Солнечный удар
Sunstroke
Cirque du Soleil may be struggling, but the cluster around it is thriving
IN THE deconsecrated church of Saint-Esprit, jugglers toss fluorescent orange clubs …Read More
Почему Сочи «лучшее» место для Зимних Олимпийских Игр
Why Sochi is, ironically, the perfect place for the winter Olympics
It is, ironically, the perfect venue for an event riddled with corruption
SOCHI, a subtropical resort on the Black Sea coast, seems an odd place …Read More
Мрачный прогноз
Grim prognosis
Obamacare will likely depress work after all
THE chasm between the salaries of chief executives and …Read More
Сражаясь с ветряными мельницами
Tilting at windmills
Why hare-brained schemes to bring down inequality do more harm than good
THE chasm between the salaries of chief executives and …Read More
Триумф Путина
The triumph of Vladimir Putin
Successes abroad and the winter Olympics make Russia look strong; but where it matters, it is weak
IN 2008, soon after winning the competition to stage the 2014 winter Olympics …Read More
Сочи или провал
Sochi or bust
The conspicuous dazzle of the games masks a country, and a president, in deepening trouble
FEBRUARY 7th sees the opening of the winter Olympics in …Read More
Китай теряет свой шарм
China loses its allure
Life is getting tougher for foreign companies. Those that want to stay will have to adjust
ACCORDING to the late Roberto Goizueta, a former boss …Read More
Барахтанье в болоте
Renzi’s struggle in the swamp
The prime minister presses on with his reform agenda after winning a crucial vote
NO RECENT Italian prime minister has swept into office with as much …Read More
Индекс Биг-Мака
The Big Mac index
Global exchange rates, to go
THE Big Mac index was invented by The Economist in…Read More
Кембрийский переломный момент
A Cambrian moment
Cheap and ubiquitous building blocks for digital products and services have caused an explosion in startups. Ludwig Siegele weighs its significance
About 540M Years ago something amazing happened on planet Earth…Read More
Безмолвное большинство
The inaudible majority
Maybe one reason the poor aren’t protesting louder is that lawmakers aren’t listening
INEQUALITY is on the rise, but the poor have not been rising up against it…Read More
Больше никакой работы по дому
You’ll never work at home
Yahoo buys a teenager’s start-up
BIG companies swallow little ones every day. So …Read More
Всё ещё умнее
Cleverer still
Geniuses are getting brighter. And at genius levels of IQ, girls are not as far behind boys as they used to be
SCIENCE has few more controversial topics than human intelligence… Read More
Исследование Марса
Mars exploration
Curiosity and Curioser
ATTENDEES at the American Geophysical Union’s autumn meeting in San Francisco were expecting to hear some big news about Mars. Sure enough, they got some — just not the sort they had anticipated. Until expectations were firmly damped down last week, they had thought they would hear about some sort of exciting discovery from Curiosity, the rover NASA landed on Mars this summer. In the event, the big — and, to some, not entirely welcome — announcement was that NASA plans to send Mars a second version of Curiosity to Mars in 2020, at a cost of about $1.5 billion.
В чём настоящее богатство народов?
The real wealth of Nations
A new report comes up with a better way to size up wealth
“WEALTH is not without its advantages,” John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote, “and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.” Despite the obvious advantages of wealth, nations do a poor job of keeping count of their own. They may boast about their abundant natural resources, their skilled workforce and their world-class infrastructure. But there is no widely recognised, monetary measure that sums up this stock of natural, human and physical assets.
Угроза Пандемии
The Pandemic threat
It’s deadly serious; so even if the current threat fades, the world needs to be better armed
IT IS said that no battle-plan survives contact with the enemy. This was certainly true of the plan drawn up over the past few years to combat an influenza pandemic. The generals of global health assumed that the enemy would be avian flu, probably passed from hens to humans, and that it would strike first in southern China or South-East Asia. In fact, the flu started in an unknown pig, and the attack came in Mexico, not Asia...