Philippa Kaur

CENTRAL PARK bisects upper Manhattan, creating two neighbourhoods and, apparently, two reading cultures. On the Upper West Side, the New York Times is “a standout for us” in terms of driving book purchases, says Victoria Harty, assistant manager of the local branch of Barnes & Noble, America’s biggest bookstore chain. On the east side, meanwhile, customers prefer recommendations from the Washington Post and the Atlantic. More

If you are fed up with the other people on your team, remember this: it could be so much worse. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two American astronauts, returned to Earth on March 18th after a planned days-long mission to the International Space Station turned into a nine-month stay. At the SANAE IV research station in Antarctica, reports have emerged of assault, death threats and intimidation among a team of South African scientists who arrived there in February; they are due to leave the base only in December. Submariners on Britain’s nuclear-armed subs can be at sea for six months or more. More

IT PASSES FOR a courtroom truism that whoever wins or loses, the lawyers come out on top—especially in litigious America. The same goes for political outcomes. Had Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party won the presidential and congressional elections in November, white-shoe firms would have expected less work on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) but more representing corporate clients before regulatory agencies. With Donald Trump and the notionally pro-business Republicans in charge, you might have guessed the opposite. Either way, billable hours beckoned. More

The capitol Hill club, in Washington, dc, is a venerable gathering spot for the city’s Republican elite. It is minutes from the offices of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Its Eisenhower Lounge boasts no fewer than 458 elephant statues; its ornate lobby features portraits of Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes and a younger Donald Trump. A grizzled shoe-shiner says that he has polished the shoes of all of those presidents bar the last. He also notes a recent change in the club’s clientele: Washington’s power-brokers, with “fancy loafers”, are back in force. More

ASML is in an enviable position. The Dutch company is the only manufacturer of equipment that can reliably etch the most advanced semiconductors, as required for everything from artificial-intelligence (AI) accelerators to smartphone chips. Even for less sophisticated processors—the type found in cars and washing machines—its machines account for over 90% of global sales. No rival comes close. More

UNTIL RECENTLY Elon Musk had little need to look over his shoulder. He once described competition for Tesla, his electric-vehicle (EV) company, as “the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day”, rather than the “small trickle” of other EV-makers. SpaceX, his rocket firm, had so undercut and outwitted the bloated aerospace incumbents that it had developed an almost invincible aura. More

MANY OF THE world’s richest deposits of iron ore and copper predate the breakup of the last supercontinent, Pangaea, around 200m years ago. Tectonic shifts subsequently scattered the global economy’s two favourite metals around Earth’s surface. An abundance of the iron ended up in what are now Australia and Brazil. Prodigious seams of pre-Pangaeatic copper settled in places like central Africa. More

Long long ago, colleagues would suggest changes to documents sequentially. They would make comments and add revisions to a file on their own computer, and then send it on to the next person. It was inefficient and opaque. The era of the shared doc has made this process much more user-friendly and transparent. But like all social activities, it has the great drawback of exposing you to other people. More