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The enduring value of an analogue technology T HIS IS THE digital age, and the advice to executives is clear. Managers need to have a digital mindset; the organisations they [...]

It was a year ago this month that China experienced the biggest wave of unrest since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Thousands of people, mostly students and youngsters, gathered [...]

Two thatch huts were still smouldering when Daniel Ellsberg and his group reached the village. It took nothing to destroy them; just a Zippo lighter. Children were searching for toys [...]

India's markets are roaring. They also have serious faults F EW STOCKMARKETS flourished in 2022. Strong performers include ones in commodity-exporting countries like Brazil, Indonesia and the Gulf states, which [...]

A good reed A new history of the written word is no plod through dusty libraries W HY DO READERS love books? For wisdom and wit, the lift of comedy [...]

P oliticians' private finances are a big political issue in central Europe, as Andrej Babis well knows. Mr Babis, a billionaire who is prime minister of the Czech Republic, faces [...]

Shell companies, tax havens and European politicians POLITICIANS' PRIVATE finances are a big political issue in central Europe, as Andrej Babis well knows. Mr Babis, a billionaire who is prime [...]

I f you write a book called "The Honest Truth About Dishonesty", the last thing you want to be linked to is fake data. Yet a paper by Dan Ariely, [...]

Confronted with catastrophe, the national government looks increasingly hapless TWO SHORT months ago Narendra Modi's government was one of the most popular and confident in India's history. Now, judging by [...]

Soaring newsprint costs make life even harder "IT'S LIKE TASERING an elderly person who's already on a pacemaker," says a British newspaper boss of the newsprint market, where prices have [...]

MORE THAN two decades have passed since we published an academic paper linking the legalisation of abortion to the enormous decline in American crime since the 1990s. The underlying theory [...]

My precious Rapidly rising paper prices are changing books T HE SECOND world war was a hard time for British publishers. Paper imports collapsed; paper started being made from straw; [...]

HUANG FEIRUO was once a respected scientist who studied ways to make pigs gain weight more quickly. He ran government-funded research projects at Huazhong Agricultural University in the central city [...]

A mantelpiece doth furnish a room, but of late mine has been looking decidedly bare,For lack of invitations there. Proper ones I mean, stiff and shiny, with gilt edges and [...]

IN 2011 BEN MOL, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash University, in Melbourne, came across a retraction notice for a study on uterine fibroids and infertility published by [...]

Papers and patents are becoming less challenging of orthodoxy "I DEAS ARE like rabbits," John Steinbeck said. "You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon [...]

Zombie papers taint academic journals long after they have been retracted IN 2003 AN investigation into Eric Poehlman, an expert on ageing and obesity, found that he had faked data. [...]

The origins of covid-19 remain unknown. Most scientists think it jumped from wild animals to humans at a meat market in Wuhan. But it is also possible it escaped from [...]

It feels less like a fact than a philosophy problem. 'The Archers', a BBC radio drama centred on the fictional rural village of Ambridge, contains numerous silent characters, spoken about [...]

IN A meeting room at the Royal Society in London, several dozen graduate students were recently tasked with outwitting a large language model (LLM), a type of AI designed to [...]

A new book offers a timely reminder that the post has always been political BEFORE COLORADO was a territory, let alone a state, it had post offices. The first opened [...]

IT IS EASY to be sceptical about the state of behavioural science. The biggest story in the field in 2023 involved two frequent collaborators, Dan Ariely of the Duke Fuqua [...]

Won't be needing these any more FOR MOST people, money still means physical cash printed by a sole, public authority. Yet that is a surprisingly modern incarnation: only a century [...]

An influential academic safeguard is distorted by status bias W HEN, IN 1905, the then-unknown patent clerk Albert Einstein sent his revolutionary ideas on special relativity, the photoelectric effect, Brownian [...]

According to a familiar saying, academic disputes are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. But in a scholarly battle over inequality, the stakes are rather higher. Research [...]

In 2015 Anne Case and Angus Deaton published a landmark paper on death rates in America. The economists found that mortality had been rising among middle-aged whites, thanks to a [...]

Clouds of suspicion Preprints on the coronavirus have been impressively reliable S CIENTIFIC PUBLISHING moves slowly. Depending on the academic field, it can take years for a single paper to [...]

The boundary between crypto and fiat money is more permeable than you think FINANCE HAS its squabbling tribes, much like the rest of society. A contest that attracts a lot [...]

Universities have boomed in recent decades. Higher-education institutions across the world now employ in the order of 15m researchers, up from 4m in 1980. These workers produce five times the [...]

As the Chinese proverb almost says, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single white paper. That, at least, is how a lot of EU policy is made. [...]

Why cash is now more appealing as a portfolio asset EVER HAD the feeling that there is a party somewhere that you're not invited to? It is the same feeling [...]

Software is subbing mistakes into scientific papers MICROSOFT EXCEL'S zeal for autocorrection has long irritated casual users. Lists of numbers preceded by dashes are misread as instructions to subtract. Phone [...]

Research on amber from a war-torn part of Myanmar is surging S CIENTISTS' CURIOSITY may be limitless, but ethical rules restrict their methods. Medical research requires informed consent, and human [...]

Three years ago, Angela Merkel, then Germany's chancellor, said it was important to have a 'relationship of trust' with China. On July 13th the government that succeeded her published a [...]

It may be helping more than it's hurting AMERICA's LOCAL newspapers are struggling to stay afloat. Since 2005 roughly 2,200 of them have folded. Private-equity firms, which often swoop on [...]

If politics in Asia shows anything, it is that family matters. In the Philippines three of the four most recent presidents were the children of past ones. In Cambodia Hun [...]

'Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.' So starts Alfred Marshall's 'Principles of Economics', a 19th-century textbook that helped create the common language economists still [...]

TO ZHE WANG at https://www.economist.com/1843/2019/03/01/deepmind-and-google-the-battle-to-control-artificial-intelligence, an artificial-intelligence (AI) company, corner kicks are like games of chess. Partly because both feature opposing sides poised to react to a single imminent move. [...]

W HEN THE COVID-19 pandemic first shut down campuses in America and Europe, the reactions among academics were mixed. Some were thrilled to retreat to home offices with uninterrupted time [...]

Crystals can do all sorts of things, some more useful than others. They can separate the gullible from their money in New Age healing shops. But they can also serve [...]

Luck plays a big and often unacknowledged part in career success, starting in the womb. Warren Buffett has talked of winning the "ovarian lottery" by being born in America when [...]

From small beginnings A market in Wuhan remains the likeliest source of covid-19 T WO NEW papers provide more robust answers than heretofore available to three of the outstanding questions [...]

"Magnets, how do they work?" asked Insane Clown Posse, a hip-hop duo, in their 2009 song "Miracles". A flurry of recent papers suggests physicists did not quite have the full [...]

CAFFEINE is one of the world's most popular drugs, and coffee one of its best-loved delivery mechanisms. It is grown in more than 70 countries; more than 2bn cups are [...]

When economists talk about bottlenecks, they typically refer to points in a supply chain that slow down production. The global economy is at present providing a rather literal example of [...]

IT HAS BEEN more than three years since the police in Hong Kong https://www.economist.com/china/2020/08/13/jimmy-lais-arrest-is-a-blow-to-press-freedom-in-hong-kong Jimmy Lai and stuck him in Stanley Prison. But as Mr Lai stood in court on [...]

In Joseph O'Neill's novel "Netherland", a jaded equities analyst, covering oil and gas firms, confesses to the tricks he uses to add credibility to his stock picks. "Voice a first-hand [...]

Before its attack on October 7th, Hamas maintained https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2023/10/09/hamass-attack-was-an-israeli-intelligence-failure-on-multiple-fronts . The assault blindsided Israel's spies, and seems to have surprised even Hamas's political leaders. But did someone know enough to [...]

What use is a vaccine when you're dead? Plenty RAYMOND SHIEH'S "hell vaccine kit" includes three vials in green, blue and red, and a large syringe, all made from joss [...]

IT IS OFTEN said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Researchers hope that they might also be a window to the brain. Scientists wonder if eye scans [...]