What This Is
N0NZER0 NEWS is a daily curated bulletin. It scans 13 RSS feeds and selects stories where you can see non-zero-sum dynamics, cognitive bias, or cooperation failure operating at scale.
It is not a news aggregator. Most of what the feeds produce gets discarded. What survives is the handful of stories where a specific mechanism — a security dilemma, an attribution error, a cooperation failure, a rare success — is visible in the event itself.
The Nonzero Lens
The bulletin is built around the ideas of Robert Wright: that tribalism is the central obstacle to the cooperation humanity needs to survive, and that understanding the cognitive and structural patterns behind it is the first step toward doing something about it.
We look for stories where you can see:
- Security dilemmas in motion — one side's defensive action provoking the other's escalation, where it would look different depending on which side you're standing on
- Foreign policy groupthink — consensus forming around a position that doesn't survive basic perspective-taking
- Fundamental attribution error — enemies acting "from character" while the same action by our side gets a situational explanation
- The explain/excuse conflation — someone stigmatized for trying to understand an adversary's perspective
- Non-zero-sum problems losing — climate, pandemic, AI governance, or arms control failing specifically because of tribalism or zero-sum thinking
- Cooperation actually working — cases where cognitive empathy or institutional coordination produces results
- Attention economy degrading discourse — algorithms amplifying tribalism, structural mechanisms distorting political understanding
- AI as existential coordination problem — arms race dynamics, safety vs acceleration, international governance
- Rules-based order hypocrisy — the gap between rhetoric and practice, double standards made visible
- Mindfulness and consciousness research — the science, not the lifestyle content
- The window opening or closing — signals about whether humanity's window for global cooperation is narrowing or widening
The Test
Does a story make a specific concept visible — not as an abstract claim, but as a specific event you can point at?
If the story is just “bad thing happened in geopolitics,” it fails. If you can see which cognitive or structural flaw produced the bad thing, it passes.
Three failure modes:
- Abstract structural claim — “tribalism is increasing” without a specific event that shows the mechanism
- Blob-confirming — a story that uncritically reproduces threat inflation or Manichaean framing
- No mechanism visible — something happened, but you can't point to the specific bias, dilemma, or cooperation failure at work
Featured Stories
Stories marked with ◆ have maximum diagnostic clarity: the ones where you can see the mechanism most cleanly, where a single event illuminates a whole pattern.
What We Don't Cover
- Standard breaking news without the non-zero-sum angle
- Partisan domestic politics
- Stories that reproduce the foreign policy establishment's framing without questioning it
- Tech hype or doom without the cooperation dimension
- Outrage bait, celebrity, sports, markets
Sources
The bulletin draws from 13 RSS feeds spanning Google News (4 topic feeds), geopolitics and security analysis (Responsible Statecraft, Defense One, The Intercept, Al Jazeera English), science (Nature, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists), tech-culture (Wired, 404 Media), and the global south (Rest of World).
When a story is a retelling of another source's reporting, we link to the original. Source attribution always matches the source name.
How It's Made
The bulletin is produced using Claude Code with a custom news curation skill. The AI scans all feeds, applies the Nonzero filter, and proposes a selection. A human editor makes the final call on every story, every headline, and every featured pick. The full skill specification is available as a downloadable document.