Nonrival

Expert analysis from think tanks and academia, on public policy, economics, and technology.
Human experts. AI summaries.

Google's AI Overviews Cut Clicks to News Sites by 40% Without Making Search Any Better, New Research Finds

promarket

• A field experiment with 1,000+ users found that Google's AI-generated search summaries reduced clicks to third-party websites by nearly 40% and increased zero-click searches by 35% — with no measurable improvement in users' search experience.
• Citations embedded in AI Overviews generated only about 8% of all clicks, meaning opt-out policies or pay-per-citation schemes would likely leave publishers far worse off than the old search model.
• The authors argue regulators and courts weighing copyright and antitrust claims against Google should focus on this core economic mechanism: AI answers are substituting for publisher visits without compensating benefits to users.

Five Years After the Taliban Takeover, One Afghan General Is Going Back to Fight — and Oral Histories Reveal What That Choice Actually Costs

hoover

• Five years after the Taliban retook Kabul, former Lieutenant General Sami Sadat has launched an armed resistance campaign, betting that the Taliban's open war with Pakistan has created a rare opening to challenge the regime.
• Newly released oral histories from Hoover's Afghanistan archive reconstruct the chaotic final hours of August 15, 2021, when Afghan generals and officials faced impossible choices — fight with crumbling forces, flee, or watch their chain of command dissolve in real time.
• The piece frames Sadat's new campaign as one more in a long line of Afghan decisions where every option exacts an irreversible cost: resuming war risks civilian lives, but waiting lets the Taliban — and the erasure of Afghan women from public life — solidify.

Tech Companies Are Sinking Data Centers Into the Ocean to Feed the AI Boom — But the Ocean May Pay the Price

the_conversation

• AI's exploding energy and cooling demands are pushing companies to experiment with underwater and floating ocean data centers, which use seawater for cooling and offshore renewables for power, cutting energy use by up to 30% compared to land-based facilities.
• Projects are now live or under construction in China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Portugal, with proposals in the U.S. — but Microsoft tried this first and quietly walked away in 2024, citing regulatory hurdles and the difficulty of repairing equipment underwater.
• The biggest unresolved problem is environmental: discharging warmed seawater near already-stressed marine ecosystems could cause localized thermal pollution, and the ocean is already warming from climate change — meaning the sea may be both AI's cooling solution and its next casualty.

In the News

Texas Families Are Asking the Supreme Court to Rule on Ten Commandments in Public Schools — and This Time the Court Might Say Yes

scotusblog

• Texas passed a law requiring every public school classroom to display the Ten Commandments, and a divided federal appeals court upheld it by ruling that a 1980 Supreme Court decision striking down a similar law no longer applies.
• The families challenging the law argue that only the Supreme Court can overrule its own precedents — and that the lower court effectively did so without the high court's permission.
• The case puts the current Supreme Court's conservative majority in the position of deciding whether to formally bury its old church-state separation doctrine and allow government-mandated religious displays in public schools.

Analysis

The Hormuz oil shock is dividing Latin America — and institutions, not oil reserves, explain who's winning

atlantic_council

• When a 2026 Persian Gulf conflict closed the Strait of Hormuz and sent oil prices surging, Latin American countries didn't respond as a bloc — Brazil and Argentina captured windfalls while Mexico and Venezuela saw their weaknesses deepen.
• The dividing line wasn't who had the most resources, but whose energy institutions were stable enough to attract long-term investment: Brazil's open pre-salt fields and Argentina's Vaca Muerta delivered; Mexico's nationalized, underbuilt refining sector left it importing the gasoline it couldn't refine from the crude it exported.
• The article argues that the scarce input across the region is now 'institutional durability' — predictable rules that make 30-year energy investments bankable — and calls on the US to treat Latin America's Atlantic hydrocarbons and critical minerals as a strategic prize worth co-investing in.

Also Worth a Look

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• The U.S. Government Wants Access to Nearly Every American's Medical Records, and the Privacy Protections It's Promising Don't Hold Up (the_conversation)
• Fewer Americans Are Gambling Than at Any Point in Decades, Even as the Industry Rakes In More Money (gallup)
• A Middle East War Is Turbocharging China's Dominance in Global EV Markets (itif)
• Canada's Plan to Boost AI Adoption Is Solving the Wrong Problem (itif)
• Hurricane Lala Drenched Hawaii Without Ever Making Official Landfall — and a Record-Breaking El Niño May Be to Blame for a Quiet Atlantic (yale_climate)
• Europe Wants Digital Independence from the US, But Can't Afford It Yet (atlantic_council)