Unpublished Newswire

When I began reporting on the Canadian military’s halting embrace of drone technology for The Walrus, one conversation impressed me. Lieutenant General Michael Wright spoke with a candour and urgency I don’t usually encounter in covering defence and intelligence. Appointed commander of the Canadian Army in 2024, Lieutenant General Wright has been a central voice on how the country’s military must modernize to remain credible. In our exchange, which occurred in June, he made a powerful case for drones as fundamental to that rebuild. There was a clarity to his proposals that felt too...

Four people gather around a desk surrounded by stars and darkness. There is eerie music playing. One of the men in the group wants to spread a virus that would eradicate an entire population of robots. Another says: “Genocide? So that’s what we’re about now?” I was hooked. I was eleven, and the show was Battlestar Galactica, which depicts how ­ machines called Cylons, who look like humans and were created by humans, destroyed most of human civilization. I began tuning in each week and was soon renting past episodes from the library or Blockbuster (this was 2006). When I had watched them...