AI holds tantalising promise for the emerging world
A warming planet threatens the world’s favourite drug
The government has yet another plan for a nuclear renaissance
Pleasure cruises, golf and tracing the family tree are not that fulfilling
For times when wind and solar fall short, some utilities are turning to an old technology called pumped storage hydropower
Before he disappeared, Ettore Majorana made a strange prediction. Researchers are still hunting for the truth about him—and his namesake particles
The Guardian Weekly (January 25, 2024) – The new issue features ‘True Colours’ – What the AFD really wants for Germany; The fading hopes for Middle East Peace; Trump’s victory and DeSantis’s doomed campaign…
Events in the Middle East continue to unfold at a bewildering pace, with pockets of conflict opening up across the region. Diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour rounds up a week of flashpoints and assesses increasingly slim hopes for controlling the situation. And Oliver Holmes provides a revealing profile of Yemen, one of the most unchanging and least visited countries in the Middle East.
The Weekly went to press before news of Donald Trump’s victory in the New Hampshire Republican primary on Tuesday night, but you can catch up with all the latest Guardian coverage and reaction here. In the magazine, David Smith delivers a postmortem on Ron DeSantis’s doomed campaign, while Jonathan Freedland argues that Trump’s march to the White House can still be stopped.
Our long-read features take somewhat divergent paths this week. First, Charlotte Edwardes meets Gary Lineker, the former England footballer turned TV presenter whose penchant for regularly airing his liberal worldviews has made him public enemy No 1 for Britain’s anti-woke brigade.
Then, Chananya Groner unearths a remarkable story of factionalism and messianic fervour within New York’s Hasidic Jewish community, stretching back 30 years, which led to secret tunnels recently being discovered beneath a Brooklyn synagogue.
And in Culture, Charlotte Higgins meets the classical musicians Dalia Stasevska and Joshua Bell, who are resurrecting a long-forgotten Ukrainian concerto as a gesture of defiance to Russia.
Finally, we’re on the lookout for your best photographs of the world around us. For a chance for your picture to feature in the magazine, send us your best shot, telling us where you were in the world when you took it and why the scene resonated with you at that particular time.
Light pulses with specific quantum properties could be harnessed to send digital ‘contracts’ between buyer and seller.
Mice that work out regularly have higher levels of a molecule that promotes muscle regeneration than sedentary mice do.
Next-generation plants that respond to demand could be key to making a low-carbon energy source more economically appealing.
Times Literary Supplement (January 24, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Rich Are Always With Us’ – Ferdinand Mount on taming the plutocrats; Empire’s balance sheet; Who is Charles III?; Silvia Townsend Warner’s revival and ChatGPT goes to college…
How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy
By Evan Osnos
As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”
There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
By Rachel Syme
When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.
Links between the complement and coagulation systems could lead to Long Covid therapies
To zoom in farther, Event Horizon Telescope wants to add more radio dishes to its network—and go to space
The Guardian Weekly (January 18, 2024) – The new issue features ‘State Of Emergency’ – How drug cartels upended Ecuador; Why Houthi anger could spread war; Are aliens already among us?…
Not long ago, Ecuador was chiefly known for its volcanoes, wildlife and eco-tourism. It’s an image that may now need some rehabilitation after chaos and bloodshed sparked by the prison escape last week of Adolfo Macías, the country’s most notorious gang leader and drug lord.
With cartels from Peru and Colombia routinely funnelling narcotics through Ecuador’s ports en route to Europe, Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips reports on a rising problem that threatens to tear apart the once-peaceful Andean state.
In the Middle East, Yemen’s Houthi rebels could stymie the increasingly slim chances of preventing a regional war. With the US and UK bombing Houthi bases in response to attacks on commercial shipping, diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour recounts the Houthis’ rise and why military strikes against them may not lead to the desired outcome.
A dormant immune system before receiving the BCG vaccine is tied to a greater innate immune response afterwards.
Detectors at the Large Hadron Collider spot the famed particle decaying into a photon and a ‘Z boson’.
Times Literary Supplement (January 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Power Failure’ – The retreat from net zero; Canon wars; The end of literary criticism; Empires imprint on the Middle East; Harvard and plagarism….
