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Wanting to copy the happiest people in the world is an understandable impulse, but it distracts from a key message of the happiness rankings—that equitable, balanced societies make for happier residents.

In the process, a research-heavy, policy-oriented document gets mistaken, through a terrible global game of telephone, for a trove of self-help advice.

the list implies “a social understanding of happiness—something that happens between people,” which is a welcome alternative to the default assumption that individual people are responsible for their own misery. He also thinks it can show people which policies to vote for if they want to nudge their society in a happier direction.

One of humanity’s greatest achievements has been mastering routes across the world’s oceans.

Customs have been decisively altered by the movement of ships across the oceans. No one drank tea in medieval Europe, but once contact had been made with the tea-drinking Chinese, tea became the obsession of millions of people from Sweden to the United States

We tend to think that the opening of the oceans was the work of the great explorers, especially the 15th century pioneers who edged their way through uncharted waters to southern Africa, the Indian Ocean and the spice lands of the Indies. These were sailors such as Christopher Columbus, who chanced upon unsuspected lands that blocked the expected sea route from Europe to China and Japan. But while these men did give the Age of Discovery its name, they didn’t start the exploration of the world’s oceans

I was dismissive of the Anthropocene, a proposed new epoch of Earth history that has long since escaped its geoscience origins to become a dimly defined buzzword and, as such (I argued), serves to inflate humanity’s eventual geological legacy to those unfamiliar with deep time.

Wing is on the Anthropocene Working Group, a group of scientists working to define just such an epoch. He hated my essay. In his manner, though, he was extremely nice about it.

the essence of a lot of Faulkner is, before you can be something new and different, slavery is always there, the legacy of slavery is not erased, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’

The top U.S. prosecutor in Atlanta resigned from his post Monday, giving no clear reason for his departure.

the prosecutor blamed "unforeseen circumstances" for his departure.

The resignation of Pak, who was appointed by President Trump, comes days after a phone call between the president and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was made public, during which Trump urged Raffensperger to "find" enough votes to overturn his loss in the state.

If Donald Trump should lose, he may well not concede. And he will still be president, with all the power that bestows. His supporters will likely be seething, thinking that the election has been stolen. These are seeds he has been sowing for months.

Trump will have command of the military, the Justice Department and part of the intelligence apparatus.

A loss would be a supremely embarrassing rebuke, the first sitting president not to win re-election in 28 years.

claiming that negotiations with foreign countries have been a breeze compared with working with his political opponents at home. 

, ‘Mr. President, tell me. Who is the country that’s most difficult to deal with? Is it Russia? Is it China? Is it North Korea? Sir, is it North Korea?’ And I go, ‘No, well, by far the most difficult country to deal with is the U.S. It’s not even close.’ And they all say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ And I say, ‘No I’m actually probably not kidding.’”

In other parts of the interview, which ran for about a half-hour, Trump repeatedly played up the size and quantity of his recent campaign rallies, said he would only declare victory “if there’s victory,” and even criticized Fox News, claiming the network was giving too much screen time to Joe Biden ― an allegation that the “Fox & Friends” hosts said was an effort to “show both sides.”

when rivalry hardens into a sullen standoff -- not a contest of ideas but a bloody-minded refusal to engage -- you have a problem. And to put it mildly, the U.S. has a problem.

The quantity of polarization isn't the main thing; what counts is the quality of polarization.

The Pew study shows that the ideological gap between the median Democrat and the median Republican (measured on a 10-point scale of political values) has widened a lot over the past 20 years

The iceberg drifted slowly through the icy Weddell Sea for a few years, before picking up steam as it entered the Southern Ocean. When last we heard from it, in 2020, it was bearing down on the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic, a bit shrunken and battered from a journey of more than a thousand miles.

Ecologists and others had feared that during its journey the iceberg might become grounded near South Georgia. That could have kept the millions of penguins and seals that live and breed there from reaching their feeding areas in the ocean.

As it traveled through the relatively warm waters of the Southern Ocean into the South Atlantic, it melted from below, eventually releasing a huge quantity of fresh water into the sea near the island. The influx of so much fresh water could affect plankton and other organisms in the marine food chain.

unusually heavy rainfall, which local officials said was the worst disruption to the wheat harvest in a decade, underscored the risks that climate shocks pose to President Xi Jinping’s push for China to become more self-reliant in its food supply.

Ensuring China’s ability to feed 1.4 billion people is a key piece of Mr. Xi’s goal of leading the country to superpower status. In recent years, tensions with the United States, the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine have all created more volatility in global food prices, heightening the urgency for China to grow more of its own crops.

officials are concerned about the vulnerability of its food supply to global shocks. Last summer, prices for pork, fruit and vegetables spiked in China, prompting the government to release pork from its strategic reserves to stabilize prices. Afterward, Chinese leaders reiterated their call to prioritize food security.

ultimately, achieving the dream of explaining everything is too big an ask, even for an economist of Galor’s range. He is so devoted to the hidden long-run pulses that determine our destinies – geography, climate, diversity, the capacity to be future-oriented, the role of education, the rights and wrongs of Malthusian economics – that he neglects what is in full view

An account that purports to describe humanity’s journey without getting to grips with why some innovations – such as the three-masted sailing ship, printing press or computer – change civilisation while others are more ordinary, can only be incomplete. These “general-purpose technologies” not only have diverse origins, as he argues, but also require an extraordinary interplay between state funding, large markets, cultural readiness and capitalist organisation to get off the ground

Galor devotes little of his book to capitalism, the structure of states and the consequent dynamic interdependence between the public and private sectors, or the importance of Enlightenment values that unleashed notions of the public sphere and rule of law. These are gigantic omissions. His is a technocratic journey full of illuminating graphs, but strangely bloodless and neglectful of political economy in explaining humanity’s journey.

When the stock market crashes, “higher for longer” will become a thing of the past as the Fed makes an abrupt pivot. Then the 10-year yields and U.S. dollar will come tumbling down.

The Federal Reserve’s policies are threatening U.S. financial markets and the economy. They are in danger of a steep recession and the risk of a repeat of 1987’s Black Monday.

Early in the pandemic, the volume of U.S. dollars in circulation soared. For two years starting in March 2020, the M2 money supply—a measure of the cash and checkable deposits in circulation plus savings deposits and other easily convertible assets—grew at an unprecedented annualized rate of 16.5%. That is more than three times the appropriate rate for hitting the Fed’s 2% inflation target.

A decade ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the Maritime Silk Road, the oceanic component of his flagship Belt and Road Initiative aimed at improving China’s access to world markets by investing in transportation infrastructure

China has already secured a significant stake in a network of global ports that are central to world trade and freedom of navigation. Although the stated goal of the investments was commercial, the United States and its allies have grown increasingly concerned about the potential military implications.

Xi has frequently talked of his ambition to turn China into a “maritime superpower.” The port network offers a glimpse into the reach of those ambitions.

The Baltic Sea port has silos to store plenty of grain, railway lines to transport it there from Ukraine, where it has been trapped by the war, and a deep harbor ready for ships that can take it to Egypt, Yemen and other countries in desperate need of food.

“Starvation is near,

Belarus controls the railway lines offering the most direct, cheapest and fastest route for large volumes of grain out of Ukraine to Klaipeda and other Baltic ports.

Over the week of March 16, markets experienced an enormous shock to what investors refer to as liquidity, a catchall term for the cost of quickly converting an asset into cash.

Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible.

They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.

Instead of trapping the United States, Mr. Putin has trapped himself. Caught between armed conflict and a humiliating retreat, he is now seeing his room for maneuver dwindling to nothing. He could invade and risk defeat, or he could pull back and have nothing to show for his brinkmanship.

Mr. Putin’s gamble has failed.

Mr. Putin — whose instinctive cautiousness I’ve observed at close quarters for two decades — has a record of withdrawing at the first sign of real conflict. When Russian mercenaries were killed by U.S. troops in Syria in 2018, for example, he had the perfect opportunity to retaliate. Instead, Russia denied the slaughter ever took place.

Central-bank sanctions are a weapon so devastating, in fact, that the only question is whether they might do more damage than Western governments might wish. They could potentially bankrupt the entire Russian banking system and push the ruble into worthlessness.

Very seldom does any actual paper money change hands

There’s only about $12 billion of cash dollars and euros inside Russia, according to Bernstam’s research. Against that, the Russian private sector has foreign-currency claims on Russian banks equal to $65 billion, Bernstam told me. Russia’s state-owned companies have accumulated even larger claims on Russia’s foreign reserves.

One great theme of the post-2008 financial world is that money is a social construct, a way to keep track of what society thinks you deserve in terms of goods and services.

15 years ago it was easier to think that money was an objective fact. Money is a kind of stuff, you might have thought, stuff with some predictable value that you can exchange for goods and services, and you can acquire a quantity of it and then you own that money and can use it however you like to buy things. 

Russia’s foreign reserves consist, in the first instance, of a set of accounting entries. But in a crisis the accounting entries don’t matter at all. All that matters are relationships, and if your relationships get bad enough then the money is as good as gone.

nt polymers, which include all plastics, are made up of chains of building blocks called monomers. They are strung together in repetitive patterns. While the monomer chains are strong, the gaps between them are weak and porous. This is the reason you are sometimes able to smell food stored inside ziplock bags.

The researchers assert that the flat sheets of polymer can be stacked together to make strong, ultra-light building materials that could replace steel. Since 2DPA-1 is cheap to manufacture in large quantities, it would substantially reduce the cost of building different structures. It would also be better for the environment because steel production is responsible for about 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.

The MIT scientists, who published their findings in the journal Nature on February 3, 2022, did not test to see if 2DPA-1 can be recycled. However, they believe the stronger, durable material could someday replace disposable containers. This would help reduce plastic pollution.

You probably use a device with a chip made by TSMC every day, but TSMC does not actually design or market those chips. That would have sounded completely absurd before the existence of TSMC. Back then, companies designed chips that they manufactured themselves. Chang’s radical idea for a great semiconductor company was one that would exclusively manufacture chips that its customers designed. By not designing or selling its own chips, TSMC never competed with its own clients. In exchange, they wouldn’t have to bother running their own fabrication plants, or fabs, the expensive and dizzyingly sophisticated facilities where circuits are carved on silicon wafers.

The innovative business model behind his chip foundry would transform the industry and make TSMC indispensable to the global economy. Now it’s the company that Americans rely on the most but know the least about

I wanted to know more about his decision to start a new company when he could have stopped working altogether. What I discovered was that his age was one of his assets. Only someone with his experience and expertise could have possibly executed his plan for TSMC. 

a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.

If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.