Zhao jian’s article was online for just a few hours on August 16th before censors erased it. To Western readers the content would have appeared anodyne, but to a Communist Party official it was laced with dangerous ideas. Mr Zhao, a respected economist, argued that it was hard to grasp why China’s government was not making more effort to stimulate the economy. The most serious economic downturn in a generation had caused uncertainty about the future to “coil around the hearts of the people”, he wrote. “The logic and constraints of decision-makers cannot be understood by the market.”

IT IS HARD to see past the human tragedy of the war in Sudan. Perhaps 150,000 people have died since fighting began last year and more than 10m have fled their homes. Millions could perish in the world’s worst famine for at least 40 years. These are reasons enough to care about the conflict. But the collapse of Sudan, at the intersection of Africa and the Middle East, with seven fragile neighbours and some 800km of coast on the turbulent Red Sea, has alarming geopolitical consequences, too.

IT IS OFFICIAL: for only the third time in the past 20 years, the UN has declared a full-blown famine. The declaration concerns a refugee camp called Zamzam, on the outskirts of the city of el-Fasher in Sudan. As long ago as April, Médecins Sans Frontières, a charity, estimated that every two hours a child in the camp was dying from starvation or disease—and since then the situation has got worse.

SCARCELY A MONTH ago, Democrats were awaiting their convention in Chicago as one might a four-day root canal. Despite losing the confidence of his party after a disastrous debate performance, the 81-year-old president, Joe Biden, was due to formalise his seemingly doomed candidacy—and perhaps drag many other Democrats down with him. But then, on July 21st, despair gave way to ecstasy, as Mr Biden dropped out and endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice-president. She became the de facto nominee within 24 hours. The dreaded ordeal was suddenly transformed into a raucous coronation.

Zeke Hernandez was worried. His 12-year-old son, Lucas, had not grown for two years. The family paediatrician told him to eat more, but it didn’t work. Eventually, after a battery of tests, another doctor diagnosed Lucas with celiac disease, which was damaging his small intestine. The solution was to stop eating wheat.

REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS do not agree on much, but both parties want to help America’s “left-behind”. Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden enthusiastically pursued policies to boost the economic fortunes of people who have, in some sense, struggled amid globalisation and deindustrialisation. Both Mr Trump and Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, promise that if elected in November they will do more of the same. On the face of it, their efforts seem to be working. The left-behind are doing better than they have done in years. But there is a catch. The manufacturing jobs that once sustained them are still in decline.

As we explain in our analysis of Pennsylvania’s economy, strong economic fundamentals will not be sufficient to propel Kamala Harris to the White House. Still, the health of the economy in the swing states should give Democrats some confidence in the final months of campaigning. Most have performed well in recent years relative to national benchmarks.

Kamala Harris has all but erased Donald Trump’s polling lead in America’s six swing states, which is testament to the excitement generated by her late entrance into the presidential race. On August 6th she will speak at a rally in Pennsylvania, the most crucial of the swing states, alongside her new running-mate, who may well be Josh Shapiro, the state’s governor. Judging by her past speeches, she will warn that Mr Trump wants to ban abortion, is a threat to democracy and only cares about the rich. Underlying it all will be another message—that the American economy is the world’s strongest, and that the country remains a place of opportunity.

FOR DECADES the world’s corporate titans have seen China as an essential place to do business. Chinese firms, it turns out, were no different. Their domestic market was vast and growing at a dizzying pace, so they had little reason to hunt for customers abroad. China’s colossal manufacturing sector, meanwhile, with its legions of cheap workers, made producing goods elsewhere unnecessary. In spite of the fuss in much of the rich world about Chinese investment, Chinese firms have a comparatively small global footprint.

In 1958 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments engineered a silicon chip with a single transistor. By 1965 Fairchild Semiconductor had learned how to make a piece of silicon with 50 of the things. As Gordon Moore, one of Fairchild’s founders, observed that year, the number of transistors that could fit on a piece of silicon was doubling on a more or less annual basis.

The first television broadcast of an Olympic games was in 1936, when around 160,000 people within transmitting range of the stadium in Berlin were able to tune in. The action was shot on three cameras, only one of which could capture live footage—and only when the sun was out. At the next summer games, in London in 1948, the BBC suggested that perhaps it should pay the organisers for the right to broadcast the event, and offered 1,000 guineas (about $40,000 at today’s prices). The Olympic committee sportingly said there was no need.

RARELY HAS so divisive a figure been so honoured by America’s political class. On July 24th Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, will deliver his fourth address to a joint session of Congress—more than any other foreign leader, including Winston Churchill.

It was as recently as March that Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, excoriated Mr Netanyahu as an “obstacle to peace” and called for new elections to remove him. The snub was all the sharper, given that Mr Schumer, Congress’s most prominent Jewish member, thinks of himself as a shomer or “protector” of Israel. Three months later the shomer yielded, joining other congressional leaders in inviting Mr Netanyahu to give his oration. “America’s relationship with Israel is ironclad and transcends one person or prime minister,” he explained. President Joe Biden, a friend to Israel but long exasperated by Mr Netanyahu, will receive him at the White House, too.

AFTER ALMOST 300 days, planning for the end of the fighting in Gaza is beginning to seem otherworldly. Politicians and generals have been talking about what might happen when the shooting stops since the start of the war in October. Diplomats have spent months shuttling around the Middle East, trying to broker a ceasefire. Yet the moment has not come—and even if it does, the obstacles to lasting calm in Gaza are daunting.

When many Western officials talk of the “day after”, they have a specific scenario in mind. It starts with buffing up the Palestinian Authority (PA), which runs parts of the West Bank, so that it may return to Gaza and govern there as well. Israel would commit to ending its half-century occupation and creating a Palestinian state. That would allow Saudi Arabia, the most influential Arab country, to normalise ties with Israel. A ruinous war could give way to a lasting regional peace.

Kebita Naima was a month pregnant when men with guns burned her home and stole everything she had. Terrified, she fled her village in eastern Congo. With a dozen relatives she walked for a week, hoping to reach Uganda, the calmer country next door. “We had nothing, no food at all,” she recalls—only water from streams and wild fruit. When she crossed the border she was “so weak and so hungry”.

That journey, and the months of deprivation that followed, affected her unborn daughter, Ms Kebita suspects. Sitting outside her home in Lobule, a village in northern Uganda, she notes how the girl, Amina, now 11, is noticeably slower than her younger brother, Mubaraka, who was better nourished both in the womb and in infancy. He started to talk a year earlier than his sister, and to walk nearly two years earlier. “He always wants to know things. He sees older kids climbing trees, and he wants to join in,” says his mother.

Just as muscles need food and exercise to grow strong, the brain needs good food and stimulation to develop properly. The first 1,000 days after conception, known as the “golden window”, are crucial. From the third trimester to the second birthday, a million synapses a second are formed in a well-nourished brain, creating the foundation on which “all learning, behaviour and health depend”, notes Meera Shekar of the World Bank. In a malnourished one, fewer connections are created. And if the brain is chronically deprived during this period, the damage is irreversible.

WHY HAVE Americans born in the 1940s, like Donald Trump and Joe Biden, had such a stranglehold on American power, and why do they cling on to it so tightly? To answer this, our US editor has interviewed dozens of prominent Americans born in the same decade. The result is a new six-part podcast series that begins this week. It is called “Boom! The generation that blew up American politics”.

Born around the same time as the atom bomb, they grew up in a country that was pre-eminent in technological, military and economic terms. Fear of mutually assured destruction lurked in their childhoods, but it was mostly blocked out by comforting domesticity. People form their political views between their mid-teens and mid-20s. For this group that time was the late 1960s, a decade of possibilities cut short by war, assassinations and street violence. Episode 1 focuses on 1968, the origin story of America’s extreme partisanship.

When Barack Obama became president in 2009, it appeared not just to be a changing of the guard, but the end of an era. Men born in the 1940s had occupied the White House for the previous 16 years; now it was the turn of a new generation. Mr Obama was born in the 1960s. His watchwords were “hope” and “change”. He had complained, in one of his many memoirs, about the “arrested development” of American politics, stuck in the “psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation”. It was time to move on, he wrote, from the stale feuds initiated on the college campuses of the 1960s.

Yet Mr Obama’s tenure turned out to be not a break with the past, but merely a brief respite from it. The two subsequent presidents, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, were both also born in the 1940s. And since they are the two main candidates in this year’s election (at least for now), one of them is likely to be president for another four years. Even if Mr Biden withdraws his candidacy, Mr Trump is currently the favourite anyway. That means their generation could end up locking up the presidency for most of the period from 1993 to 2029—getting on for 40 years.

History, science and common sense concur: even great leaders age. In 1953, during his second stint as prime minister, Winston Churchill had a stroke after dinner. “No one seemed alarmed by [his] slurred speech and unsteadiness on his feet, one of the advantages of having a reputation for enjoying alcohol,” writes Andrew Roberts, a historian. For several weeks, as Churchill was incapable of governing, his son-in-law and private secretary ran the country in effect. He never fully recovered, yet refused to stand down until 1955, when he was 80. “Churchill is now often speechless in Cabinet; alternatively, he rambles about nothing,” wrote Harold Macmillan, a future Conservative prime minister, in 1954.

For most people, cognitive decline is a private tragedy, scarring loved ones but few others. When it afflicts political leaders, the damage can be catastrophic. Paul von Hindenburg, Germany’s president in 1933, was no fan of Adolf Hitler but let him become chancellor to break a political stalemate. Some historians blame this epic misjudgement on the fact that he was 85, exhausted and perhaps suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

Some fires are hard to snuff out. The one that started after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on June 27th, through which he stammered only semi-lucidly, is developing into a blaze. For a few days it was only the media—albeit including the columnists and commentators closest to the president—who were calling for him to abandon his bid for re-election. But on July 2nd the president’s support within the Democratic Party started to crack. Lloyd Doggett, a representative from Texas, became the first sitting Democratic congressman to call for him to stand aside. Betting markets, which had put the odds of the president leaving the race at 25% that morning, had raised them to 75% by the following day.

Other grandees have been hinting at similar views, or at least refusing to excuse Mr Biden’s doddering inarticulacy. Jared Golden, who represents a rural district in Maine, published an op-ed in a local newspaper stating matter-of-factly, “Donald Trump is going to win. And I’m OK with that.” Sheldon Whitehouse, a senator from Rhode Island, told a local TV station, “Like a lot of people, I was pretty horrified by the debate.” Perhaps most importantly, Nancy Pelosi, a former speaker of the House of Representatives who had initially pooh-poohed concerns about Mr Biden’s fitness, seemed to open the door to doubters by telling an interviewer, “I think it’s a legitimate question to say, ‘Is this an episode—or is this a condition?’”

MOST OCTOGENARIANS opt for the easy life. President Joe Biden is embarking on a gruelling, billion-dollar campaign to win the privilege of continuing to work until he is 86. To what end exactly? In his previous campaign, in 2019, Mr Biden said he wanted to save “the soul of the nation”—by which he meant depriving Donald Trump of the presidency. Mr Trump’s revenge candidacy this year has prompted Mr Biden to revive his old pitch. Our election model suggests the president has only about a 30% chance of securing re-election, although a debate between the candidates on June 27th could cause the polls to shift. A second victory for Mr Biden would properly vanquish his nemesis. But it would also leave the president with four more years in the White House. What would he do with them?

It is common for presidents to struggle to enact their second-term agendas. George W. Bush did not get far with plans to steer federal spending on health care, retirement and education to the private sector, for instance. Barack Obama’s second term, of which Mr Biden had a front-row view as vice-president, was an endless sequence of fiscal battles with a Republican Congress, ending in a final humiliation when the Senate refused even to vote on Mr Obama’s nominee for a vacant seat on the Supreme Court.

IN LATE 2021 the Royal Navy approached Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, a pair of American tech giants, with a question: Was there a better way to wage war? More specifically, could they find a more effective way to co-ordinate between a hypothetical commando strike team in the Caribbean and the missile systems of a frigate? The tech firms collaborated with BAE Systems, a giant armsmaker, and Anduril, a smaller upstart, among other military contractors. Within 12 weeks—unfathomably fast in the world of defence procurement—the consortium gathered in Somerset in Britain for a demonstration of what was dubbed StormCloud.

Marines on the ground, drones in the air and many other sensors were connected over a “mesh” network of advanced radios that allowed each to see, seamlessly, what was happening elsewhere—a set-up that had already allowed the marines to run circles around much larger forces in previous exercises. The data they collected were processed both on the “edge” of the network, aboard small, rugged computers strapped to commando vehicles with bungee cables—and on distant cloud servers, where they had been sent by satellite. Command-and-control software monitored a designated area, decided which drones should fly where, identified objects on the ground and suggested which weapon to strike which target.

Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, often talks of his firm’s clashes with America in military parlance. “It’s time to pick up the guns, mount the horses and go into battle,” he said in an internal meeting in 2018. In a memo the following year he encouraged staff to tie ropes to Huawei’s figurative tanks and help drag them onto the battlefield.

The martial talk is understandable: Huawei has been under attack from America for over a decade. In 2012 the American authorities began claiming that China might use the firm for espionage. Another broadside was the indictment of the firm’s CFO (and Mr Ren’s daughter) in 2018 for violating sanctions on Iran. By 2020 America’s harrying had descended into all-out war, with most American firms barred from doing business with Huawei and foreign firms barred from selling it chips or other gear that use American technology. America also sought to dissuade other countries from using Huawei’s equipment in their mobile-phone networks.

“Ab ki baar, 400 paar.” This time, more than 400 seats. That was the campaign slogan of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies ahead of India’s election. Yet in the end they fell far short, winning just 293. The BJP itself suffered a 63-seat loss, taking its tally from 303 to 240, below the 272 needed for a majority. Where did it all go wrong?

The Indian voter has confounded expectations again. A decade ago, when Narendra Modi swept to power with an outright majority in parliament, a quarter-century of messy coalition politics came to an end. When his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) expanded that majority to 353 of the 543 seats in the lower house five years later, many pundits hailed the dawn of a new “dominant-party system” akin to independent India’s first three decades, when the Congress party ruled without interruption.

Such was Mr Modi’s confidence in the build-up to this year’s general election that he set an even bigger target for the BJP and its allies this time, pledging to win 400 seats. As the voting was under way, he outlined a 1,000-year vision for India. And in late May he told a television interviewer, “God has sent me for a purpose.”

Hikers climbing out of their cars early in the morning at North Mountain Park in Phoenix, Arizona, are welcomed by songbirds and two women behind a fold-up table. “Would you like to protect a woman’s right to choose?” asks Beth Ballmann, from beneath a bright pink sun hat. A barely awake young man mumbles something about not being registered. Linda Chiles’s eyes light up. “I can help you with that too. We can do it today!”

Along with many others, the two women are trying to collect enough signatures to add a referendum to Arizona ballots in November, which would enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. The volunteers wear “We Can Do It” Rosie the Riveter T-shirts bought on Amazon. They have carried their clipboards to car parks, yoga classes, the state fair and many doorsteps. “They can’t escape us this time,” Ms Chiles whispers, as a couple returns from a hike. Indeed they don’t.

Since taking office in 2018, Cyril Ramaphosa has turned indecisiveness into an art form. No matter the problem, South Africa’s president will dither about the solution. Six years after pledging a “new dawn” he has yet to get to grips with the country’s multiple crises, including record unemployment, the highest murder rate in 20 years and widespread corruption.

So it is troubling that Mr Ramaphosa may soon have to make a momentous choice. On May 29th South Africa will hold national and provincial elections. The Economist’s poll tracker suggests the ruling African National Congress (ANC) will win its lowest share of the vote ever, probably falling below 50% for the first time. South Africa’s proportional voting system means that it would then need to form a coalition to govern. Potential partners range from thuggish black nationalists to multiracial liberals, making Mr Ramaphosa’s decision a fateful one for South Africa, and this election the most important since 1994, when Nelson Mandela became president.

Since taking office in 2018, Cyril Ramaphosa has turned indecisiveness into an art form. No matter the problem, South Africa’s president will dither about the solution. Six years after pledging a “new dawn” he has yet to get to grips with the country’s multiple crises, including record unemployment, the highest murder rate in 20 years and widespread corruption.

So it is troubling that Mr Ramaphosa may soon have to make a momentous choice. On May 29th South Africa will hold national and provincial elections. The Economist’s poll tracker suggests the ruling African National Congress (ANC) will win its lowest share of the vote ever, probably falling below 50% for the first time. South Africa’s proportional voting system means that it would then need to form a coalition to govern. Potential partners range from thuggish black nationalists to multiracial liberals, making Mr Ramaphosa’s decision a fateful one for South Africa, and this election the most important since 1994, when Nelson Mandela became president.

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES is a coveted job, at least among a certain type of power-crazed geriatric man. America’s founders nearly made the office more exalted still. John Adams, the first vice-president, thought the president should be known as His Elective Majesty or His Mightiness. The Senate endorsed another form of address: His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties. But the House of Representatives rejected grand titles, and George Washington went along with it to dispel claims that he had monarchical ambitions. The accusations flew anyway, and have been repeated whenever one party dislikes what the president is up to, which is to say most of the time.

Novelists have taken such fears further, imagining the overthrow of American democracy by a charismatic dictator: President Buzz Windrip in Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), Nehemiah Scudder in Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi series “If This Goes On” (1941), Charles Lindbergh in Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (2004). President Scudder, a preacher-turned-politician from the boondocks, wins the election of 2012. The election of 2016 is then cancelled.

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES is a coveted job, at least among a certain type of power-crazed geriatric man. America’s founders nearly made the office more exalted still. John Adams, the first vice-president, thought the president should be known as His Elective Majesty or His Mightiness. The Senate endorsed another form of address: His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties. But the House of Representatives rejected grand titles, and George Washington went along with it to dispel claims that he had monarchical ambitions. The accusations flew anyway, and have been repeated whenever one party dislikes what the president is up to, which is to say most of the time.

Novelists have taken such fears further, imagining the overthrow of American democracy by a charismatic dictator: President Buzz Windrip in Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), Nehemiah Scudder in Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi series “If This Goes On” (1941), Charles Lindbergh in Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (2004). President Scudder, a preacher-turned-politician from the boondocks, wins the election of 2012. The election of 2016 is then cancelled.