Articles
Opening the Arctic
The Christophe de Margerie’s journey through the Arctic, in January 2021, was unprecedented. The changing climate has both prolonged the sailing season and shrunk the ice cover in the deepest part of winter.
Empire of Pain
Keefe’s narrative book about the Sacklers and Oxycontin is detailed that only in the chinks do we spot the story behind the story: the rotting structure of American healthcare that wills disasters into being.
The taxpayer pays twice
Covid vaccines are the newest occupants of a strange category: drugs and treatments that taxpayers have paid to develop, and then pay to buy again from companies.
Why did India run short of vaccines?
For years, India made and exported more vaccines than any other country. Yet its vaccination drive against Covid-19, which began in early January 2021, stumbled and faltered.
The world’s most indispensable company
ASML, a Dutch company, sits at the heart of the $439 billion microchip industry. It makes the machines that make microchips. It’s difficult to think of another company anywhere that is simultaneously this important and yet this unknown to the public at large.
Hawking Hawking
In a new book, Charles Seife raises two vital questions. What is the nature of scientific fame? And why did Stephen Hawking, in particular, succeed in achieving it?
The democratic designs of J.B.S. Haldane
A story about an air-raid shelter designed by JBS Haldane holds evergreen truths about the tense relationship between science, government and capital. Those truths have only become apparent again during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Rich vs the Very Very Rich
When in 2015 a Chinese billionaire bought Wentworth, one of Britain’s most prestigious golf clubs, affluent dentists and estate agents were confronted with the unsentimental force of globalised capital.
Waves Across the South
Sivasundaram isn’t the first historian to stretch the geographical range of the age of revolution. He escorts it through the Persian Gulf, down the Bay of Bengal and southern India, across Singapore and Indonesia, via Tonga and New Zealand, and finally to Tasmania