes Andreas Babst, a correspondent for German publication Neue Zürcher Zeitung. These days, however, the hotel is pretty quiet.

Babst reports on what it’s like to work at the Intercontinental, speaking to both Taliban and non-Taliban employees—the marketing manager, the human resources manager, the head chef, the hotel president—as well as an Afghan family from Canada staying at the hotel. It’s a fascinating account of the hotel’s role throughout the country’s history and a rare look inside the day-to-day operations of a Taliban-controlled business.

On the fifth floor, on the right, at the end of the long corridor, is the Khyber Suite, the Intercontinental’s penthouse. A balcony winds around the suite, allowing guests a view over all of Kabul. Right now, the U.N. is hosting a course: how to solve interpersonal conflicts. Here, Massoud is said to have planned his attacks with binoculars. Until 1996, when new, even more radical Islamists came from the south and conquered Kabul for the first time: the Taliban. They castrated and executed Najibullah, the ex-president with the Mercedes, dragged his body around the city and hanged him in public. The Taliban removed the chairs in the hotel bar and sat on carpets.

There are no windows in this long corridor on the fifth floor. Neon lights on the walls brace themselves against the darkness. They cast harsh shadows. Sounds and history sink into the stretch carpet. It smells like dust and something else, sour. The hotel’s employees don’t like to be on the fifth floor. It’s haunted up here, they say.

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The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever

Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson made hundreds of millions when he sold his company. His current venture is Blueprint, a life-extension system he’s developing that’s meant to reduce biological age. The idea of insanely rich people experimenting with peculiar longevity treatments is nothing new. But Johnson, who views himself as an explorer in an unprecedented era of humanity and AI rather than some kind of biohacker, believes he can achieve immortality with an algorithm. Charlotte Alter observes Johnson in his home—which feels like “an Apple Store in a jungle”—to see what an algorithmically ruled life looks like, and manages to make us both laugh and ponder our own mortality in the process.

Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging—like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.”

He describes his intense diet and exercise regime as falling somewhere between the Italian Renaissance and the invention of calculus in the pantheon of human achievement. Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel; Johnson has his special green juice.

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What If the Robots Were Very Nice While They Took Over the World?

It’s easy to look at the rise of generative AI and imagine the singularity roaring toward us as an extinction-level event. It’s harder to look at it the way Virginia Heffernan does: with a canny sense of optimism. But that’s exactly what her feature on Cicero, an AI bot trained in the negotiation-focused strategy game Diplomacy, provides. What if ChatGPT isn’t heading toward HAL, but R2-D2?

If Cicero’s aura of “understanding” is, behind the scenes, just another algorithmic operation, sometimes an alignment in perception is all it takes to build a bond. I see, given the way your position often plays out, why you’d be nervous about those fleets. Or, outside of Diplomacy: I understand, since living alone diminishes your mood, why you’d want to have a roommate. When the stock customer service moves—“I can understand why you’re frustrated”—figured into Cicero’s dialog, they had a pleasing effect. No wonder moral philosophies of AI lean heavily on the buzzword alignment. When two minds’ perceptions of a third thing line up, we might call that congruity the cognitive equivalent of love.

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The Last Descent

Susan Casey’s anger is palpable in this piece for Vanity Fair. She explores Stockton Rush’s reckless approach to building the Titan submersible, the implosion of which cost five lives, including his own. When the media and the public followed the search for the Titan back in June, they didn’t know what was common knowledge in the submersible community: the fear was always that the hull of the Titan would fail.

OceanGate’s recalcitrance was like smog hovering over the conference room. During a coffee break, I heard the Titan mentioned in the same breath as the UC3 Nautilus, a creepy Danish sub whose owner had killed and dismembered journalist Kim Wall on a dive. In a corner, two marine engineers were worked up, and I caught a snatch of their conversation: “When it’s compressing it can actually buckle,” one engineer said in an exasperated tone, referring to Rush’s carbon fiber hull. “Like if you stand on an empty soda can.” The other engineer snorted and said: “I wouldn’t get into that thing for any amount of money.”

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The Race to Catch the Last Nazis

An instantly absorbing piece, with meticulous reporting from Tom Lamont, who has clearly put the time in with Nazi hunter Thomas Will to understand his complicated profession. It’s a disturbing and thought-provoking look at the last Nazis who will ever face trial, with particular focus on the fascinating case of Irmgard Furchner, put on trial at 96 for her role as a civilian secretary at Stutthof camp.

He is one of the last in a long line of Nazi hunters, the chief of a German bureau created decades ago to investigate historic atrocities and to track down aiders and abettors of the Holocaust—those few that remain. All these years after the collapse of the Third Reich, many of the suspects that Will tries to bring to justice die on him. 

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The Inside Job

A cop with expensive taste and money troubles. A wealthy woman who loved and supported him. An old man with dementia with a large estate and no next of kin. And a secret girlfriend and a fake will. Mix these elements together and what do you get? Katherine Laidlaw’s latest story for Toronto Life about a romance and scam gone wrong.

It was easy to keep the women apart. They occupied different worlds within Toronto. Dixon attended high-society balls and charity galas. She travelled broadly and often. Balgobin—whom he always contacted using a burner phone or through ­Snapchat—had modest means and ambitions. She lived in a studio apartment near the Rogers Centre and worked with society’s elderly and most vulnerable. She brought snacks to Konashewych’s office down the street on her breaks. She was dutiful, eager to please. Over time, her position at the OPGT, where she oversaw the ongoing care of clients and their financial decisions, would prove surprisingly lucrative.

That Sommerfeld didn’t have a will or documented next of kin wasn’t unusual—many OPGT clients don’t. But it is rare for someone with substantial assets, and he had an $834,000 estate. A 2018 audit of the agency found that just six per cent of its clients had assets of more than $100,000. That made Sommerfeld a member of a very small group. His medical care and financial decisions would be entrusted to the most senior client representatives at the agency, each overseeing anywhere from 80 to 100 cases at a time. In January of 2017, a new public servant took over the caseload that included Sommerfeld’s estate: Adellene Balgobin.

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Heavily Persecuted, Highly Influential: China’s Online Feminist Revolution

Reporting from China—at least the sort that appears in Western publications—tends to ignore the nation’s residents in favor of invisible-hand macro forces. Economy. Technology. Geopolitics. But Rest of the World presents a much-needed alternative to that approach, and Wanqing Zhang’s feature about feminism’s deepening foothold is a perfect distillation of why it’s necessary. If you want to understand what’s going on somewhere, you talk to the people who live there; it’s as simple as that.

Weibo, which has more monthly active users than X (formerly Twitter), remains the most popular platform for general discussion in China. But in part because of the platform’s harsh policing and relentless trolls, women have increasingly congregated on Xiaohongshu, where they outnumber male users more than two to one. Women have found ways to trick the app’s recommendation algorithm so their posts are shown mostly to other women. Douban, where many interactions happen within semi-secluded groups, is another feminist refuge.

Lü, the activist, describes the retreat from Weibo to Douban and Xiaohongshu as a shift from “a public plaza” to “a friend’s living room.” In the latter spaces, female empowerment is less about trying to create structural change and focuses more on less sensitive everyday topics: conflicts with boyfriends or discussions about whether to marry, have children, or use makeup.

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