Cheap and fast algorithms are matching—and surpassing—the world’s top models
NuScale Power’s small modular reactors promised cheaper nuclear power, but costs soared and utilities balked
Verve Therapeutics says its base-editing approach may help prevent heart disease in many people
What his victory in America’s election would mean
Ashadow looms over the world. In this week’s edition we publish The World Ahead 2024, our 38th annual predictive guide to the coming year, and in all that time no single person has ever eclipsed our analysis as much as Donald Trump eclipses 2024. That a Trump victory next November is a coin-toss probability is beginning to sink in.
Rising prices and animal spirits give it a long-awaited opportunity
Global investors are giddy about Japan again. Warren Buffett made his first visit to Tokyo in more than a decade this spring; he has built up big holdings in five trading houses that offer exposure to a cross-section of Japan Inc. Last month Larry Fink, ceo of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, joined the pilgrimage to Japan’s capital. “History is repeating itself,” he told Kishida Fumio, the prime minister. He likened the moment to Japan’s “economic miracle” of the 1980s. Even disappointing gdp figures released on November 15th will not dent investors’ optimism.
Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow, a fictionalized account of the life of the actress Sun Weishi, depicts the hypocrisy of the Communist elites and the fate of those who embraced new ideals after the revolution.
The Woman Back from Moscow: In Pursuit of Beauty by Ha Jin
This book will be denounced in Beijing. Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow is a novel based on the life of Sun Weishi, an adopted daughter of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, whose brilliant mind and intensive study in Moscow of the Stanislavski acting method brought her to the pinnacle of China’s theatrical world during the Mao years. Her beauty and effervescent personality attracted powerful men—not only Zhou, who doted on her, but also Lin Biao, the Chinese Communist Party’s leading general, who divorced his wife in order to propose marriage to her (unsuccessfully), and Mao, who apparently raped her during a long rail trip. She had several other suitors and eventually married the film star Jin Shan.
Recent books about the importance of the microbiome have driven many patients to fixate on the idea of “gut health.” Are they right to do so?
Reviewed:
A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet, and Disease by Shilpa Ravella
Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure by Bryn Nelson
The Anti-Viral Gut: Tackling Pathogens from the Inside Out by Robynne Chutkan
Right before their colonoscopies, with the stress of a bowel prep still rumbling in their bellies and a mental image of the procedure beginning to sharpen, some patients will ask me why I chose a career in gastroenterology: “What made you interested in this?” The reason I usually give is that you could go all your life without a heart problem, or a lung problem, or a kidney problem, but not without a bit of nausea, constipation, or abdominal pain. The work of digestion is part of the rhythm of our daily lives, I tell them, which helps my work feel similarly immediate.
“It was important that we retained as much of the ruin as possible and that we didn’t try and put it back to kind of romanticised version of what you might assume it would have been 200 years ago,” Ann Nisbet said.
“And any extension or alteration or intervention that we did, we wanted it to sit in harmony with the ruin, we didn’t want either part to be more important than the other.”
by Nicholas Shakespeare (Harvill Secker)
Shakespeare, renowned biographer of Bruce Chatwin, reveals a story worthy of a Bond novel in his life of Ian Fleming. The painstakingly researched yet fast-paced book explores Fleming’s childhood, dramatic war years and complex personal life and reveals how they shaped his hugely successful books.
by Adam Sisman (Profile/Harper)
A follow-up to his 2015 biography of le Carré, who died in 2020, Sisman’s latest book exposes the great spy writer’s duplicitous and deceitful relationships with the women in his life, providing new insights into the secret life of the man behind George Smiley. A fascinating, revelatory appendix to Sisman’s fuller life.
by Ralph Dutli, translated by Ben Fowkes (Verso)
This life of “legendary literary saint”, Osip Mandelstam, provides a timely reminder of both the long history of repression in Russia and the powerful role that literature can play when in the right hands. Dutli’s rounded portrait of the Russian poet unafraid to speak truth to power brings to life the man and his time.
by Anna Funder (Viking/Knopf)
Funder, author of Stasiland, her prizewinning account of the East German secret police, takes six letters written by Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife, as the imaginative springboard for a deep dive into their relationship and her impact on his writing and legacy. A haunting, tragic and revealing book.
by Sarah Ogilvie (Chatto & Windus)
A former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary herself, Ogilvie has written a “people’s history” of the great literary endeavour. Begun in 1879, the OED is an epic, crowdsourced attempt to pin down slippery, evolving language and this book tells the fascinating story of the eclectic and unsung contributors to this living monument to language.
by Nathan Thrall (Allen Lane/Metropolitan Books)
This quietly heartbreaking work of non-fiction reads like a novel. At its centre is a tragic road accident outside Jerusalem in the West Bank from which Thrall, a Jewish American journalist, carefully traces the labyrinthine lives of those involved and the tangled web of politics, history and culture that ensnare them all.
The Globalist Podcast (November 16, 2023) – The Norwegian Refugee Council’s Shaina Low on the latest from Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital,
Vladimir Putin approves new media restrictions ahead of next year’s presidential election and Taiwan’s opposition unites on a joint ticket. Plus: why Finland is considering closing its border with Russia and the state of democracy in Madagascar.
A raid of a hospital that Israel asserts is a base for Hamas is shaping up as a watershed moment in a conflict that has put the Mideast on edge.
The pollution control devices contain valuable metals, making them a hot commodity for recycling. Some beneficiaries of the thefts look the other way.
Both American and Chinese accounts of the meeting indicated scant progress on the issues that have pushed the two nations to the edge of conflict.
The teenagers in the Greater Jerusalem swim club made a point of not focusing on their differences. That changed with the war.
Boomers Daily 