How the British Broke Their Own Economy With the best intentions, the United Kingdom engineered a housing and energy shortage. March 3, 2025, The Atlantic 🌟完整外刊原文，请扫码加V并备注“外刊”进学习群免费获取 What’s the matter with the United Kingdom? Great Britain is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in an era of energy super-production and launched an epoch of productivity advancements that made many life essentials, such as clothes and food, more affordable. Today, the country suffers from the converse of these achievements: a profound energy shortage and a deep affordability crisis. In February, the Bank of England reported an ongoing productivity slump so mysterious that its own economists “cannot account fully” for it. Real wages have barely grown for 16 years. British politics seems stuck in a cycle of disappointment followed by dramatic promises of growth, followed by yet more disappointment. A new report, titled “Foundations,” captures the country’s economic malaise in detail. The U.K. desperately needs more houses, more energy, and more transportation infrastructure. “No system can be fixed by people who do not know why it is broken,” write the report’s authors, Sam Bowman, Samuel Hughes, and Ben Southwood. They argue that the source of the country’s woes as well as “the most important economic fact about modern Britain [is] that it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere.” The nation is gripped by laws and customs that make essentials unacceptably scarce and drive up the cost of construction across the board. Housing is an especially alarming case in point. The homeownership rate for the typical British worker aged 25 to 34 declined by more than half from the 1990s to the 2010s. In that same time, average housing prices more than doubled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The housing shortage traces back to the postwar period, when a frenzy of nationalization swept the country. The U.K. created the National Health Service, brought hundreds of coal mines under state control, and centralized many of the country’s railways and trucking and electricity providers. In 1947, the U.K. passed the Town and Country Planning Act, which forms the basis of modern housing policy. The TCPA effectively prohibited new development without special permission from the state; “green belts” were established to restrict sprawl into the countryside. Rates of private-home building never returned to their typical prewar levels. With some spikes and troughs, new homes built as a share of the total housing stock have generally declined over the past 60 years. The TCPA was considered reasonable and even wise at the time. Postwar Britain had been swept up by the theory that nationalization created economies of scale that gave citizens better outcomes than pure capitalism. “There was an idea that if we could rationalize the planning system … then we could build things in the right way—considered, and planned, and environmentally friendly,” Bowman told me. But the costs of nationalization became clear within a few decades. With more choke points for permitting, construction languished from the 1950s through the ’70s. Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives rolled back nationalization in several areas, such as electricity and gas production. But their efforts to loosen housing policy from the grip of government control was a tremendous failure, especially once it was revealed that Thatcher’s head of housing policy himself opposed new housing developments near his home.

How Zelensky’s Oval Office Meeting Turned into a Showdown With Trump The question hovering over Washington was whether the confrontation was a spontaneous outburst or a planned verbal smack down. March 1, 2025, The New York Times 🌟完整外刊原文，请扫码加V并备注“外刊”进学习群免费获取 Just hours before President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine sat down with President Trump in the Oval Office on Friday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina dispensed some advice to the Ukrainian leader. “Don’t take the bait,” he said, encouraging him not to get into a spat with Mr. Trump. “I said, don’t get into arguments about security agreements,” Mr. Graham recalled on Friday evening in a brief telephone interview with The New York Times, as he sat aboard Air Force One preparing to fly to Florida with the president. Mr. Zelensky did not silence his concerns during his meeting with Mr. Trump, who has come to expect a level of capitulation from almost everyone who has met with him since Election Day, from foreign leaders to billionaire business executives. The result was an extraordinary dressing down by a U.S. president of a foreign ally in the middle of the Oval Office, while the media’s cameras recorded it all. The question hovering over Washington on Friday evening was whether the confrontation was a spontaneous outburst or a planned verbal smack down by Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, neither of whom respects Mr. Zelensky. But three people with knowledge of what took place beforehand said neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Vance had been looking to blow up a deal for Ukraine’s mineral rights, which Mr. Zelensky had been expected to sign in Washington. Instead, they said, Mr. Zelensky seemingly triggered the two American leaders by not sufficiently thanking the United States for trying to end the war (which Mr. Trump wanted to hear) and by pressing for commitments to protect Ukraine from Russian aggression going forward (which Mr. Trump did not want to hear). In the end, Mr. Zelensky left the White House without a signed deal over mineral rights, which Mr. Trump had sought for weeks, and, for now, an even more contentious relationship with his country’s most important ally. The day was not supposed to unfold this way.

The End of the Postwar World Trump and Vance are sending a dark message to America’s allies. February 20, 2025, The Atlantic 🌟完整外刊原文，请扫码加V并备注“外刊”进学习群免费获取 For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else. The Trump administration is now bringing the post–World War II era to an end. No one should be surprised: This was predictable, and indeed was predicted. Donald Trump has been a vocal opponent of what he considers to be the high cost of U.S. alliances, since 1987, when he bought full-page ads in three newspapers, claiming that “for decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” In 2000, he wrote that “pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” In his first term as president, Trump’s Cabinet members and advisers repeatedly restrained him from insulting allies or severing military and diplomatic links. Now he has surrounded himself with people who are prepared to enact and even encourage the radical changes he always wanted, cheered on by thousands of anonymous accounts on X. Of course America’s relations with allies are complex and multilayered, and in some form they will endure. But American allies, especially in Europe, need to face up to this new reality and make some dramatic changes. This shift began with what felt at first like ad hoc, perhaps unserious attacks on the sovereignty of Denmark, Canada, and Panama. Events over the past week or so have provided further clarification. At a major multinational security conference in Munich last weekend, I sat in a room full of defense ministers, four-star generals and security analysts—people who procure ammunition for Ukrainian missile defense, or who worry about Russian ships cutting fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea. All of them were expecting Vice President J. D. Vance to address these kinds of concerns. Instead, Vance told a series of misleading stories designed to demonstrate that European democracies aren’t democratic. Vance, a prominent member of the political movement that launched the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, had to know what he was doing: flipping the narrative, turning arguments upside down in the manner of a Russian propagandist. But the content of his speech, which cherry-picked stories designed to portray the U.K., Germany, Romania, and other democracies as enemies of free expression, was less important than the fact that he gave a speech that wasn’t about the very real Russian threat to the continent at all: He was telling the Europeans present that he wasn’t interested in discussing their security. They got the message.

Germany's Friedrich Merz: The risk-taker who flirted with far right February 24, 2025, BBC 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Friedrich Merz - leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - is predicted to become Germany's next Chancellor. His party is projected to win around 28% of the vote. The question now is who he might form a coalition with. Described by his supporters as an antidote to Europe's crisis of confidence, Merz, 69, is a familiar face to his party's old guard. Politically, he has never come across as exhilarating. And yet he promises to provide Germany with stronger leadership and tackle many of his country's problems within four years. His explosive bid last month to tighten migration rules with the support of far-right votes in parliament revealed a man willing to gamble by breaking a major taboo. It also marked yet another clear break from the CDU's more centrist stance under his former party rival Angela Merkel. Although Merz ultimately failed to change the law, he had launched a lightning bolt into an election campaign triggered by the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government late last year. Famously sidelined by Merkel before she became chancellor, he quit parliament entirely to pursue a lucrative series of corporate jobs and was written off as yesterday's man.

Why America Has So Few Doctors As a matter of basic economics, fewer doctors means less care and more expensive services. February 14th, 2022, The Atlantic 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 By the time Elizabeth Erickson was a freshman at Davidson College in 2002, she knew she wanted to become a doctor. Because she understood that the earliest health interventions are among the most important, she set herself on a pediatrics track. After four years of premed classes, she went straight to medical school at Wake Forest University, which took another four years. Then came three years of residency at Duke University, plus one final year as chief resident. In 2014, she joined the faculty of Duke’s School of Medicine. Her dream was realized at the steep price of 12 consecutive years of learning and training, plus about $400,000 of debt. Erickson’s story would be exceptional in just about any other country. But it’s hardly unusual in the United States, which has the longest, most expensive medical-education system in the developed world, and among the lowest number of physicians per capita. “There is a huge scarcity of primary-care doctors, like pediatricians, and many of us are operating in a scarcity framework without enough resources,” Erickson told me. In January, I wrote that America needs an abundance agenda—a plan to attack the problems of scarcity in our housing, infrastructure, labor force, and, yes, health-care system. As the pandemic has made clear, we need medical abundance in the 21st century. That means more high-quality therapies, more clinics, better insurance, and better access to medicine. But it also means more doctors. As I dug deeper into the roots of America’s health-care scarcity, I realized that I had to start by answering a simple question: Why does America make it so hard for people like Elizabeth Erickson to practice medicine? Imagine you were planning a conspiracy to limit the number of doctors in America. Certainly, you’d make sure to have a costly, lengthy credentialing system. You would also tell politicians that America has too many doctors already. That way, you could purposefully constrain the number of medical-school students. You might freeze or slash funding for residencies and medical scholarships. You’d fight proposals to allow nurses to do the work of physicians. And because none of this would stop foreign-trained doctors from slipping into the country and committing the crime of helping sick people get better, you’d throw in some rules that made it onerous for immigrant doctors, especially from neighboring countries Mexico and Canada, to do their job. Okay, I think you’ve caught on by this point. America has already done all of this. Starting in the late 20th century, medical groups asserted that America had an oversupply of physicians. In response, medical schools restricted class sizes. From 1980 to 2005, the U.S. added 60 million people, but the number of medical-school matriculants basically flatlined. Seventeen years later, we are still digging out from under that moratorium.

The Well-Off People Who Can’t Spend Money Tightwads drag around a phantom limb of poverty, no matter what their bank account says. August 6th, 2024, The Atlantic 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 David Fox has plenty of savings. He earns hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Recently, he allocated $60,000 to buying a new car—but when he arrived at the dealership, he could bring himself to spend only $30,000 on a used model. Despite making a conservative choice, he had panic attacks for a week afterward. “I have this feeling that the bottom is gonna fall out,” Fox told me. “What if there’s not enough? What if, what if, what if … So instead of going out and enjoying my success, I kind of just batten down the hatches and prepare for the worst.” Fox falls into a category of people that the University of Michigan marketing professor Scott Rick has spent years studying: “tightwads,” or people who have trouble spending their money. In various studies that he’s conducted, Rick has found that tightwads do not scrimp because they lack money. They are not any poorer than spendthrifts (people who overspend); tightwads actually have better credit scores and more money in savings. (Perhaps because they never spend it.) Instead, they’re afraid to spend money that they do have. Tightwads’ issues reveal how our financial choices can be more psychological than economic. If you feel anxiety about your finances, it might not be relieved by making more money. Irrational stinginess is a strange problem to have, akin to complaining about being too beautiful. Some tightwads are hesitant to talk about their issues, because when they do, people react by saying, “Poor little rich boy,” as Fox put it. In a society with so much income inequality, it’s obviously better to be well-off and anxious than to be poor and desperate. But the tightwads I spoke with have very real agita—panic, guilt, stress—over their financial situation, even though there’s no real reason for them to worry. They drag around a phantom limb of poverty, burdened with the sneaking sense that something isn’t right, no matter what their bank account says. “Our spending, in some cases, is tied with our identities,” Abigail Sussman, a marketing professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “And so, if I think of myself as somebody who doesn’t splurge on things, spending on something like a new couch that maybe would make my life more comfortable … could interfere with my perception of my own identity.”

How AI will divide the best from the rest Tech bosses say the tech will be a great equaliser. Instead, it looks likely to widen social divides Feb 13, 2025, The Economist 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 At a summit in Paris on February 10th and 11th, tech bosses vied to issue the most grandiose claim about artificial intelligence. “AI will be the most profound shift of our lifetimes,” is how Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s boss, put it. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, said that it would lead to the “largest change to the global labour market in human history”. In a blog post, Sam Altman of OpenAI wrote that “In a decade perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today.” Mr Altman’s prediction taps into an established school of thought. As large language models first gained popularity in the early 2020s, economists and bosses were hopeful that they, and other AI tools, would level the playing field, with lower-skilled workers benefiting most. Software capable of handling tasks such as protein-folding and poetry-writing would surely democratise opportunity. Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, a chip designer, envisioned a future in which workers “are all going to be CEOs of AI agents”. More recent findings have cast doubt on this vision, however. They instead suggest a future in which high-flyers fly still higher—and the rest are left behind. In complex tasks such as research and management, new evidence indicates that high performers are best positioned to work with AI (see table). Evaluating the output of models requires expertise and good judgment. Rather than narrowing disparities, AI is likely to widen workforce divides, much like past technological revolutions. The case for AI as an equaliser was supported by research showing that the tech enhances output most for less experienced workers. A study in 2023 by Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University and Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that generative-AI tools boosted productivity by 34% for novice customer-support workers, helping them resolve queries faster and more effectively. Experienced workers, by contrast, saw little benefit, as the AI reinforced approaches they were already using. This suggested the tech could narrow gaps by transferring best practices from talented to less talented employees. A similar trend was observed in other knowledge-intensive tasks. Research by Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang, both of MIT, found that weaker writers experienced the greatest improvements in the quality of their work when using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to draft materials such as press releases and reports. Many saw better quality simply by using the AI’s unedited output, underscoring its ability to elevate baseline performance. Similarly, Jonathan Choi of the University of Southern California and co-authors found a general-purpose AI tool improved the quality of legal work, such as drafting contracts, most notably for the least talented law students. The problem is that this is swamped by another effect. A job can be considered as a bundle of tasks, which tech may either commoditise or assist with. For air-traffic controllers, tech is an augmentation: it processes flight data while leaving decisions to humans, keeping wages high. By contrast, self-check-out systems simplify cashiers’ roles, automating tasks such as calculating change. This lowers the skill requirement, causing wages to stagnate. Thus despite the early optimism, customer-service agents and other low-skilled workers may face a future akin to cashiers. Their repetitive tasks are susceptible to automation. Amit Zavery of ServiceNow, a business-software company, estimates that more than 85% of customer-service cases for some clients no longer require human involvement. As AI advances, this figure will probably rise, leaving fewer agents to handle only the most complex cases. Although AI may at first boost productivity, its long-term impact will be to commoditise skills and automate tasks.

Americans Are Trapped in an Algorithmic Cage The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace. February 7th, 2025, The Atlantic 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Shortly before President George W. Bush was reelected, in 2004, an anonymous Bush-administration source told The New York Times, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Those in what the adviser called “the reality-based community” would be left “studying that reality—judiciously, as you will.” Then “we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.” The newly inaugurated Trump administration bears many of the worst hallmarks of the Bush era. Like the Bush administration, the Trump administration seeks to purge the federal government of dedicated, competent civil servants in favor of sycophantic loyalists. Like the Bush administration, the Trump administration has little regard for constitutional or legal barriers to its authority. And like Bush supporters once did, the Trump administration’s underlings speak of their leader in cult-like tones of reverence, with the single-minded dogmatism of zealots on what they believe to be a holy mission. No longer confined to the Emerald City of the Baghdad Green Zone, imperial life has come back to haunt the capital, the lawlessness of the post-9/11 Bush era returned in an even more grotesque, exaggerated fashion as the governing philosophy of that administration’s Republican successors. This time, however, making reality falls within the confines of the imperator’s capabilities. The presence of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew—dubbed the “broligarchs” by Scott Roxborough—at Trump’s inauguration was an ominous sign. Along with Elon Musk, the far-right billionaire and owner of X, who with Trump’s blessing appears to have illegally asserted control over parts of the federal government, these tycoons represent a tech elite that collectively controls the mediums through which Americans collect and assess information, and therefore determine much of what Americans see and hear on a daily basis. Before Trump was reelected, social-media companies had a profit motive to keep people attached to their screens as long as possible, which was bad enough. Now Trump has made clear with his threats that he expects them to use their power to prop up his administration. They have all, at least symbolically, demonstrated their loyalty. Bezos even interfered with the editorial independence of The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, to prevent it from endorsing Trump’s opponent, and his underlings have proceeded to dismantle the institution piece by piece. Although many Trump allies spent much of his first term and all of the Biden administration complaining about “woke capital,” or corporate capture by liberal cultural forces, it was obvious from the beginning that they were never interested in curtailing corporate power, only in controlling it for their own purposes. The purpose now is to impose their version of reality on the public, even as they pursue an agenda that is nothing short of ruinous.

Nezha 2: ancient Chinese stories prove a winning formula for animated film success Eight days after its release, Nezha 2 became China’s highest-grossing movie ever with its take on mythical figures February 9th, 2025, SCMP 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 China’s box office records were smashed this week as animated blockbuster Nezha 2 became the highest-grossing film in the country’s history following its January 29 release. Millions around the country flocked to cinemas over the Lunar New Year holiday to watch the latest instalment in the Nezha phenomenon, which is adapted from the epic tale of Nezha, a youthful deity who defied the dragons in Chinese mythology. That a story taken from Chinese history and folklore should be so popular with audiences is no surprise. Over recent years, amid China’s rapid economic growth and technological rivalry with the West, there has been an increase in national pride and a revival of traditional culture. This has seen old and new collide, with these ancient tales being retold using the latest in digital technology. It is this reignited passion for traditional Chinese culture that has also seen success for similar entertainment, including Tang dynasty-inspired blockbuster 30,000 Miles from Changan, and classic novel-based action game Black Myth: Wukong. Box office takings for Nezha 2 are touted to be the closest to international industry standards ever achieved. On Thursday, the film officially became China’s highest-grossing movie, reaching 5.8 billion yuan (US$796 million) in revenue, overtaking the previous record set in 2021 by The Battle at Lake Changjin, a patriotic account of the Chinese stand-off against the United States during the Korean war. It marks a new milestone for locally produced animation, which has been overtaking the shares of Disney and Japanese motion movies in the Chinese market in recent years. Nezha 2, or Nezha: Demon Child Conquers the Sea, explores how Nezha, a boy born with a demonic destiny and great strength, realises that the cosmic order has been manipulated by the deity leader Wuliang Xianweng to consolidate power and the superiority of his clan. While grappling with his self-image and identity, Nezha and his best friend Ao Bing unite the suppressed spirits in the sea to fight against the system. The film has sophisticated animation and a captivating plot, but industry experts have said its success still hinges on its use of traditional mythical figures.

With DeepSeek, China innovates and the US imitates The start-up’s breakthrough confounds outworn prejudices about the two countries January 30th, 2025, Financial Times 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Triumphalist glee lit up the Chinese internet this week. Just as Google DeepMind’s victory over China’s strongest Go player in 2017 showcased western brilliance in artificial intelligence, so DeepSeek’s release of a world-beating AI reasoning model has this month been celebrated as a stunning success in China. DeepSeek’s smarter and cheaper AI model was a “scientific and technological achievement that shapes our national destiny”, said one Chinese tech executive. The start-up had become a key player in the “Chinese Large-Model Technology Avengers Team” that would counter US AI dominance, said another. China’s delight, however, spelled pain for several giant US technology companies as investors questioned whether DeepSeek’s breakthrough undermined the case for their colossal spending on AI infrastructure. US tech and energy stocks lost $1tn of their market value on Monday, although they regained some ground later in the week. The stereotypical image of China abroad may still be that of a state-subsidised, capital-intensive manufacturing economy that excels at churning out impressive low-cost hardware, such as smartphones, solar panels and electric vehicles. But, in truth, China long ago emerged as a global software superpower, outstripping the west in ecommerce and digital financial services, and it has invested massively in AI, too. DeepSeek’s emergence confounds many of the outworn prejudices about Chinese innovation, although it is far from a typical Chinese company. It certainly invalidates the old saw that while the US innovates, China imitates and Europe regulates. In several ways, DeepSeek resembles a bootstrapped Silicon Valley start-up, even if it was not founded in a garage. Launched in 2023, the company has the same high-flown ambition as OpenAI and Google DeepMind to attain human-level AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI). But its founder Liang Wenfeng runs one of China’s leading hedge funds, meaning the company has not had to raise external financing. In an interview republished in the China Talk newsletter, Liang explained that DeepSeek operated more as a research lab than a commercial enterprise. When recruiting, it prioritised capabilities over credentials, hiring young Chinese-educated researchers. Liang said these people were given the space to explore and the freedom to make mistakes. “Innovation often arises naturally — it’s not something that can be deliberately planned or taught,” he said.

The Anti-Social Century Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. January 8, 2025, The Atlantic 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists about America’s anti-social streak. Although the particulars of these conversations differed, a theme emerged: The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality. Phonebound If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life. Some of this screen time is social, after a fashion. But sharing videos or texting friends is a pale imitation of face-to-face interaction. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s. The decline of hanging out can’t be shrugged off as a benign generational change, something akin to a preference for bell-bottoms over skinny jeans. Human childhood—including adolescence—is a uniquely sensitive period in the whole of the animal kingdom, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation. Although the human brain grows to 90 percent of its full size by age 5, its neural circuitry takes a long time to mature. Our lengthy childhood might be evolution’s way of scheduling an extended apprenticeship in social learning through play. The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need. Socially underdeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood. A popular trend on TikTok involves 20‑somethings celebrating in creative ways when a friend cancels plans, often because they’re too tired or anxious to leave the house. These clips can be goofy and even quite funny. Surely, sympathy is due; we all know the feeling of relief when we claw back free time in an overscheduled week. But the sheer number of videos is a bit unsettling. If anybody should feel lonely and desperate for physical-world contact, you’d think it would be 20-somethings, who are still recovering from years of pandemic cabin fever. But many nights, it seems, members of America’s most isolated generation aren’t trying to leave the house at all. They’re turning on their cameras to advertise to the world the joy of not hanging out. Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. “Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,” Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me. “Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.” Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.

Lisa Su, 2024 CEO of the Year Dec 10, 2024, TIME 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Lisa Su apologizes if she seems tired. It’s the day after the U.S. presidential election, and like much of the nation she was awake until the early hours, transfixed as the results came in, only tearing herself away once it became clear that Donald Trump had won. “I wanted to know,” Su explains as she takes her place at the head of a conference table in the Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). “It’s relevant information.” The identity of the next President is pertinent news to most of America’s CEOs, but few more so than the leader of a top semiconductor company. Semiconductors, or chips, are the engines of our computers, phones, cars, internet services, and—increasingly—our artificial intelligence (AI) programs. The relentless rise of the chip over the past seven decades has grown economies, transformed lives, and helped cement the U.S., where most chips get their start, as the globe’s postwar hegemon. AMD is one of the world’s leading designers of the CPU chips that power both personal computers and data centers, the vast warehouses of servers that make possible the likes of Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. It’s also a top designer of graphics processing units, or GPUs, the specialized chips used to create and run AI programs like ChatGPT. When you send an email, stream a movie, buy something online, or chat with an AI assistant, chances are an AMD chip is providing some of the computing power needed to make that happen. In November, a supercomputer that runs on AMD chips displaced another AMD-based machine to become the world’s most powerful, Which is thanks in large part to Su’s leadership. When she became CEO a decade ago, AMD stock was languishing around $3, its share of the data-center chip market had fallen so far that executives rounded it down to zero, and the question on everybody’s lips was how long the company had left. An engineer by training, Su spearheaded a bottom-up redesign of AMD’s products, ­repaired ­relationships with customers, and rode the AI boom to new heights. In 2022 the company’s overall value surpassed its historical rival ­Intel’s for the first time. AMD stock now trades at around $140, a nearly 50-fold increase since Su took over. This fall, Harvard Business School began teaching Su’s stewardship of AMD as a case study. “It really is one of the great turnaround stories of modern American business history,” says Chris Miller, a historian of the semiconductor industry and the author of Chip War. For all its progress, AMD remains the semiconductor industry’s distant No. 2. As Su’s team was speeding past Intel, both companies were lapped by Nvidia, run by Su’s cousin Jensen Huang, which in two years has risen from industry also-ran to become the most valuable company in the world. Nvidia got a jump on its rivals by realizing that its chips, initially made for rendering graphics, happened to be perfectly suited for training neural networks, the programs that underpin modern AI. Of the $32 billion worth of AI data-center GPUs sold in the third quarter of 2024, ­Nvidia’s accounted for some 95%. In November, AMD announced that it would lay off 4% of its global workforce in what it framed as a restructuring to focus on the opportunities from AI. Meanwhile, big tech customers, like Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, are now designing their own specialized chips for AI workloads, which could reduce their reliance on AMD products. And AMD’s continued growth relies on a host of factors outside its control: continued progress in AI; the security of Taiwan, where the vast majority of its top chips are manufactured; and the actions of a notoriously unpredictable U.S. President. Trump’s return to the White House will bring new turbulence to an industry that has barely caught its breath from a half-­decade of geopolitical showdowns, shortages, and an AI-fueled market boom. A lot rides on Su’s ability to steer the company through these obstacles. People who know her describe Su as a shrewd strategist who invests in talented people and jettisons those who aren’t pulling their weight. “I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” she tells TIME, ahead of a strategy meeting where she delivers blunt feedback to her executives and urges them to move faster and delegate more. Su, 55, holds meetings on weekends and is known among her executives for wanting to talk on morning calls about the finer points of long documents that were circulated after midnight. When prototype chips get delivered from the factory, she often personally goes down to the lab to help scrutinize them. It’s a hard-­charging style that isn’t for everyone and makes it difficult for people who don’t meet their commitments to survive at the company, according to Patrick Moorhead, a tech-industry analyst and a former AMD ­executive who left before she joined.

With a TikTok Ban Looming, Users Flee to Chinese App ‘Red Note’ Some say they joined Xiaohongshu, which translates to “little red book,” to spite the US government after a ban on TikTok became more likely. Jan 13, 2025, Wired 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 As TikTok anxiously awaits a Supreme Court decision that could determine whether it will be banned in the United States, users are preemptively fleeing the app and migrating to another Chinese social media platform called Xiaohongshu, which literally means “little red book” in Mandarin. As of Monday, Xiaohongshu was the number one most-downloaded app in Apple’s US App Store, despite the fact that it doesn’t even have an official English name. The second app on the list is Lemon8, another social media app owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, that is also experiencing a traffic surge from exiled TikTok users. Over the weekend, thousands of people began swarming to Xiaohongshu, which is known in China as a platform for travel and lifestyle content and has over 300 million users. The newcomers, who refer to the app as “Red Note” or “the Chinese version of Instagram” and call themselves “TikTok refugees,” are relying on translation tools to navigate Xiaohongshu’s mostly Chinese ecosystem. Some say they are hoping to rebuild communities they had on TikTok, while others say they joined the app out of spite and to undermine the US government’s decision to ban TikTok “I would rather stare at a language I can't understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday. There are a countless number of similar clips in which TikTok refugees introduce themselves and explain why they decided to come to Xiaohongshu, many raking up thousands of likes and comments each. A spokesperson for Xiaohongshu could not immediately be reached for comment. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Friday from TikTok and the US government, which respectively made their cases for and against a law passed last year that would force TikTok to sell its US operations or be banned by January 19. Experts said the justices appeared to think the law was constitutional and would likely allow it to stay, leaving many users feeling that the app’s days are numbered. While TikTok is unlikely to immediately disappear from the phones of people who have already downloaded it, it could be deleted from US app stores, causing many to panic and look for the next place to go.

What's the latest on the Los Angeles wildfires and what caused them? Jan 13, 2025, BBC 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 At least 24 people have died in the Los Angeles fires as two major blazes continue to burn across the sprawling Californian city. Firefighters had made progress by Sunday - containing one smaller fire and nearly containing another - but the two largest blazes are still raging. With strong winds expected to continue until Wednesday, the fire threat remains "very high", LA county officials said. The fires are being marked as the most destructive in the city's history with officials warning the death toll could rise. Cadaver dogs and crews are continuing to search the scorched rubble of razed homes in neighbourhoods. What's the latest? The largest fire, in the Palisades, has now burnt through more than 23,000 acres although thousands of firefighters have made some progress in containing about 11% of it. Crews were doing "everything they can" to stop its spread, said LA City Fire Chief Kristin Crowley on Sunday. The blaze was moving east, threatening the exclusive neighbourhood of Brentwood, home to the Getty Center, a world-famous art museum that has now evacuated its staff. Students at the nearby University of California, Los Angeles were also awaiting updates from officials, while classes are being held remotely. Chief Crowley said favourable winds on Saturday had helped, but warned northerly gusts up to 50mph (80km/h) and low humidity were expected on Sunday. A red flag warning - indicating a high level of fire danger - will be in place until 18:00 (02:00 GMT) on Wednesday, with the strongest Santa Ana winds expected on Tuesday. 16 of the dead were found in the Eaton fire zone, while eight were found in the Palisades area. Another 16 people are reported as missing. As of Sunday, more than 105,000 people were under evacuation orders in Los Angeles County, while another 87,000 face warnings. Those numbers have decreased since Saturday. More than 12,000 structures - homes, outbuildings, sheds, mobile homes and cars -have been destroyed including 7,000 in the Eaton fire. The Palisades fire has destroyed about 5,300 structures, including at least 426 houses. Following reports of looting, authorities say they're also enforcing a curfew from 18:00 local time (02:00 GMT) to 06:00 within the areas affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires. Police have so far made 29 arrests - 25 in the Eaton fire area and four in the Palisades fire zone. These included two individuals caught posing as firefighters and entering properties. On Saturday night, police arrested one person for curfew violation in the Palisades and six people in Eaton - three for violating curfew and three for additional charges, including carrying a concealed firearm and narcotics-related charges.

Justin Trudeau leaves a wrecked party and divided Canada Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland are among those tipped as the next Liberal leader Jan 6, 2025, The Economist 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 On January 6th Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, announced his resignation after weeks of speculation and a mounting political crisis. The Liberal Party has won three successive elections since 2015 under his leadership. But over the past year he has become an isolated and deeply polarising figure as supporters have abandoned the party, angry that it has failed to tackle inflation, housing costs and the strains from high immigration. In the coming weeks the Liberals will be gripped by a leadership struggle. Canada faces an election which must be held by October. It will be fought over his deeply flawed legacy, and how the next government responds to a looming trade war, geopolitical risks and a sluggish economy. “This country deserves a real choice in the next election,” Mr Trudeau said. “It has become clear to me that if I am having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election.” He joins a growing list of progressive leaders done in by their failure to address the anxieties of ordinary voters, many of whom are shifting to populist parties. Among those crowing over his exit will be President-elect Donald Trump whose contempt has been laid bare recently in a stream of social media posts, dismissing Mr Trudeau as the “governor” of “the Great State of Canada”, and urging Canadians to consider becoming the 51st member of the United States. The rampant Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, will be watching who the Liberals pick next, and eyeing a landslide election victory.