Philippa Kaur

In business there is no surer sign of distress than when a firm delays its financial results. That also appears to be true of business schools. Around Christmas—and in many cases behind their usual schedules—America’s top business schools published their equivalent of annual reports, which include data on the new jobs of graduates from their Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes, typically two-year courses for students with professional experience. We have crunched the numbers. At the top 15 business schools, the share of students in 2024 who sought and accepted a job offer within three months of graduating, a standard measure of career outcomes, fell by six percentage points, to 84%. Compared with the average over the past five years, that share declined by eight points. More

Animals have evolved many different ways to signal submissiveness to their more powerful counterparts. Lower-ranking chimpanzees might greet a dominant chimp by producing a breathy sound known as a pant-grunt. Hanuman langurs present their hindquarters. Spotted hyenas of both sexes (yes, both) have a habit of displaying erections to acknowledge that they sit lower down the pecking order. Chickens invented the very concept of pecking orders. More

To make steel pliant enough to be shaped into parts for cars and planes, it must first be heated until it glows cherry red. That, incidentally, may have been the colour of David Burritt’s face when Joe Biden blocked the purchase of us Steel by Nippon Steel, a Japanese firm, on January 3rd. Mr Burritt, the American steelmaker’s boss, issued an incandescent statement calling the president’s decision “shameful and corrupt” and accusing him of helping China (“Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing are dancing in the streets”). More

THE MASTERS of the universe will have hoped for some peace and quiet over Christmas. The holiday period was the last time for Wall Street financiers to catch a breath before Donald Trump is handed the keys to the White House on January 20th. Even if he does not make Canada the 51st state or annex Greenland, his second term promises lots of excitement. Currency traders are watching the Canadian dollar, Danish krone and other monies—though this has less to do with Mr Trump’s territorial ambitions and more with the tariffs he has vowed to slap on allies and foes alike. Stockpickers are waiting to see which firms find favour with the mercurial president and which fall foul. More

Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, is best known for making iPhones in China. Yet in October it announced plans to build a megafactory in Mexico that will churn out servers made with artificial-intelligence (AI) chips from Nvidia, a semiconductor giant. To meet the roaring demand for AI, the plant’s capacity will be, as Young Liu, Foxconn’s chairman put it, “very, very enormous”. More

It is unusual for Amazon, the world’s biggest e-emporium, to be playing catch-up in its own industry. Yet that is exactly what it is doing in India, where last month it began piloting a quick-commerce service in the city of Bangalore, delivering a wide variety of goods in minutes. It is years behind local stars such as Swiggy, Zepto and Zomato, which already offer such a service. More

“It feels like we’re in a new era now,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, as he announced sweeping changes to the firm’s social-media platforms in a video on January 7th. Two weeks ahead of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, Mr Zuckerberg outlined an overhaul of Meta’s content-moderation policy that meets many of the demands of American conservatives. The initiative says much about both the future of social media and the relationship between American business and government. More

Dry January is under way. After the excesses of the festive period, nearly one-third of Americans are expected to give up, or at least cut down on, alcohol this month. Many will save money. Some will lose weight. And a growing number will still continue to drink their favourite tipple—or at least something close to it. More