How did Snow White become the year’s most cursed movie? Disney’s latest live-action adventure has been at the centre of various controversies over casting, alleged feuds and delays March 21, 2025, The Guardian 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Once upon a time, Disney made a business decision: if it was going to adapt its library of animated movies into live-action features (with merch and theme park tie-ins galore), it should add Snow White to the pipeline. The 1937 classic – the company’s first full-length animated feature ever, its first crack at a veritable goldmine of princess IP – would follow the modernizations (and attendant revisions) of Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, released in 2015 and 2017, respectively. It was only logical, Snow White being one of its most recognizable and brand-defining characters. The company began developing a live-action feature in 2016, in the heady first wave of its IP era. Nine years later, Snow White has finally made it the big screen, but the journey has been anything but a fairytale. The remake has been a saga of delays, culture war flashpoints and controversies, some earned and much not. The new Snow White has managed the difficult feat of being a children’s movie that irritates both ends of the political spectrum at once, from rightwing nuts crying “woke” over the casting of Rachel Zegler, an American actor of Colombian descent, to pro-Palestinian advocates upset over the presence of the Israeli actor and IDF supporter Gal Gadot as the Evil Queen. And that’s not even getting to the obvious and nagging issue of the titular seven dwarves. The title proved toxic enough that Disney took the rare step of scaling back its premiere six days ahead of its release, limiting the media presence to talent-friendly in-house press. (Though not without precedent – Warner Bros acted similarly with the 2023 rollout for The Flash, premiering in the midst of star Ezra Miller’s many scandals.) People have picked up on the fact that, well, the vibes are not good, with multiple reports that Disney is going through the motions to get it over and done with, stumbling to the finish line.

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling. March 24, 2025, by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen. I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing. This is going to require some explaining. The story technically begins shortly after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel, in October 2023. The Houthis—an Iran-backed terrorist organization whose motto is “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam”—soon launched attacks on Israel and on international shipping, creating havoc for global trade. Throughout 2024, the Biden administration was ineffective in countering these Houthi attacks; the incoming Trump administration promised a tougher response. This is where Pete Hegseth and I come in. On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz. I have met him in the past, and though I didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me, I did think it somewhat unusual, given the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with journalists—and Trump’s periodic fixation on me specifically. It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me. It is not at all uncommon these days for nefarious actors to try to induce journalists to share information that could be used against them.

Trump Signs Order Aimed at Eliminating Education Dept. ‘Once and for All’ Congress and federal law stand in the way of shutting down the agency, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and supports programs for students with disabilities. March 20, 2025, The New York Times 🌟完整外刊原文，请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 President Trump on Thursday instructed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin shutting down her agency, a task that cannot be completed without congressional approval and sets the stage for a seismic political and legal battle over the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools. Surrounded by schoolchildren seated at desks in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Trump signed a long-awaited executive order that he said would begin dismantling the department “once and for all.” The Trump administration has cited poor test scores as a key justification for the move. “We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump said. The department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and supports programs for students with disabilities, was created by an act of Congress. That means, according to Article I of the Constitution, that only Congress can shut it down. That clear delineation of power, a fundamental component of democracy from the inception of the United States, underscores why no other modern president has tried to unilaterally shutter a federal department. But Mr. Trump has already taken significant steps that have limited the agency’s operations and authority. Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. The job cuts hit particularly hard at the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces the country’s guarantee that all students have an equal opportunity to an education. Mr. Trump’s order contains potentially contradictory guidance for Ms. McMahon. On the one hand, the order directs her to facilitate the elimination of the agency. On the other, she is also mandated to rigorously comply with federal law. The order offers no guidance on how to square those two points.

China Amplifies Rebuke of Li Ka-shing’s Panama Port Deal With BlackRock March 14, 2025, Bloomberg 🌟完整外刊原文，请扫码加V并备注“外刊”进学习群免费获取 CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd. shares plunged Friday after China’s top office on Hong Kong affairs reposted a sharp attack on the conglomerate’s decision to appease President Donald Trump by selling its stake in Panama ports. The commentary that the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office posted on its website originally appeared in the Ta Kung Pao newspaper and warned companies to be very careful about which “side they should stand on.” It said that social media users have accused the conglomerate founded by billionaire Li Ka-shing of “spineless groveling,” ignoring China’s interests and “selling out all Chinese people” in the quick deal announced last week. CK Hutchison’s shares fell as much as 6.7% Friday morning, the most since September 2022, highlighting investor concerns that Beijing might try to intervene in the deal. Li’s company stands receive cash proceeds of more than $19 billion if the transaction goes through, roughly equivalent to the company’s market value before the deal was announced.

Elon Musk’s self-destruction The cost for Donald Trump of keeping the world’s richest man by his side is growing March 11, 2025, Financial 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 When Elon Musk said he loved Donald Trump “as much as a straight man can love another”, the emetic effect was widespread. Trump is one of the few people left in Washington DC who likes having Musk around. Yet having given Musk more power than any private figure in US history, the president is watching his benefactor turn into an albatross. The question is how Trump will get rid of Musk, not whether. The price of having him as co-helmsman is already steep. The New York Times chronicled how Trump clipped Musk’s wings in a heated cabinet meeting last week. Cabinet heads, rather than Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, would take care of their own hiring and firing, Trump said. His White House had until then been notably leak free — in contrast to his first term. But it appears senior staff are keen to see the back of the chainsaw-wielding oligarch. The showdown had been set up with the aim of hastening that day. A measure of Musk’s worry about his waning star is that his visit to Mar-a-Lago last weekend was not originally scheduled, say insiders. Moreover, Musk has tried to funnel millions more into Trump’s political action committees and been turned down. Trump is not known to refuse money. But it would look like Musk was buying his prolonged stay. His standing is dropping as fast as Tesla’s stock price. Trump’s approval rating has remained steady. With signs of a coming “Trump recession”, Musk may still be a useful lightning rod. But that is the extent of his upside. His sway is mostly negative. There is not a Republican legislator or Trump principal who is not terrified of Musk’s power. A $50mn cheque to fund a primary challenge could end a senator’s career — $10mn for a legislator. Musk’s X, which is Maga’s informal state broadcast arm, could also destroy a cabinet member’s career. Officials now routinely issue press releases first on X. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, first announced plans to pare back USAID on X.

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.