The Fearsome Eurocrat

Vestager’s entire tenure has been laced with an instinctive mistrust of big corporations. She’s driven investigations of Amazon.com, Fiat, Gazprom, Google, McDonald’s, and Starbucks—and she still has two and a half years remaining in her term.”What really matters is: If you want to do business in Europe, you play by the European rule book.”

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The Thirst of Bangalore

That term, water mafia, conjures an image straight out of Mad Max—gangs of small-time Immortan Joes running squadrons of belching tankers, turning a city’s water on and off at will. When I first started to hear about Bangalore’s crisis, that lurid image was hard to square with the cosmopolitan city I knew from a lifetime […]

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The Island That Grows

The Jurong Rock Caverns in Singapore are just one answer to a pair of intriguing questions: What does a tremendously rich and ambitious country do when it is running out of land? And what can the rest of the world learn from these experiments?

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William Gedney in India

In one of his notebooks, Gedney scribbled a couple of lines from the Bhagavad Gita, spoken by Krishna to his friend Arjuna: “Many lives you and I have lived, Arjuna; I remember them all, but you do not.” This could have been Gedney’s credo. He moved among transitory lives, remembering them for us.

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The remains of the Neigh

When the National Army Museum in London reopens this spring, its exhibits will include the skeleton of Marengo, Napoleon’s white charger. This was, reportedly, the horse that won its name after bearing Napoleon to victory in northern Italy, then carried him through Austerlitz and Jena, back in slumped defeat from Russia, and finally at Waterloo.

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