Philippa Kaur

In an arena in London, the crowd counts down from 20. Two athletes crouch inside a maze of bars and ramps, waiting for the buzzer. One will chase, the other will try to escape. This is “World Chase Tag”, a professional league that has turned a childhood pastime into a spectacle, complete with referees, sponsors and TV deals. It has attracted millions of viewers and struck broadcast agreements with ESPN in America and Channel 4 in Britain. More

WHEN TECH folk talk about the lacklustre progress of large language models (LLMs), they often draw an analogy with smartphones. The early days of OpenAI’s ChatGPT were as revolutionary as the launch of Apple’s iPhone in 2007. But advances on the frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) have started to look akin to ho-hum phone upgrades rather than genuine breakthroughs. GPT-5, OpenAI’s latest model, is a case in point. It has generated even less buzz than is expected from the iPhone 17, Apple’s newest release, which is due to be unveiled on September 9th. More

“Make America nuclear again.” That is the aim of Rick Perry, a former governor of Texas who served as energy secretary in Donald Trump’s first term as president. On July 4th, to back up the sloganeering, he launched Fermi America, a firm hoping to build the world’s largest energy and data-centre complex. Outside Amarillo, a cattle town in the Texan panhandle, bulldozers shift red soil for a facility that will first generate electricity using natural gas and solar, before construction of conventional nuclear reactors and several small modular reactors (smrs), which will produce 11 gigawatts (gw) of power. More

Lululemon Athletica, a brand famous for flogging leggings for over $100 apiece, has long been in vogue among investors as well as fashionistas. Over the past decade the “athleisure” firm has reported operating margins of 15-25%, well ahead of rivals, in part owing to the vast share of sales it makes directly to customers. Its sales per square foot of shop space have reached around $1,500 a year, also far outstripping other retailers. Lululemon’s stretchy trousers and chic sweatshirts have married comfort and fashion for a new breed of home workers who wanted to look sharp but relaxed on conference calls. More

The sprawling port of Tanger Med on Morocco’s north coast looks out onto the busy Strait of Gibraltar. Departing ships carry cars and goods to 180 locations across the globe. In the port itself lorries zip about on roads that shimmer in the heat. Tanger Med is set to become even larger, showing off the country’s ambitions as a manufacturing and trade hub. More

Very premature babies need lots of immediate medical attention. Which is why one neo-natal team in an American hospital texted the acronym “ELBW”, shorthand for “extremely low birth weight”, to relevant clinical staff if they wanted them to get to the unit fast. Unfortunately, some recipients of this message took it to mean that a baby had a problem with its elbow, and did not require an urgent response. This excruciating story is one of many told in a new book, “There’s Got To Be A Better Way”, by Nelson Repenning, a business-school professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Donald Kieffer, a one-time operations executive at Harley-Davidson who also lectures at MIT. More

IN 1997 FRANCES CAIRNCROSS, then of The Economist, memorably proclaimed “the death of distance”. Dame Frances (as she has since become) argued in a book with this title that telecommunications technology was making geography irrelevant to business and personal lives. Some of her claims may have been overblown but, in one crucial respect, the thesis was bang on. With the exception of China, around which the Communist Party erected the cyberspatial ramparts of the Great Firewall, distance was, in all markets that mattered, dead online. More

After Chatgpt was launched in 2022, generative artificial intelligence (ai) quickly came to be seen as an existential threat to the search business of Google, owned by Alphabet. It has turned out to be the firm’s saviour—at least in one sense. On September 2nd Amit Mehta, a federal judge who last year declared Google an illegal monopolist, rejected the government’s demand that the search giant be torn apart, and delivered it the gentlest of punishments. The reason was ai. It “changed the course of this case”, he said. More