China’s AI boom is reaching astonishing proportions
Just hours after the launch on March 6th of Manus, a Chinese artificial-intelligence (AI) bot, a flood of visitors caused its...
How DOGE is driving America’s public-health guardians mad
ON A NARROW road on the main campus of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, lie...
The best- or worst-timed book in history
The Technological Republic. By Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. Crown Currency; 320 pages; $30. Bodley Head; £25 “SILICON...
How Trump provoked a stockmarket sell-off
As they saw the line go down, American investors may have felt an unfamiliar sensation: anxiety. The S&P 500 fell by anot...
South Africa’s government is looking fragile
Budget announcements are rarely memorable events in South Africa. But the statement on March 12th by Enoch Godongwana, the fi...
7-Eleven is still struggling to fend off its Canadian suitor
THE BATTLE for control of Seven & i, the Japanese owner of 7-Eleven, has taken a number of surprising turns since Aliment...
Abiy Ahmed’s agricultural revolution is too good to be true
AFRICA HAS a new breadbasket—or so says Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister. Thanks to a state-led programme of agricultura...
Another civil war looms in South Sudan
Residents of Juba, the capital of South Sudan, are familiar with violence. When civil war erupted in 2013, two years after in...
Athol Fugard spoke truth to apartheid South Africa
He could never explain exactly why he did it. He was only ten or eleven at the time, an ordinary white brat. There had been a...
Britain’s worklessness disaster
For Sarah, the trouble started with a fracture in her back. She’d worked in a warehouse for years. Now she’s “too old to lug ...