Tuesday, 29 September 2026
Picked from the best of the world's press
Ceiling Painted Dome Cupola Angels Fighting Demons in the Vatican Museums. Today is Michaelmas in much of Western Christianity.
For a decade the oil industry invested on the assumption that demand would fall, so when the Strait of Hormuz was blocked in 2026 there was no spare capacity to absorb the shock and prices could only climb.
Pouring money into smaller classes buys a wave of newly certified teachers rather than the good ones who can lift struggling students.
Several US states have overhauled property taxes in recent years, shifting the burden off owner-occupied homes onto commercial property and state coffers, which pushes home prices even higher.
Flock promises never to add facial recognition to its license plate cameras, but a company called VIDIZMO is pitching police on piping Flock's data into its own system for face matching, behavior prediction and racial and gender sorting.
Lindsay Owens's new book Gouged lays out how companies use surveillance data and algorithms to set a different price for every customer and every worker — and the reviewer's complaint is that it diagnoses the disease far better than it treats it.
Flu has arrived more than a month early in the northern hemisphere and is starting in the American West rather than the usual Southeast, while Covid wastewater has peaked and mosquito season is winding down.
A gene that kills the mosquitoes spreading dengue was engineered two decades ago, but it has spent fifteen years bouncing between three US agencies and still isn't approved.
Two economists dug into US households worth over $5 million and found they hold more than 13 times the wealth of the Forbes 400 — by owning thousands of independent local businesses all over the country.
After passive funds overtook active ones in the US in 2020, active funds' gross alpha turned from positive to negative around 2010, and a researcher argues that redemption flows pushing against active bets explain part of it.
The Tokugawa shogunate's isolation was not timid conservatism but a deliberate system built after centuries of civil war to kill the conditions for another one.
A frog in Brazil's rainforest survives the fungus killing amphibians worldwide not through its own immune system, but through the specific bacteria living on its skin.
In the first seven months of 2026 the US ran its largest goods deficit with Vietnam at $138.9bn, ahead of Mexico and Taiwan, while the deficit with China fell from a 2018 peak of $419.2bn to roughly $156bn.
The Ao Naga of northeast India kept no written records before the nineteenth century, and today nearly all of them are Christian, leaving their old worldview only in the words of missionaries and colonial officers.
