Evening Nervesters,

It’s Carole here, bringing you some essential pre-match reading ahead of tomorrow’s World Cup semi-final. You’ll know Argentina, the football team. But did you know that Argentina, the country, is home to a radical experiment involving Palantir’s billionaire co-founder, Peter Thiel?

The article we’re publishing today by Argentinian writer Uki Goñi, the Guardian’s former correspondent, is a must-read piece of original journalism. I’ve been trying to puzzle out what Thiel is up to and where Javier Milei fits in, the chainsaw-wielding president who’s a friend to both Trump and Musk. 

The mash-up of Thiel and Milei together is terrifying, and Uki puts the project in the context of  Argentina’s troubled history, from sheltering Nazis and eugenicists to the dictators whom Uki reported on in his youth. 

It’s head and shoulders above the articles I’ve read elsewhere and brings into play Uki’s firsthand knowledge of Argentina’s authoritarian past as well its “anarcho-capitalist” present. 

Milei has announced plans to make Argentina the first country in the world for AI(s) to acquire “legal personhood”. In an op-ed for the FT last month, he wrote that Argentina would be the country where AI could “free itself”, a techfascist wet dream with consequences that Uki lays out in chilling detail. 

Now I will hand over to the rest of the team to provide the links to today’s content …

Carole

“South America has long been a honey-trap for world-class charlatans with out-of-the-box ideas,” writes the author and journalist Uki Goñi. Now, President Javier Milei has announced he will be “transforming Argentina, the planet's eighth-largest country, into a tax haven for ‘non-human corporations’.” Peter Thiel has moved to Buenos Aires, and if Milei has his way, totally autonomous AI-run companies will be following on his heels (as well as a fleet of data centres consuming clear glacier water across Patagonia). It seems almost impossible to believe it could happen – but that’s the plan. Read Uki’s compelling feature here.

Farage’s announcement last week that he was resigning his Clacton seat and forcing a byelection has had some unlikely consequences. He is now facing off against a man with a bin on his head and no longer getting an easy ride in some parts of the UK media. As Sangita Myska writes: “This absolute farce has brought about something many – including me – thought impossible: Britain’s rightwing media overlords may be turning on Nigel Farage.” Read her column here.

Heartstopper, Alice Oseman’s culture-shifting queer romance series, comes to a bittersweet end this Friday with a feature-length film on Netflix. Writer Julia Raeside, parent to one of that generation, bids it a very fond farewell. Elsewhere in this week’s hotlist there are new beginnings: London’s pioneering Yard theatre reopens in a new space with a killer season including Edinburgh hit Philosophy of the World this month, and Ian McKellen as Lear in the autumn; and writer Amy Abdelnoor’s “exquisitely observed” debut novel Ever Land is published. There’s also a Barbara Hepworth show, a tech-bro documentary and much more. Read the full hotlist here.

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