Hints of the long campaign ahead are emerging, but all the operations so far are just drawing the eventual, full-scale battle lines. Cheap vaccinations could save millions of lives lost to cervical cancer; we ask why and where jab rates are falling. And why airlines have more money tied up in Nigeria than in the rest of the world combined.
For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, try a free 30-day digital subscription by going to www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer
Just how safe is the online world? Yale Professor of Law and Philosophy Scott Shapiro delves into cybersecurity in his book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing. The book’s title derives from the exploits of ‘Fancy Bear’, an elite unit of the Russian military intelligence that hacked the US Democratic National Committee in 2016. From a bored graduate student who accidentally crashed the nascent internet, to cyber criminals and bot farms, Shapiro looks at the dark history of the information age.
Dr Alice Hutchings first began researching cybercrime in the late 1990s, while working in industry, and is now Director of the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre. She argues that the romanticised image of the underground hacker as an anti-authoritarian ‘lone wolf’ who possesses technological wizardry is outdated. Hacking has become industrialised with criminals able to buy ‘off-the-shelf’ tools to infect computers.
While hackers constantly look to exploit vulnerabilities within the technology, one of the major weak points are users themselves. Jenny Radcliffe’s job is to expose the flaws and weaknesses in security operations. In People Hacker she explains how she uses a blend of psychology, stagecraft and charm to gain access to computer systems, and reveals how people can boost their security and make her job more difficult.
Located on the island of Java in Indonesia, just 100 kilometers from the capital of Jakarta, lies what might be one of the most important archeology sites in the world.
While it has been known to locals for centuries and to professional archeologists for over 100 years, it has only been seriously studied in the last several decades.
Some of the estimates of the age of this site, if true, would radically transform what we know about early human civilization.
Learn more about Gunung Padang, perhaps the oldest and largest pyramid in the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Modern economics presumes a particular view of scarcity, in which human beings are innately possessed of infinite desires and society must therefore facilitate endless growth and consumption irrespective of nature’s limits. Yet as Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind show, this vision of scarcity is historically novel and was not inevitable even in the age of capitalism. Rather, it reflects the costly triumph of infinite-growth ideologies across centuries of European economic thought—at the expense of traditions that sought to live within nature’s constraints.
The dominant conception of scarcity today holds that, rather than master our desires, humans must master nature to meet those desires. Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind argue that this idea was developed by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson, who laid the groundwork for today’s hegemonic politics of growth. Yet proponents of infinite growth have long faced resistance from agrarian radicals, romantic poets, revolutionary socialists, ecofeminists, and others. These critics—including the likes of Gerrard Winstanley, Dorothy Wordsworth, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt—embraced conceptions of scarcity in which our desires, rather than nature, must be mastered to achieve the social good. In so doing, they dramatically reenvisioned how humans might interact with both nature and the economy.
Following these conflicts into the twenty-first century, Albritton Jonsson and Wennerlind insist that we need new, sustainable models of economic thinking to address the climate crisis. Scarcity is not only a critique of infinite growth, but also a timely invitation to imagine alternative ways of flourishing on Earth.
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is the Associate Professor of British History at the University of Chicago. His current research deals with a set of closely related themes in environmental history, history of science, and political economy.
Carl Wennerlind is the Professor of History and Chair at Barnard College, Columbia University. He specializes in the history of early modern Europe, with a focus on intellectual history and political economy. He is particularly interested in the historical development of ideas about money and credit; ideas on the relationship between economy and nature; and ideas about "improvement" and "modernization."
Thomas Edward Kingston is a Berkeley Fellow in South and Southeast Asian Studies and PhD Student with a designated emphasis in Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley
We've read the now-unsealed indictment detailing dozens of federal criminal counts against former President Trump. We'll break down the key points about the charges and tell you Trump's response as he continues his presidential campaign.
Also, part of a major interstate collapsed. We'll tell you about the impact despite no one getting hurt.
Plus, there's only a month left to claim a large chunk of cash from the IRS, there's a planned blackout on Reddit today, and the sports world is celebrating two historic wins.
The Justice Department on Friday unsealed a 49-page federal indictment against former president Donald Trump. He faces 37 felony counts, including 31 counts of violating the Espionage Act. We’re joined by Kate Shaw, professor of law at the Cardozo School of Law and co-host of Crooked’s Strict Scrutiny podcast, to dig into the charges and what comes next.
And in headlines: a section of the I-95 highway in Philadelphia collapsed after a tanker truck caught fire, “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski died by suicide in his North Carolina prison cell, and four indigenous children were found alive after 40 days of going missing in the Colombian Jungle.
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The Group of Seven leaders in May issued a statement about "de-risking and diversifying" from China, while also acknowledging that they would not be "decoupling or turning inwards."
What does "de-risking" and "diversifying" look like?
"Well, I think the imbalance of trade is extremely concerning, particularly when we're talking about a regime that is now credibly accused of a genocide against the Uyghur people. It has totally broken an international treaty in regard to Hong Kong and dismantled completely the promised freedoms and autonomy for Hong Kong," says Benedict Rogers, co-founder and chief executive of Hong Kong Watch.
Hong Kong Watch is a "registered charity" based in the United Kingdom that "researches and monitors threats to Hong Kong’s basic freedoms, the rule of law and autonomy as promised under the ‘one country, two systems’ principle, which is enshrined in the Basic Law and the Sino-British Joint Declaration," according to its website.
"And it's committing other very serious atrocity crimes against other groups within China, but also it's complicit with atrocities in other regimes, particularly North Korea and Burma," Rogers says. "And of course, it's increasingly threatening Taiwan. And plus, it's a regime that hid and lied to the world over the virus, which became the COVID-19 global pandemic."
Rogers adds:
So, to have such a high dependency on that one country for imports I think is a very dangerous situation to be in. And I hope that the United States and other countries as well will diversify, and that means producing more at home, but also investing in other countries that are less risky.