Sep 21st 2024

The breakthrough AI needs

The world this week

Leaders

Power, chips and constraints

The breakthrough AI needs

A race is on to push artificial intelligence beyond today’s limits

Held back

How the world’s poor stopped catching up

Progress stalled around 2015. To restart it, liberalise

Biden dithers

Let Ukraine hit military targets in Russia with American missiles

Hitting back at the forces blasting Ukrainian cities is legal and proportionate

Painful lessons

Britain should let university tuition fees rise

Domestic students have been paying less in real terms every year

The left’s doctrine of original sin

After peak woke, what next?

The influence of a set of illiberal ideas is waning. That creates an opportunity

Letters

On bitcoin mining, social care, orange juice, dogs, Sudan, country music, contemporary compositions

Letters to the editor

By Invitation

Nutrition

Bill Gates on how feeding children properly can transform global health

Briefing

Back to sleep

America is becoming less “woke”

Our statistical analysis finds that woke opinions and practices are on the decline

Asia

A weakened strongman

What does Modi 3.0 look like?

Not waving but plodding

China and Australia are beefing up their Pacific policing

No country for women’s rights

The Taliban is removing every shred of freedom from women

Cramming culture

Private tutoring is booming across poorer parts of Asia

Banyan

The private sector won’t save America’s Indo-Pacific policy

China

Sunset delayed

Anger abounds as China raises its strikingly low retirement age

The trade-off

By raising the retirement age, has China created a care crisis?

Heading home

China has freed an American pastor. Does it want anything in return?

Battered

A typhoon hits Shanghai and the Chinese economy groans

United States

Swing states

Pennsylvania, the crucial battleground in America’s election

The man behind the gun

Who is Ryan Routh, Donald Trump’s would-be assassin?

The Adams families

Eric Adams’s friends keep having their phones taken away

Admit it

What is the effect of the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ban?

Campaign calculus: now you see it

Kamala Harris’s post-debate bounce is now visible in the polls

Rebels with a cause

The never-Trump movement has leaders. What about followers?

Lexington

How the right is taking culture war to culture itself

Middle East & Africa

Electronic warfare

Israel has bloodied Hizbullah but is stuck in a war of attrition

Staging protests

A theatre in Jenin offers a different kind of Palestinian resistance

Politicians v judges

Israel’s government is again trying to hobble its Supreme Court

Daylight robbery

Nairobi’s reputation for crime is outdated

A perfect storm

Floods in Nigeria’s north-east are aggravating a humanitarian crisis

The Americas

Rainforest rewards

Can the voluntary carbon market save the Amazon?

Who’s in charge?

How Brazilian lawmakers won extra powers to waste money

Canadian politics

A by-election loss puts Justin Trudeau on the ropes

Europe

Bringing it all back home

Near-shoring is turning eastern Europe into the new China

Friedrich the Great

Germany’s conservatives choose the country’s probable next leader

The cogs of war

Ukraine is a booming market for Balkan arms makers

Brussels reboot

Can a new crew of European commissioners revive the continent?

Temptation islands

Aland is lovely, weapon-free and too close to Russia

Charlemagne

Europe is bidding a steady farewell to passport-free travel

Britain

Grads and grind

The broken business model of British universities

Good times

Ten years on from Scotland’s independence referendum

Atomic number

Britain’s nuclear-test veterans want compensation

Rock and goal

Treasure-hunting on England’s Jurassic Coast

Photo crops

British farms are luring the Instagram crowd

The vision thing

How will Labour reform Britain’s public services?

Bagehot

The bungee-jumping, sandal-clad right-wingers of British politics

International

UNintended consequences

A UN vote on Palestine underlines America’s weakening clout

Technology Quarterly

Putting the silicon back in the valley

AI has returned chipmaking to the heart of computer technology

Shrink to fit

The semiconductor industry faces its biggest technical challenge yet

The names are meaningless

Node names do not reflect actual transistor sizes

Getting to one trillion

How to build more powerful chips without frying the data centre

A Cambrian moment

AI has propelled chip architecture towards a tighter bond with software

OK (analogue) computer

Researchers are looking beyond digital computing

The relentless innovation machine

The end of Moore’s law will not slow the pace of change

Chipmaking

Sources and acknowledgments

Business

The age of the hectocorn

OpenAI’s new fundraising is shaking up Silicon Valley

Flying pickets

How much trouble is Boeing in?

Bartleby

Should you be nice at work?

Smelted

Chinese overcapacity is crushing the global steel industry

It’s in the game

How FIFA was outplayed by Electronic Arts

On a detour

Why the hype for hybrid cars will not last

Schumpeter

PwC needs to rethink its global governance

Finance & economics

End of the road

The world’s poorest countries have experienced a brutal decade

Ignoring the noise

Why the Federal Reserve has gambled on a big interest-rate cut

Buttonwood

The Federal Reserve’s interest-rate cuts may disappoint investors

Smashing pots, selling iron

How China’s communists fell in love with privatisation

Competition policy

European regulators are about to become more political

Free exchange

What the history of money tells you about crypto’s future

Science & technology

Waste not, want not

Most electric-car batteries could soon be made by recycling old ones

Energy storage

New battery designs could lead to gains in power and capacity

Geology

Earth may once have had a planetary ring

The mother of invention

China’s AI firms are cleverly innovating around chip bans

Long-standing mystery

How bush pigs saved Madagascar’s baobabs

Culture

God in the bedroom

How odd Christian beliefs about sex shape the world

Rich people’s problems

How today’s wealthy present themselves differently

World in a dish

How the martini became the world’s most iconic cocktail

Here’s the skinny

Weight-loss drugs have changed culture

Rocket man

Meet the world’s most elusive arms dealer

Unbridled

One of history’s biggest drivers is not what you might think

The Economist reads

The Economist reads

What to read about modern feminism

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Obituary

The land of forgetting