This week’s Economist.

Steven Shapin · Barrel of Greenbacks: Luis Alvarez and the Bomb

A review by Steven Shapin of Collisions: A physicist’s journey from Hiroshima to the death of the dinosaurs. Author: Alec Nevala-Lee.

The Manhattan Project, which built the atomic bomb, transmuted pure theory into mass slaughter, and it changed everything for the scientists who did the work.

Oppenheimer was called the Father of the Bomb, but Alvarez was the scientist in the delivery room. At the moment the bomb was released over Hiroshima, Alvarez was fully occupied watching the oscilloscope screen that recorded data from the gauges slung under parachutes. Minutes later, he ‘looked in vain for the city that had been our target’, seeing no man-made structures on the ground. He worried that the Enola Gay bombardier had missed, but the crew on the observation plane reassured him that Hiroshima had been annihilated: ‘It was a beautiful job of bombing.’

Why Ebola came back — and a warning for the next pandemic

Speed is another blessing of modern life for viruses. A pathogen jumping into a human in Jakarta at midday can be in New York by tea time. 

FT LInk

Our world is actually analogue if you look at it from high enough.

A comment from DavidOxford in FT. He also added:

Some coding jobs may be eaten by AI but there has been for years, a world shortage of analogue and radio frequency electrical engineers and quite likely this will continue

For dermatology, analogue still rules. And I believe you can make an argument that this will be true for much of medicine.

Pope Leo calls for leaders to reject polarisation as he begins Spanish tour | Pope Leo XIV | The Guardian

If they were confronted with the question: do they want to see Bad Bunny or do they want to see the pope, I think many will go to see Bad Bunny,” he said on his flight from Rome, before adding: “But I think there will also be a few here to see the pope.”

Indeed. I was there in Rome earlier this year.

Beyond all the grant chasing, bitching and annoying hype merchants, every now and then, I just sit back and smile at scientific discovery— the automated escalator that turns out new knowledge. This is from the ever excellent Fermat’s Library.

This week’s paper is “Age of Meteorites and the Earth” (1956) by Clair Patterson.For most of history, no one knew how old the Earth was – estimates ranged from a few thousand years to a few billion, with no reliable way to choose between them. Then a 34-year-old Caltech geochemist settled it in eight pages. Rather than date the Earth directly, Patterson dated five meteorites and showed our planet belonged to the same family.

The number he got, 4.55 billion years, has barely moved in seventy years.

(The paper is here: https://fermatslibrary.com/s/age-of-meteorites-and-the-earth)

from The Economist

What do you do with your past? She was only 17 when the war ended but she already had so much past; she had already seen so much. Like that boy in the camp. He had been tied to a tree then SS soldiers had shot at him. They shot his foot, his arm, his hands, an ear. A little boy, used as target practice. Then there was the girl who tried to escape. The soldiers had shot her then hung her body in the middle of the camp as an example. And there was the pregnant woman: when she went into labour, the SS tied her legs together. She had never seen agony like hers.

The dangerous delusion of modern warfare

The Economist

Entrepreneurs weave FPV-derived [first party view] video depicting the terrified or resigned faces of cornered Russian and Ukrainian soldiers into snuff movies set to heavy metal. Combat increasingly resembles bespoke remote-controlled execution. In one FPV video highlighted by the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, a Russian soldier approached by a Ukrainian drone gestures towards his nearby comrade lying in a ditch: kill him instead. The drone pauses imperiously. It drops a grenade on the second soldier, decapitating him. Then it returns to the first soldier and does the same to him.

A few lines later we read …

The age of nuclear-arms-control agreements has come to an end.

Do most baristas in Norway have a master’s degree? | May 23rd 2026 Edition

Nice letter from ROLAND DEHOUSSE in Brussels in this week’s Economist.

Being myself on the verge of retiring from the European civil service, I felt a deep connection to Charlemagne’s column on federalists’ nostalgia for a Europe that never was (May 9th). I especially enjoyed the analogy between the pioneers of European integration and the builders of medieval cathedrals. Indeed I count myself as one of the “still many in Brussels who get teary-eyed as they describe their humble role in…this continental peace project, as worthy of admiration in their eyes as any cathedral”. But alas, I can’t help thinking that my late father, himself an MEP, was right when he used to fume: “They promised us a cathedral and built a supermarket instead.”

With a parking lot, too, I suggest— a la Joni Mitchell

Bezos, Backlash and Zombies – Paul Krugman

But [Jeff] Bezos obviously suffers from billionaire brain, which I defined last year as that special blend of ignorance and arrogance that occurs all too frequently in men who believe that their success in accumulating personal wealth means that they understand everything, no need to do any homework.