On Thursday 17 September 2026, King Willem-Alexander will reopen Kasteel Huis Bergh in 's-Heerenberg after a nearly three-year restoration, striking a commemorative coin with a historic screw press to mark the occasion. Two days later, on 19 September, the castle fully reopens to the public. For the Netherlands' largest water castle, with almost 900 years of history, it is the start of a new chapter.
Lowlands — A Campingflight to Lowlands Paradise — returned to the fields of Biddinghuizen from August 21 to 23, 2026, and something unusual happened: the festival did not sell out. For the first time in years, there was no frantic online scramble, no crashed servers, and no "sold out" sign within minutes. Instead, roughly 60,000 visitors found noticeably more breathing room between the twelve stages — and most of them seemed to love it.
The assignment given to TaskDaemon-4 was deceptively simple: find a free time slot with the specialist within forty-eight hours. A scheduling task. The kind of task the Daemon series had been built to swallow whole — parse the calendars, run the matching, book the slot, log the success. TaskDaemon-4 estimated the whole job at eleven seconds of compute and ninety-two lines of routine.
It would be wrong about every part of that.
The Line is the centrepiece of Neom, the development region Saudi Arabia is building in its north-western desert: a mirrored structure presented in 2022 as 170 kilometres long, 200 metres wide and 500 metres high, designed to house nine million people without cars or roads, powered by renewables, with an official cost estimate of around $500 billion. This post summarises an architectural analysis of that design by Daniel Titchener (August 2025) and sets it against the reporting on what has actually been built and paid for since.
Ever wondered why your favorite tech platforms, once sleek and user-friendly, now feel bogged down with an endless stream of ads and questionable content? You're not alone! This VPRO Tegenlicht documentary dives deep into a phenomenon aptly termed "Enshittification" by American activist and writer Cory Doctorow. It explains how platforms like Google, Instagram, and YouTube are deliberately degrading their services, filling search results with ads and scams, and prioritizing revenue over user experience.
In episode #2010 of De Nieuwe Wereld, economist and columnist Jona van Loenen talks with Jelle van Baardewijk about the Dutch housing market. His position is that the shortage of houses is not what makes them expensive; the amount of money a buyer can borrow or bring along is. That claim sits next to the policy motto of the past decade — build, build, build — and it comes with proposals that would shift costs towards homeowners.
In a recent discussion on De Nieuwe Wereld TV, hosted by Ad Verbrugge, economists Lex Hoogduin, Paul Buitink and Kees de Kort addressed some of the most pressing questions of the moment. The focus was on increased military spending, the state of Europe's economy, the future of the euro and the contours of a new financial and economic world order.
On 11 May 2022, the European Commission presented a regulation to tackle child sexual abuse material online (COM(2022) 209). The proposal obliges online services to map out risks, gives authorities the power to have material removed or blocked, and sets up a European centre for coordination and victim support. Its most debated part are the detection orders: mandatory detection of abuse material in communications. Member states and the European Parliament do not yet agree on whether that power should exist, and with which safeguards.