‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (August 14, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, why Biden’s China strategy isn’t working, Saudi Arabia’s plan to dominate global sport (10:20) and how green is your electric vehicle, really? (17:55).
Tag Archives: Opinion
Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — SEPT 2023
My Generation
Anthem for a forgotten cohort
Man Called Fran
Plumbing, the depths
Waiting for the Lights
The life of an Iranian exile
War Analysis: How Ukraine Sank The Moskva – Russia’s Flagship Missile Cruiser
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (1843 magazine August 7, 2023): A special edition of Editor’s Picks from The Economist’s summer double issue. This week, we take a deep dive into how Ukraine’s virtually non-existent navy sank the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea.
How Ukraine’s virtually non-existent navy sank Russia’s flagship
The Moskva was the most advanced vessel in the Black Sea. But the Ukrainians had a secret weapon, reports Wendell Steavenson with Marta Rodionova
Opinion: Burdens Of CEOs, Weather Guesses, The Gen Z Guerrillas Of Myanmar
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (July 31, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week: what to do about overstretched CEOs, how to better predict the weather (9:00) and we meet Myanmar’s Gen Z guerrillas (15:00).
Opinion: Technology Of Babymaking, Overly-Rosy Economics, Barbenheimer
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (July 24, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week: a report on the technology behind babymaking, why optimism about the world economy might be premature (10:30), and what the hype over Barbenheimer says about the movie industry (16:17).
Opinion: Trump 2024, NATO Promises To Ukraine, New Anthropocene Thinking
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (July 17, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week: how populist Republicans plan to make Donald Trump’s second term count, NATO’s promises to Ukraine mark real progress, but there is still much more to do (10:12) and what matters about the human-dominated Anthropocene geological phase is not when it began, but how it might end (14:41).
Culture/Politics: Harper’s Magazine — August 2023
Doctor’s Orders
COVID-19 and the new science wars
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not unusual to enter common spaces across the United States—grocery stores, malls, office buildings—and experience a kind of perceptual whiplash. People wearing N-95 masks and latex gloves stood beside others wearing no mask at all—or else letting their mandatory face coverings slouch flaccidly beneath their chins.
Who Walks Always Beside You?
A disappearance in Arkansas
Twenty-two years ago, a six-year-old girl—my cousin—got lost in the Arkansas Ozarks, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance would eventually connect my family to another story, a dark and bizarre one involving kidnapping, brainwashing, murder, and a cult that believed in the imminent end of the world, laced with the kind of eerie coincidences or near-coincidences that cause perfectly rational people to question what they think they know about reality.
Opinion: Future Of War In Ukraine, A New Asia Family, U.S. Lab-Monkey Shortage
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (July 10, 2023) – Three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week: how the war in Ukraine will affect the future of combat, the new Asian family (10:36) and why a lab-monkey shortage in America is encouraging smuggling (19:07).
Opinion: A Humbled Putin, Environmentalism Harms The Poor, The Better Flags
‘Editor’s Picks’ Podcast (July 3, 2023) – A selection of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist: The humbling of Vladimir Putin, how misfiring environmentalism risks harming the world’s poor (10:20) and some tips to design better flags (18:55).
The humbling of Vladimir Putin
The Wagner mutiny exposes the Russian tyrant’s growing weakness. But don’t count him out yet
The last pretence of Vladimir Putin to be, as he imagines, one of his nation’s historic rulers was stripped away on June 24th. A band of armed mercenaries swept through his country almost unopposed, covering some 750km (470 miles) in a single day, seizing control of two big cities and getting to within 200km of Moscow before withdrawing unharmed.
How misfiring environmentalism risks harming the world’s poor
The trade-off between development and climate change is impossible to avoid
Thank goodness for the enthusiasts and the obsessives. If everyone always took a balanced view of everything, nothing would ever get done. But when campaigners’ worldview seeps into the staid apparatus of policymaking and global forums, bad decisions tend to follow. That, unfortunately, is especially true in the world of climate change.
How to design better flags
Some tips to avoid having an embarrassing emblem
Have you ever met a vexed vexillologist? This is someone who frets when flags are badly designed. Sadly, too many flags flutter to deceive: they are cluttered with imagery, a mess of colours and all too easily forgettable. Yet flags matter. Witness Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow banner, which now serves as a potent symbol around the world (not to mention on this newspaper’s covers).
REVIEWS: ‘Warfare After Ukraine – Battlefield Lessons’ (The Economist)
Like the first world war, but with high technology
The war shows how technology is changing the battlefield. But mass still counts, argues Shashank Joshi
The latest in the battle of jamming with electronic beams
Jamming is knocking drones and missiles out of the sky
Boomers Daily 