The Economist [unpaywalled]: “Let Truth and falsehood grapple,” argued John Milton in Areopagitica, a pamphlet published in 1644 defending the freedom of the press. Such freedom would, he admitted, allow incorrect or misleading works to be published, but bad ideas would spread anyway, even without printing—so better to allow everything to be published and let rival views compete on the battlefield of ideas. Good information, Milton confidently believed, would drive out bad: the “dust and cinders” of falsehood “may yet serve to polish and brighten the armory of truth”. Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian, lambasts this position as the “naive view” of information in a timely new book. It is mistaken, he argues, to suggest that more information is always better and more likely to lead to the truth; the internet did not end totalitarianism, and racism cannot be fact-checked away. But he also argues against a “populist view” that objective truth does not exist and that information should be wielded as a weapon. (It is ironic, he notes, that the notion of truth as illusory, which has been embraced by right-wing politicians, originated with left-wing thinkers such as Marx and Foucault.)…In “Nexus”, a sweeping narrative ranging from the stone age to the era of artificial intelligence (AI), Mr Harari sets out to provide “a better understanding of what information is, how it helps to build human networks, and how it relates to truth and power”. Lessons from history can, he suggests, provide guidance in dealing with big information-related challenges in the present, chief among them the political impact of AI and the risks to democracy posed by disinformation. In an impressive feat of temporal sharpshooting, a historian whose arguments operate on the scale of millennia has managed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly. With 70 nations, accounting for around half the world’s population, heading to the polls this year, questions of truth and disinformation are top of mind for voters—and readers…”