From Rockett v. Eighmy, decided today by Eighth Circuit Judge David Stras, joined by Judges Bobby Shepherd and Jane Kelly:

When Judge Eric Eighmy had courthouse officers lock two children in holding cells because they refused to leave with their mother following a custody hearing, he violated their clearly established Fourth Amendment rights….

Bart Rockett and Kami Ballard divorced in Missouri, but initially stayed together to give their two kids, who were "aspiring stars," a chance to "make it big" in Los Angeles.  The children found some success in the entertainment industry, including appearing on America's Got Talent, but their parents eventually split up.

Ballard filed a petition for sole custody that landed on Judge Eighmy's desk. During a hearing several months later, the children waited outside the courtroom while their parents tried to work it out. They agreed on primary custody for Ballard, with Rockett responsible for them at the beginning of each month and "during TV pilot season."

Once the hearing was over, however, neither child was willing to leave with her. With an argument unfolding in the lobby of the courthouse, Judge Eighmy walked over, introduced himself to the children, and told them to follow him to a conference room. Once there, he informed them that they had no choice but to leave with her. A youth counselor then reinforced the point by telling them that they "ha[d] to listen to the judge." The children would not budge, even after the judge mentioned that the other option was foster care.

Frustrated, Judge Eighmy had the children follow him again, this time to a waiting area in the courthouse's juvenile division. Once there, he told someone to "[k]eep an eye on" them to "make sure they [did not] go anywhere." After disappearing for a few minutes, he led them down a hallway to two holding cells. A second threat to place them in foster care made no difference, so he had a juvenile officer "lock them up." Before they entered the cells, the officer patted them down and ordered them to remove their socks and shoes. Judge Eighmy stood by as the officer locked the doors behind them.

With the children in their separate holding cells, Judge Eighmy took a seat in a nearby office. After what "felt like forever," the officer opened the cell doors for Judge Eighmy, who asked them one more time whether they would leave with their mother. This time, they both nodded yes, so he let them go. From start to finish, the time spent in the holding-cell area was between twenty and forty minutes.

Following these events, Rockett sued in federal district court for, among other things, a violation of the children's Fourth Amendment rights…. [T]he jury awarded the children $5,000 each on their Fourth Amendment claims. From there, the district court declined to reduce the verdict and added $326,637.22 in attorney fees….

The procedural posture is a bit complicated, but the court denied both judicial immunity (based on an earlier panel decision on the issue) and qualified immunity:

Judge Eighmy violated the Fourth Amendment only if he seized the children and did so unreasonably. Locking the children up after the custody hearing was both….

Not every seizure … violates the Fourth Amendment. To the contrary, "[ ]reasonable" ones, like lawful arrests supported by probable cause, do not. But here, Judge Eighmy did not have "probable cause to believe that [the children had] committed" an offense, much less one that justified placing them in a holding cell. Rather, their only misdeed was one every parent knows well: resisting authority. Even in the context of legal-custody proceedings, refusing to leave with a parent is not a jailable offense. Nor were there "exigent circumstances" arising out of danger to themselves or others.

We have no doubt that Judge Eighmy believed he was acting in "good faith," and possibly even in the children's best interests, by detaining them. But good faith in the Fourth Amendment context is about reasonable reliance, either on binding appellate precedent or a warrant issued by a "neutral magistrate." Neither was present here. No case allows a judge to detain children in a holding cell when they refuse to leave with a parent. And a custody plan is no substitute for a warrant. In short, rough justice does not trump the Constitution….

The law in this area was also "clearly established." "[I]t would have been sufficiently clear [to] every reasonable official," Judge Eighmy included, that locking up two children for refusing to follow directions violated the Fourth Amendment. As we put it over a decade and a half ago, long before the events in this case, "[i]t is clearly established that a warrantless arrest, unsupported by probable cause, violates the Fourth Amendment." …

A reasonable judge should have known better. As we said the first time around [i.e., the first time the case went up on appeal], criminal contempt was off the table because the children were neither parties to the custody case nor present inside the courtroom. Nor could the power to punish a party for violating an injunction have provided the justification, given that Judge Eighmy never issued one….

And here's an excerpt from the 2023 decision denying judicial immunity (a separate question from qualified immunity):

Judicial immunity has been around a long time. See Yates v. Lansing (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1810) ("The doctrine which holds a judge exempt from a civil suit or indictment, for any act done, or omitted to be done by him, sitting as judge, has a deep root in the common law."), aff'd (N.Y. 1811). In England, it served to insulate common-law judges on the King's courts from their rivals on other courts.

One of the earliest known examples involved a judge who presided over a murder trial. After it ended, he was dragged into a rival court and charged with conspiracy for his role. The prosecution ended, however, when the court recognized that the judge was "immune from prosecution … for [his] judicial act[]." …

As broad as the rule seemed to be, two exceptions narrowed its scope. The first was that judges could still be prosecuted for out-of-court "conspirac[ies]." That is, like any other citizen, judges could be haled into court for any illegal acts they committed outside the courtroom. The second was that, when judges "exceeded their authority" by considering a matter "not within their jurisdiction," their actions were … "without jurisdiction." Acting without "power and authority" eliminated the shield of judicial immunity.

As judicial rivalries began to wane, including in the American colonies, the power-and-authority rationale for judicial immunity did too. The focus shifted to protecting judicial independence: allowing judges "to act upon [their] own convictions, without apprehension of personal consequences." See Pierson v. Ray (1967) (explaining that judges "should not have to fear that unsatisfied litigants may hound [them] with litigation charging malice or corruption").

Judicial immunity continues to apply today, not only in prosecutions …, but in civil-rights actions brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983…. The exceptions remain largely the same too. Judicial immunity can be "overcome in only two sets of circumstances": (1) when a judge takes "nonjudicial actions"; and (2) when the action is judicial, but is done "in the complete absence of all jurisdiction." …

On one end of the spectrum [of judicial action to nonjudicial action], the classic example of a judicial act is "resolving disputes between parties who have invoked the jurisdiction of a court." Other related acts qualify too, like holding litigants "in contempt," and issuing "search warrant[s]."

But those acts also have their limits. There is no doubt, for example, that judges can "direct[] police officers to bring counsel in a pending case before the court," but they cannot order the officers to beat them with their nightsticks along the way. Nor can judges wake up one day and decide to spontaneously issue a search warrant against a nosy neighbor or a political rival.

Like these examples, Judge Eighmy's decision to personally escort the kids to jail took what would otherwise be a judicial act too far. Judges have the authority to order an officer or a bailiff to escort an unruly litigant to jail. They can also pull the parties into a conference room to discuss what just happened in court.

Judge Eighmy crossed the line, however, when he personally escorted the kids to jail, stood there while they removed their clothes and belongings, and personally came back an hour later to release them. For one thing, the children were not even present in the courtroom, so he could not hold them in contempt for "[d]isorderly, contemptuous or insolent behavior." For another, judges do not do double duty as jailers. So even assuming Judge Eighmy could have ordered someone else to take the kids to jail, he could not put them there himself.

It is no answer that Judge Eighmy believes he was exercising his contempt power. To be sure, absolute immunity is available for judges who hold a litigant in contempt even when they are "not in [their] … robes, … no[r] in the courtroom itself." But here, the children were never parties, they never stepped foot in the courtroom, and Judge Eighmy personally locked them up himself. We have been unable to find any case that extends judicial immunity so far.

Judge Eighmy fares no better with his other argument: that Missouri law allows judges to enforce child-welfare statutes informally. Without question, police officers can take children into custody if they are behaving in a way "injurious to [their] welfare or to the welfare of others." But not judges, who can only order others to "[t]ake charge of children before and after" a juvenile hearing. The point is that judicial immunity is unavailable because what Judge Eighmy did is not "a function normally performed by a judge." …

Thanks to James Creigh for the pointer.

The post No Immunity for Judge Who Locked Children in Holding Cells in Custody Case appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Mali’s armed forces have recaptured the northern city of Kidal following a large-scale military offensive conducted alongside Russia’s Africa Corps. It is a major development in the government’s efforts to restore state control over territory held by armed groups.

The Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) announced that their troops consolidated their operational deployment in Kidal on October 7, 2026, under Operation Dougoukoloko, following several days of airstrikes and coordinated air and ground operations against the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an armed group affiliated with al-Qaeda.

In a statement, the military said the operation had weakened the armed groups’ fighting capacity and disrupted their logistical networks.

“As part of the large-scale offensive conducted in the Eastern theater, under Operation DOUGOUKOLOKO, the Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) consolidated their operational deployment in the city of KIDAL on Wednesday, October 7, 2026,” the statement said.

The military added that the offensive followed an intense air campaign and several air-ground operations that had “neutralized several elements belonging to the FLA-JNIM terrorist coalition” and inflicted significant damage on their logistical capabilities.

According to the statement, the operation was conducted by Malian forces and their partners, referring to Russia’s Africa Corps, which has supported Mali’s military authorities in security operations.

The military said the offensive aimed to strengthen security for communities in northern Mali, ensure the free movement of people and goods, reinforce border security, and disrupt the criminal economic activities of armed groups.

“Through this operational dynamic, the FAMa continue their sovereign mission of securing the national territory and protecting civilian populations and their property against abuses by Armed Terrorist Groups,” the statement added.

A strategic city in the conflict

Kidal, long a stronghold of Tuareg separatism, has been at the center of the conflict in northern Mali since 2012. The Malian army first retook the city on November 14, 2023, after more than a decade with almost no state presence there.

That control ended in April 2026. On that day the FLA and JNIM launched near-simultaneous assaults on several cities, including the capital, Bamako, as well as Kati, Mopti, Gao and Kidal. The attacks targeted military installations and strategic sites. Defense Minister General Sadio Camara was among those killed. Malian troops and Africa Corps forces subsequently withdrew from Kidal.

For the transitional government led by General Assimi Goïta, which has made territorial sovereignty its central promise, the recapture is a major symbolic victory.

Mali’s sovereignty and regional security

The recapture comes as Mali continues to pursue a security strategy centered on strengthening its armed forces and working with external partners, particularly Russia, following the deterioration of its relations with several Western governments and the expulsion of French forces.

For the Malian government, securing Kidal is more than a military objective but also a question of national sovereignty. Control of the city would strengthen the state’s position in the north.

In its statement, the military said the operation was intended to provide lasting security for the population, protect civilian property, and restrict the activities of armed groups operating in the region.

The recapture of Kidal does not by itself resolve Mali’s broader security crisis. The Alliance of Sahel States (AES) broadly continues to face security threats and destabilization campaigns from adversaries in its fight to assert sovereignty.

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Three months after Saudi Arabia resumed its aggression against Yemen’s Ansar Allah-led government by attacking Sanaa International Airport in July, the conflict continues to spiral.

Saudi-backed forces claimed that they managed to cut off the main road connecting the Red Sea port city of Mokha with the Bab al-Mandeb strait on Monday, October 12, in a bid to reverse Ansar Allah’s major territorial gains along the Red Sea coast.

This came after Ansar Allah launched an intensified military operation that resulted in encircling Yemen’s southwestern city of Taiz last week. Taiz has been under the control of the Saudi-backed Yemeni government for roughly the last ten years.

As Yemen’s third-largest city, the encirclement of Taiz constitutes a critical development in the country’s armed conflict and geopolitical landscape, especially with a vital supply route linking Taiz with Aden being cut off. For over a decade, Aden has served as the temporary capital of Yemen’s Saudi-backed government.

Ansar Allah’s encirclement of Taiz sparked heavy ground clashes with the Saudi-backed forces, while Saudi warplanes intensified their strikes on the city as well as other parts of Yemen.

Ansar Allah emerges undeterred by the Saudi escalation

However, those airstrikes have not deterred the Ansar Allah-led armed forces from targeting Saudi airports and vital energy facilities with missiles, and drones. 

The Yemeni Armed Forces’ spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Sare’e confirmed on Sunday, October 11, that the attacks disrupted air traffic at King Khalid Airport in Riyadh and King Fahd Airport in Dammam. They also caused fires in Aramco’s Shuqdam gas and Tanajib oil facilities in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.

On Monday, Ansar Allah announced the targeting of King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh once again with a ballistic missile, and Khamis Mushait Air Base in southern Saudi Arabia with a drone.

As a result, Saudi Arabia’s General Authority of Civil Aviation extended the suspension of flight operations at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh until October 17, 2026.

The Yemeni movement clarified that its latest attacks on Saudi airports, alongside other energy and military facilities, came in response to the recent Saudi strikes on civilian infrastructure across Yemen. This included an attack on a passenger bus in Taiz, reportedly killing two civilians and injuring seven others. 

Trump says US may join Saudi Arabia in striking Yemen

Commenting on the attacks on Riyadh’s main airport, US President Donald Trump told reporters he is considering joining Saudi Arabia in striking Ansar Allah in Yemen.

“We just found out about the recent attack. So, we’ll make a decision. We move very quickly,” Trump said.

Tehran suggest mediation of talks between Ansar Allah and the Saudis

For its part, the Islamic Republic of Iran called on Saudi Arabia to resolve the conflict through diplomacy rather than a military approach.

According to Saudi and Iranian media outlets, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi proposed on Sunday that Tehran mediate a dialogue between Riyadh and Ansar Allah, during a telephone call with his Saudi counterpart Prince Faisal bin Farhan.

Large-scale protests broke out in different parts of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province on Monday, October 12, after the federal government dismissed its elected government and imposed the centralized Governor’s rule.

The federal government also declared an emergency in 12 out of 40 of KP’s districts, citing a law-and-order situation. The imposition of the emergency under article 232 of Pakistan’s constitution means the suspension of citizen’s fundamental rights.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) which was ruling the KP government, called the dismissal of its government a “direct assault on the democratic mandate of the people.” PTI is currently leading a large march to Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, demanding the release of its jailed leader and former prime minister, Imran Khan,

Several of its leaders and activists protested the federal government’s decision in different parts of the province on Monday and Tuesday, despite the repression unleashed by security forces.

The federal government has deployed the armed forces in large numbers across the province, closed down all the educational institutions and blocked all access routes to the capital Peshawar with shipping containers in order to prevent large protests.

Chief Minister Sohail Afridi was also arrested on Monday, along with several of the elected members of the provincial legislative council, with PTI claiming his whereabouts were unknown.

Afridi, who was leading the march to Islamabad since October 4, had, on Saturday, dared the federal government to dismiss his government, claiming the imposition of federal rule by dismissing “the only truly elected government” in the country would be a brutal repression of popular will.

The PTI has called for large-scale protests against the move in the coming days. It has also filed a petition demanding the revocation of the Governor’s rule and production of its elected members, arrested since Sunday.

“Unpardonable crime“

Reacting to the dismissal of the PTI government, Ammar Ali Jan, leader of the leftwing Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) called it “one of the darkest chapters” in the country’s history.

“All those responsible, including the PMLN [Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz, the ruling party], PPP [Pakistan Peoples Party, part of the ruling coalition] & the establishment [the Army] have committed an unpardonable crime against our people,” Ali Jan said, asking people to “revolt against this tyranny.”

Several other groups and parties opposed the federal government’s move, calling it an attack on people’s basic rights.

HKP called it a brazen disregard for the will of the people which will further increase the gap between the people and the government “in the midst of unprecedented security, economic and regional challenges” faced by Pakistan.

The left-wing Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP) and Awami Workers’ Party-Marxist also opposed the move, calling it an example of authoritarianism. The MKP dismissed the justification about the PTI government’s failure to maintain law and order and curb terrorism as just excuses to undermine the popular mandate.

The federal government, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of the PMLN, has long accused the KP government of failing to secure law and order in the province, citing rising cases of “terrorist attacks.”

It claimed the PTI-led government has “deliberately disengaged with the fight against terrorism” as justification for its dismissal on Sunday.

Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar also claimed on Monday that the move has been welcomed by the people of KP as the PTI government was sympathetic and even supportive to “terrorist” groups.

The dismissal of the PTI government in KP is largely seen as a result of the persistent political tensions between the PTI and the ruling coalition.

The PTI is the largest opposition party in the country’s National Assembly. Khan, despite being in prison for the last three years, still has a large popular following.

Khan and the PTI have maintained that the ruling coalition, in collaboration with the country’s armed forces, conspired and rigged the 2024 elections to deprive them of power after Khan spoke against the latter’s interference in the democratic governance.

The PTI was denied its symbol during the national elections, forcing it to run its candidates as independents, while Khan was disqualified to contest in the elections and denied permissions to campaign. He was put in prison and charged with scores of cases related to corruption, misuse of power, and violence.

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What’s the point of playing? Games don’t provide an organism with food, water, or shelter. They distract from the pursuit of survival and reproduction. And yet play is found across the animal kingdom; the act separates creative, joyful, living creatures from “merely mechanical things,” as the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga once put it. In his famous 1938 study on games and play, Homo Ludens, Huizinga asserts that the behavior represents something fundamentally absurd: Humans “play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.”

Huizinga’s analytical understanding of leisure remains influential in the fields of philosophy and game design. Perhaps this is why the British writer Joanna Kavenna, halfway through her zany, cerebral romp of a novel, Seven, quotes at length from Huizinga. Play is necessary, she quotes him as saying, even if “we live in a demented world.” Humans aren’t robots, Kavenna seems to be reminding us. And her novel, which lands during a moment when the biggest question about robots is whether they’ll kill us all, offers a jaunty insight: When we embrace our irrationality, we deepen our understanding of what separates us from our computers.

The plot and thematic structure of Seven are guided by an invented board game, Seven, which resembles chess and involves a spiral-shaped board known as the “box.” The game involves seven movable pieces and two six-sided dice, and its rules are flexible; the novel itself is punctuated by four separate sets of instructions. (This slipperiness will become important later on.) In the same way that chess has been used by writers and artists as a metaphor for war or existential struggle, Seven becomes a symbol for how humans attempt to make sense of their world’s incoherence.

Kavenna’s characters are deadly serious about their game, but the author is willing to poke fun at them. The action begins in a university philosophy department in Oslo, where the nameless, genderless narrator works as a research assistant to an Icelandic philosopher named Alda Jónsdóttir. The professor’s area of study is called “box philosophy,” and it focuses on the problem of “Thinking Outside the Box About Thinking Outside the Box.”

What does the assistant’s job look like in practice? They spend time getting too drunk at faculty dinner parties, doing menial work for Jónsdóttir, and “asking questions,” but their first matter of serious business is “working on none of the above.” They try to clarify: “I don’t mean that I didn’t work on anything I’ve just mentioned, but that I worked on the category of None of the Above.” This deadpan joke serves a narrative function, priming the assistant—and the reader—to start thinking beyond the rules, and to enter a more expansive realm.

[Read: Open AI just carpet-bombed mathematics]

Jónsdóttir sends the narrator away on, essentially, a wild-goose chase to Greece; their mission is to hunt down a man named Theódoros Apostolakis—a poet, dentist, and Seven enthusiast who is “big in boxes.” This journey across Europe includes several professional Seven competitions, during which the rules keep changing. Everything the assistant learned in Norway seems useless except the central lesson—to think outside the box. These games abroad lead the narrator to start contemplating the role of recreation, the limits of human ingenuity, and the meaning of consciousness. Soon this will bring them face-to-face with the novel’s ultimate threat, an artificial-intelligence program that undermines everything that Jónsdóttir and the Seven players care about: creativity, curiosity, play. “How do you play a game without rules?” Kavenna writes. “Do you just make stuff up and hope for the best?”

These thoughts coalesce in the second half of the novel, when an AI bot named the Quail is introduced. Invented by a Seven player named Indrek Laar, who, Kavenna pointedly notes, believes that “AI was very clever and therefore had experiences,” the Quail is named for qualia, a term borrowed from philosophy. (It’s meant to capture a quality of consciousness, though the narrator dismisses it as “a baroque way of saying ‘experience.’”)

The bot is “designed to play Seven” and nothing else, Kavenna writes. “It couldn’t give you relationship advice or sympathise when you were feeling sad, or translate the Iliad or write your homework. It just played Seven.” And it does its job well. The Quail manages to beat the world’s reigning Seven champion, Ashok Deo, in a humiliating match that the narrator calls both the “greatest Seven game of the millennium” and “the worst game ever”—technically impressive, but absolutely demoralizing. “No one had enjoyed it,” Kavenna writes, “because the Quail couldn’t experience enjoyment and the Quail’s proxy—Indrek Laar—was horrified.”

Ashok’s loss echoes real-life incidents in which computers have won games against humans, such as the 1997 victory of IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer over the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and the repeated defeats of the Go champion Lee Sedol by Google’s program AlphaGo in 2016. Culturally, these results represented a significant shift in how we understand the relationship between humans and computers. The Kasparov match “had the impact of a Greek tragedy,” one audience member told The New York Times. But its reception wasn’t all bad: Another champion commented, “Nice style!” while watching Deep Blue take another round. The machine, she admitted to the Times, “made many moves that were based on understanding chess, on feeling the position. We all thought computers couldn’t do that.” Deep Blue, and AlphaGo after it, seemed to do more than just win by brute force: They encroached on the human flair for creativity.

[Read: Yet another literary prizewinner seems to be AI]

Those machines—and the fears they inspired—can look quaint when compared with today’s technology. Some AI-safety researchers see it as an existential threat to humankind. Earlier this year, an OpenAI model not meant to have open access to the internet managed to break out of its “sandbox” and hack the databases of another tech company, Hugging Face. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated and more prevalent. AI-company employees are publicly quitting, raising alarms about the safety culture inside major firms. Popular conversations are inundated by pessimism—and at the same time, companies are advertising their services by urging onlookers to “stop hiring humans,” as in one controversial San Francisco– and New York–based billboard campaign. The stakes of the conflict between human and computer capabilities can feel bleak and funereal.

Kavenna’s portrayal of the battle of man versus machine is leavened, however, by her sense of humor. Machines may be able to beat us, but has a computer ever written an effective joke? Beyond being funny, the novel also defies machines by eschewing binaries (“I was neither one thing nor another,” the genderless, nameless, race-less narrator observes of their mental state. “I was mostly in a state of / .”) But Kavenna’s pitch for human superiority really comes together in the novel’s denouement. Eventually, the narrator meets a Seven champion named Eleni Hikaru Jones. She’ll point out that when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, the latter “carried on playing the game. He accepted that Deep Blue was better than him, but he was still the best human player.”

This idea inspires the characters to one-up machine intelligence by changing the rules of the game—or, in Kavenna’s framing, thinking outside the box. While Ashok plays the Quail, Indrek, the bot’s inventor, recognizes the turmoil he’s unleashed. Human loneliness, not malice, was his motive: “He made the Quail so he would always have someone to play with.” Knowing this, Eleni persuades Indrek to join forces with her. Together, they cook up a scheme to create an AI bot that can beat the Quail, and call it the Red Fox.

As these two AIs spend an evening rapidly moving through Seven matches against each other, the humans find better things to do: In the time it takes Eleni and Ashok to play a single leisurely game of Seven, the Red Fox beats the Quail 147 times. But the new device hasn’t accomplished anything of value to either person. In the end, a human Seven champion does indeed beat the Red Fox—but not by winning a Seven match. Instead, she accomplishes something like breaking out of her sandbox: Although Eleni “hadn’t won the game, she had won the game,” the narrator tells us cryptically, as though reciting a riddle or koan. What use, after all, is winning without enjoyment, or real struggle? The iterative process of trying, failing, exploring is far more interesting than the Red Fox’s joyless plod to victory. The emotional stakes for Eleni and Ashok are real, but their true triumph exists in the region of what if—that space of possibility in which one might either win or lose, with no determined outcome: the realm of play.

At the end of the novel, the narrator is back in Greece, sitting outside where “the waves were lapping the shore and the stars were innumerable.” They realize that their quest—to study “how we box in the dots”—was really just another form of “boxing in” imaginative thinking, which is to say human creativity. In Seven, Kavenna suggests that because we fear how artificial intelligence can outmaneuver us, we have overlooked the reality of the situation: Having invented both AI and the games that AI can beat us at, humans still have the choice to knock over the table. We can walk outside; we can look away. People, so unlike Deep Blue, AlphaGo, Claude, and the Quail, can decide on a whim to care about something other than winning.

© Illustration by Hannah van der Weide

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