The Eurovision contest began in 1956, but Russia and Ukraine began to compete after the end of the Cold War. Over the past decade and a half, their fraught relationship has seeped into Eurovision.
Quartz
Disney’s magic fiefdom
In a part of Floriday, Disney can draft construction codes, manage a fire department, run utilities, and even erect a nuclear plant. How did Disney get its own district?
The agave apocalypse
To meet the skyrocketing demand for mezcal, producers in Oaxaca and elsewhere are over-harvesting wild agaves. Entire ecosystems could collapse. But Mexico has been here before, with tequila.
Tech support at the Paralympics
Ottobock, a 102-year-old German manufacturer of prosthetics, has also set up a workshop at every Paralympics since 1988 save one, offering to repair or replace any athlete’s prosthetic if it acts up or breaks down.
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.
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.