Welcome to the website of Michael Heim. I am a freelance journalist and author. You will find some of my writing here. It will give you an idea about what I do and how I do it.
At the same time, this page is meant as an insurance. Time and again, I have posted threads approaching full article length on social media - not hot takes, but thought-out arguments involving a significant amount of research.
These pieces are swept away in the torrent of new posts. And they might vanish altogether when a platform bites the dust. I have learned that lesson the hard way when Google+ shut down. A fair bit of writing evaporated that day, along with more than 6000 followers.
Now I keep copies. If I think they are worth it. But please judge for yourself.
You like what you read, would perhaps like to cooperate and get in touch? Please do.
Posted on Bluesky and X/Twitter, 12 January 2025.
The decline is no longer down to couples deciding they don't want kids, or can't afford to have them, or a lack of childcare. That matters much less than in the past. The main driver of falling birth rates is: staying single.
Posted on Bluesky and X/Twitter, 2 January 2025.
Video from 15.000 drones on the front line is captured and stored in Ukraine, amounting to 2 million hours of battlefield footage since the war started. The footage is invaluable for teaching AI to interpret what is happening on a battlefield. The AI model essentially observes what human drone operators have focused on, what they have identified as a target, what they have tried to hit. AI learns to do all that, too – but once the training is complete, it can act much faster.
Posted on Bluesky and X/Twitter, 22 December 2024.
Even to defence hawks, Trump's demand looks unrealistic. Word is that he will settle for less: 3.5% is the number being talked about. Yet most national governments in Nato are reluctant to spend more than 2% of GDP, the target all members have agreed to. Some countries, like Spain, Italy and Canada, are still far below that level.
The current spending target, ambitious as it may seem to some, is barely enough to finance the status quo. Much larger sums will be needed to improve defence significantly. From a security perspective, the advice is straightforward: Members should pour as much money as possible into their armies, navies and air forces. But could it go wrong?
Posted on Bluesky, 17 December 2024.
ISIS fighters are acting on behalf of Turkey, or so it appears. They seem to have infiltrated part of the rebel alliance. But what is really going on?
Original predictions posted on Twitter, 9 November 2016.
My predictions would almost certainly be wrong, but they provided a baseline of assumptions – something to work with in the face of overwhelming uncertainty. Primarily, though, predicting the future was (and is) a tool to reckon with the present, in both of its aspects: the state of affairs and the direction of pull.
For that reason, the right benchmark for judging predictions is not their accuracy but how useful they are. They provide a compass, not a road map. Being right doesn't matter. Knowing what to look out for does.
They also turned out to be a little less wrong than I expected.
Originally posted on Google+, 26 February 2012.
There is a reason I am posting this particular photo this week. Six years ago, the events unfolding under this dome changed an entire country overnight, in the most terrible way imaginable.
The building itself played a crucial role in these events. It all happened early in the morning of 22nd February 2006, when a group of men approached the entrance and overwhelmed the guards. They were wearing uniforms of the Iraqi Special Forces, but in fact belonged to the gang of Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, the most ruthless killer in the Iraqi conflict, leader of "al-Qaida in Iraq".
Originally posted on Google+, 15 January 2012.
The photos you will see below are from my archive, taken in the early 1990s, but they couldn't be more current. They show a ritual of extreme mourning, and the last time it was performed was yesterday. That's because yesterday marked the end of a 40-day mourning period for a religious leader who has been slaughtered, along with almost all of the people who were with him, by a rival for the position of leading the faithful.
