Eikleaf

Rosewood logs with deep red cut ends lie piled on top of each other in an outdoor stockpile.

The paper forest

A man lifts a long patterned python skin onto a line where many skins hang to dry beside rusty sheds, with pale hides spread on the ground.

What a legal python skin can prove

A white cylindrical tank container labelled helium, refrigerated liquid, mounted on a lorry trailer at a container port.

Who gets helium when supplies run short

Two people stand on a railed walkway in front of an open white dome housing a large telescope, with hills and a dusk sky behind.

Finding the satellite is only the beginning

Three green torpedoes rest on display stands outside an exhibition hall beneath the wing of a grey aircraft, the middle one with a polished metal nose.

Who tells the torpedo where to go

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A broad, rocky mountain slope with patches of lingering snow rises above a green meadow dotted with white wildflowers, under a grey sky.

Who decides after the first strike

New procurement records show Russia rebuilding a mountain post of Perimeter, the Soviet "Dead Hand". The automation worth worrying about sits upstream, in warning and judgement, not at the launch key.

Close-up photo of a browser address bar showing a green padlock icon next to the text https://.

The key was 4: who decides which websites your software trusts

A concrete road bridge on tall pillars standing over a dry, grassy and stony reservoir bed, with trees behind.

How a wet country runs short of water

Orbital view of rainforest cut through by a dense grid of pale cleared strips among dark green forest

How Brazil cut Amazon deforestation to a record low, and what could undo it

Turquoise meltwater ponds spread across white Arctic sea ice, with two researchers standing on the ice

Can the world cool back down after 1.5°C?

The brick front of Pentonville Prison in north London.

Why falling crime doesn’t always empty prisons

A line of flatbed trucks loaded with aid pallets parked at a desert crossing point.

The arithmetic of a ration cut

A large crowd of marchers filling a tree-lined Paris boulevard beside the stone triumphal arch of the Porte Saint-Martin

How France’s school protests met the cost-of-living revolt

Wide view of the long colonnaded granite facade of the US Treasury Building under a blue sky, with trees and a street in front

Why rich governments are paying more to borrow, and who feels it

Aerial view of large flat-roofed data centre buildings spread among roads and commercial sites under a partly cloudy sky.

Who pays for the grid that data centres need?

Large white crude oil pipelines running in parallel across a storage site under a clear sky, with valves and a pump station behind.

What emergency oil stockpiles can and cannot do

Aerial night view of a sprawling oil refinery glowing with orange and white lights under a deep blue sky

Why diesel remains scarce as crude exports recover

Astronaut photograph of a desert coastline with a wide bay and several pale, reef-fringed islands in deep blue water

Ethiopia already reaches the sea. Why does it want a coast?

A grey Royal Saudi Air Force F-15SA fighter jet flying with both afterburners glowing against a dark cloudy sky.

What Saudi Arabia’s military spending cannot guarantee

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The glass-and-green-facade towers of the International Criminal Court building in The Hague under a blue sky, with grassy dunes and a footpath in the foreground.

How far a US sanctions list reaches into a court in The Hague

A soldier kneels on a sandy forest track, burying a mine with a small shovel

Finland destroyed a million landmines. Why does it want them back?

A shop window filled with rows of gold necklaces and bangles

Sudan’s war runs on gold

A long, red, thread-like virus particle with a curled end lying across blue cells.

A vaccine for one Ebola, tested against another

Aerial view of a large, low grey data-centre building surrounded by rows of cooling equipment, with fields and a lake under a sunset sky.

Who carries the debt behind the AI boom?

A missile leaves a warship's deck in a bright burst of flame and smoke, lighting up the ship's superstructure and wake at dusk

Cheap drones, scarce missiles: what it takes to keep an air defence going

Night view from orbit of the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hormuz, with city lights along the coasts and the curve of the Earth on the horizon

How the world absorbed the Hormuz oil shock

The hollow state: why Lebanon became a country that cannot govern itself — and...

The myth of nuclear zero: why the demand at the heart of the Iran...

Why tropical diseases don’t get vaccines: the market failure that has no market solution

The ceasefire economy: what actually causes wars to end — and why so many...

What happens when a country defaults — the economics and politics of sovereign insolvency

The buffer zone doctrine: how temporary military occupations become permanent

What happens when America leaves: the economics and illusions of European security without US...

How WHO declares a global emergency — and why the declaration rarely saves enough...

The reconstruction economy: who gets rich when a country is rebuilt, and what that predicts about recovery

The moral mind: why your ethical intuitions are less reliable than you think — and what to do about...

How algorithms became regulators: when private code functions as law without the accountability of law

The economics of trust: what happens to a society when the thing that makes markets work starts to disappear

What OPEC actually is now: the economics of a cartel that is slowly dismantling itself

When the military becomes law enforcement: the legal architecture behind killing without trial

The war loan behind central banking: how a 1694 bargain still shapes the world’s central banks

The invention of the nation-state: why the world’s default political unit is only 200 years old and already cracking

Why cities don’t work the way their planners intended — and why the best ones were never planned at...

The remittance economy: how migrants send home more money than all foreign aid combined — and what that does...

The paradox of tolerance: what Karl Popper actually said and why everyone is using it wrong

The science of aging: why we age, why some species barely do, and whether the process is inevitable

The economics of pilgrimage: what happens to a city when millions arrive at once

How the lighthouse became economics’ favourite example of a public good — and what economists got wrong

How a single sentence written in 1602 shaped every stock market on Earth

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Why so many published studies are wrong — and what science is doing about...

The biology of risk-taking: why teenagers, traders, and soldiers make the same mistakes

The countries that run permanent surpluses — and the uncomfortable reasons why

The geography of debt: why certain nations borrow in currencies they don’t control

The hidden cost of being an island nation

How insurance companies quietly govern the world’s oceans

Why certain languages are vanishing in two generations while others nearly dead are reviving

How soil types predicted the outcome of the American Civil War

How Switzerland stays neutral — the actual legal and military architecture behind it

Why bridges get more political the longer they are

The invisible market that prices human life

How satellites changed the economics of war without firing a single shot

The science of loneliness: why isolation is killing people and what the data shows

What happens to a country’s debt when it ceases to exist

How AI actually works: what the developers know that the headlines don’t

Why rivers make poor borders — and why we keep using them

The last territories with no permanent population — and who is quietly claiming them

The river that four countries fight over — and why the fight is getting worse

Why certain ports have more geopolitical power than entire countries

Why certain cities became financial capitals — and others, equally positioned, did not

The science of strategic starvation: how food has been weaponized throughout history

The nuclear plants that nobody talks about — and why they matter more than the famous ones

Why some democracies fail in ten years while others last centuries

Did Protestantism make Europe rich? Religion, schools and economic growth

Why the world’s best agricultural land is increasingly owned by foreign governments

What happens to your body when you are chronically stressed: the biology of pressure

Why landlocked countries are systematically poorer — and the exceptions that prove the rule

How a handful of seed banks are the last line against global food collapse

Why so many of the world’s fastest-growing cities are in one region

The mountain range that determines Asia’s weather — and its wars

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The floating borders: how maritime law decides who owns the sea

Why the brain finds uncertainty more painful than bad news

The currency crises that remade continents: a pattern everyone ignores

The science of habit: why willpower doesn’t work and what does

Hawala – the financial system that runs largely outside Western banks

Why coastlines are getting longer the more precisely you measure them

How ancient Rome’s road network still shapes European trade routes

How the Geneva Conventions actually work in practice — versus in theory

The economic history of spices: how flavor changed the world’s power structure

How refrigeration changed the geopolitical map more than any 20th century war

The economic history of the English language: how a dialect became the world’s default

The psychology of money: why smart people make predictable financial mistakes

How the internet changed the economics of attention — and everything else

The economics of organized crime: why prohibition creates the industries it tries to destroy

The Great Stagnation: why productivity growth slowed and whether it can recover

The invisible border that splits the Internet in two

Why educated people believe things that are not true

The countries that chose autocracy democratically

The antibiotic resistance crisis: why the world is quietly running out of treatments

The countries that never needed a revolution — and what protects them

The underground economy that sustains the world’s poorest countries

How colonialism created the conditions for today’s global obesity epidemic

How your ZIP code predicts your life expectancy better than your genes

Why nuclear fusion has been 20 years away for 70 years — and whether that’s finally changing

The hidden arithmetic of immigration: what the research actually shows

How the price of housing became the defining economic issue of the 21st century

The science of infectious disease: why pandemics follow predictable patterns

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Why the global food system is more fragile than anyone admits

The geopolitics of the deep sea: why the ocean floor is the new Arctic

The science of why you can’t trust your own memory

The hidden cost of being poor: why poverty is more expensive than wealth

The last peoples with no contact with the outside world — and who decides whether to leave them alone

How empires die: the economic signals that come before the fall

The mathematics of gerrymandering: why democracy’s greatest flaw is geometric

How megadroughts ended civilizations — and the ones currently underway

The slow death of America’s most heavily pumped aquifer

How much plastic is really recycled?

Why the Arctic is becoming the world’s most contested real estate

The rare earth supply chain: the hidden dependency behind every modern device