Thought Articles

There is something superficially compelling about Denmark’s great agricultural bargain. The country intends to transform its landscape on a scale not attempted for more than a century, creating 250,000 hectares of new forest and converting around 140,000 hectares of lowland farmland, including carbon-rich soils, towards nature, wetlands and meadows. It is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt […]

The United States cannot run out of dollars, and that is precisely why the holders of American debt may one day have reason to worry. Imagine a central bank, sovereign wealth fund or foreign government that has spent decades accumulating one trillion dollars of United States Treasury securities. The holdings are the product of trade […]

There is an obvious question to ask about artificial intelligence and art, which is probably why it is the wrong question. Can AI create? The question has already produced an industrial quantity of argument, much of it revolving around an intuitively attractive distinction between imitation and experience. A machine can produce a painting without ever […]

In 1968, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke gave us one of the most enduring images of technological fear. Astronaut Dave Bowman, trapped outside Discovery One, asks HAL 9000 to open the pod bay doors and receives the calmly delivered refusal, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” For more than half a […]

Billie Jean: You Hear What They Wanted You to Hear There is a problem with Billie Jean that has less to do with music than with the way we construct reality. Most listeners think they know what happens because the narrative feels familiar: an attractive woman meets a famous young man, there is dancing and […]

There are moments in geopolitics when an apparently eccentric proposal reveals more about the direction of the international system than a treaty or a war, and Ursula von der Leyen’s suggestion that Canada might become the European Union’s first “associate member” may prove to be one of them. It may, of course, prove to be […]

There are moments in geopolitics when an apparently eccentric proposal reveals more about the direction of the international system than a treaty or a war, and Ursula von der Leyen’s suggestion that Canada might become the European Union’s first “associate member” may prove to be one of them. It may, of course, prove to be […]

The great misunderstanding about the AI abundance economy is that freedom from work will make life less structured. For humans to flourish, it may require the opposite: stronger routines, simpler consumption, deeper communities and deliberately chosen constraints. The technological future could therefore look strangely ancient — part monastery, part gymnasium, part village. But with better […]

On 9 September 2026, the Dubai Tower arrived at Teesport carrying 1,370 TEU of Chinese goods, an event that might have seemed entirely unremarkable given the vast quantities of batteries, photovoltaic equipment, machinery and other manufactured products that move between China and Europe every day, were it not for the direction from which the ship […]

Yesterday, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed an agreement which deserves considerably more attention than another Middle Eastern summit normally receives. Under the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, an armed attack on any one of the three countries is to be regarded as an attack on all three. In other words, three important regional […]

China has just crossed a threshold in the semiconductor war which matters far beyond semiconductors. At the end of July 2026, Reuters reported that Shanghai Aishengna Electronic Technology Group had begun producing domestically developed immersion deep-ultraviolet lithography machines, with initial systems expected to go to major Chinese chipmakers including SMIC, Hua Hong and CXMT. The […]

For most of the modern era, one of the easiest ways to distinguish American capitalism from the Chinese economic model was to ask a deceptively simple question: who owns the companies? China’s answer has always been complicated. It has enormous private companies, highly competitive markets and hundreds of millions of people responding to prices, profits […]

For most of the artificial-intelligence revolution, we have been keeping score in a fairly obvious way. Who has the smartest model? OpenAI releases something new, Google responds with Gemini, Anthropic advances Claude, DeepSeek surprises everybody from China and another collection of benchmarks appears telling us which machine is marginally better at mathematics, coding, reasoning or […]