On the Edge. By Nate Silver. Penguin; 576 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30

Kamala Harris’s first encounter with pro-Palestinian protesters since becoming the Democratic nominee unfolded at a campaign rally in a Michigan suburb on August 7th. As Ms Harris spoke to thousands of buoyant supporters, the dissenters disrupted the party vibe: “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide! We won’t vote for genocide!” Ms Harris acknowledged their right to speak, but as they carried on, she lost patience: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

This spring I took a walk through the farming village of Kobar in the West Bank. Its low-rise buildings wound around shrubs and bushes; pale pink blossom was just starting to bloom on the almond trees. On the surrounding hillsides you could see Jewish settlements – neatly ordered rows of identical villas with red tiled roofs. In the months before my visit, armed settlers from places like these had been attacking Palestinian villagers, largely with impunity. The buildings of Kobar were covered in graffiti, some of which read “Death to Israel”.

BREAKING (WHICH you may know as breakdancing) will make its Olympic debut—the only sport to do so—at this summer’s Paris games. It joins new urban sports BMX, skateboarding and 3v3 basketball, which debuted at Tokyo 2020, and is part of a broader shift by the International Olympic Committee to include more youth-oriented events. Yet breaking is judged in a completely different way—a way that ensures audiences will see something entirely new at these Olympics.

FROM AN ESTATE agent’s perspective, the lunar surface has little to recommend it. Its none-too-metaphorical lack of atmosphere means it is bombarded by meteorites, cosmic radiation is unrelentingly harsh and temperatures range from lows of -246°C to highs of 121°C. Subsurface lunar caves, on the other hand, with stable temperatures and cover from projectiles, would be much more enticing habitats. The only question is, do any exist?

In a paper published in Nature Astronomy, Lorenzo Bruzzone and Leonardo Carrer, at the University of Trento, and their colleagues, offer a definitively affirmative answer. They provide evidence of a cave about 80 metres long and 45 metres wide at the bottom of a 135-metre-deep pit in the Sea of Tranquility. The neighbourhood is a historic one: plains which surround the pit are the site of humanity’s first lunar landing. Though the site’s selenological (the lunar equivalent of geological) origins are unclear, it may be the remains of a subsurface tube forged by a river of lava. When the tube’s ceiling caved in—perhaps after a meteor impact—a giant pit (with its associated caves) was all that survived.

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Backing Joe Biden

Presidential effectiveness is not measured by televised debates. Presidents govern by making decisions after thorough preparation and detailed consultations with their advisers. In questioning Joe Biden’s candidacy, you offer no reason for doubting his ability to make good decisions (“No way to run a country”, July 6th). You do think, however, that political infighting among Democrats over a potential replacement would somehow settle on a better candidate, who would have a stronger chance of defeating Donald Trump, and who would make better decisions than Mr Biden.

To outsiders, and indeed many in the country, Indian cinema is all about masala movies. Named after the blend of spices ubiquitous in the country’s cuisine, these films feature a mix of genres, formulaic plots and larger-than-life heroes. Most of India’s highest-grossing movies—many from Bollywood, the behemoth Hindi-language film industry—can be classified as masala. But these big-budget, action-packed melodramas belie India’s diverse cinematic output.

It is Mollywood which is leading the way in variety and sophistication. (The name nods to Malayalam, the language of Kerala state, where the film-makers are based.) It is arguably India’s most productive film industry: some 200 Malayalam films were released in 2023. Bollywood—which caters to around 500m Hindi speakers, 15 times Kerala’s population of 35m—produced roughly the same number.

When Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te, took office in May, his first meeting was with Santiago Peña, the president of Paraguay. It is one of just 12 countries that recognise Taiwan as the legitimate China, rather than the larger People’s Republic of China.

China claims Taiwan as its territory. Formal links with other countries lend legitimacy to Taiwan’s claim to statehood. Paraguay, together with Guatemala, is one of Taiwan’s largest remaining friends. The country advocates for Taiwan at the United Nations, from which the Asian island is excluded.

Elections to the European Parliament saw the hard right making the most gains overall, though the European People’s Party, representing the centre-right, and the Socialists and Democrats, on the centre-left, remain the biggest voting blocs. Green parties lost a quarter of their seats. In France Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally took a third of the vote, more than double that of Emmanuel Macron’s party, Renaissance. In a surprise announcement, the French president dissolved the National Assembly and called a snap election. Mr Macron lost his parliamentary majority in 2022, and says the country now “needs a clear majority in serenity and harmony”.

Germany’s governing coalition also got a shellacking at the election. The opposition Christian Democrats came first and the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) second, beating all three parties in the government. The Social Democrats, the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, took just 14%, its worst showing ever in a national poll. The AfD’s biggest increase in support was among people aged 16-24, in an election where 16-year-olds were able to vote for the first time.

The Federal Reserve left its benchmark interest rate on hold at a range of between 5.25% and 5.5%. Markets were more interested in the latest moves along its path for rate reductions. The Fed now thinks it will cut just once this year, possibly as late as December, a big change from March, when it predicted three cuts. On June 6th the European Central Bank cut interest rates for the first time in five years, shaving a quarter of a percentage point off the deposit facility, to 3.75%.

America’s labour market confounded expectations again, adding 272,000 jobs in May, far above analysts’ forecasts and the second-biggest monthly addition of employees to the payrolls this year. The annual inflation rate fell to 3.3%.

Dig deeper into the subject of this week’s cartoon:

As the French hard right triumphs in EU elections, Macron calls snap vote (Jun 10th 2024)
Peak Europe turns 25: why June 1999 marked the continent’s zenith (Jun 6th 2024)
The hard right is getting closer to power all over Europe (Sep 14th 2023)

KAL’s cartoon appears weekly in The Economist. You can see last week’s here.

This week we have a worldwide cover on the rise and rise of Chinese science.

The West has been slow to grasp that China is now producing some of the world’s best research and innovation. In 2003 America produced 20 times more high-impact scientific papers than China. By 2022 China had overtaken both America and the European Union. When the Nature Index of contributions to articles in prestigious journals was launched in 2014, China’s score was less than a third of America’s. By 2023 it was top. According to the Leiden Ranking of the volume of scientific research output, the world’s ten top universities include six in China.

IF THERE IS one thing the Chinese Communist Party and America’s security hawks agree on, it is that innovation is the secret to geopolitical, economic and military superiority. President Xi Jinping hopes that science and technology will help his country overtake America. Using a mix of export controls and sanctions, politicians in Washington are trying to prevent China from gaining a technological advantage.

America’s strategy is unlikely to work. As we report this week, Chinese science and innovation are making rapid progress. It is also misguided. If America wants to maintain its lead—and to get the most benefit from the research of China’s talented scientists—it would do better to focus less on keeping Chinese science down and more on pushing itself ahead.

Add monetary policy to the list of ways in which America’s economy stands out. Central banks in Canada, Sweden and the euro zone all recently began cutting interest rates. Yet the Federal Reserve on June 12th again postponed its plans for monetary loosening. Even though rates in America have risen higher than in other big rich countries and inflation is falling, the median Fed rate-setter expects a cut of just one quarter of a percentage point this year.

Some monetary divergence is the natural consequence of America’s stronger growth. But what is striking about America is how immune its markets appear to be to the threat of political dysfunction and fiscal frailty. By contrast, in the rest of the world those factors are weighing increasingly heavily.

WHEN DONALD TRUMP left office in January 2021 his political career seemed over. It was not just Democrats who thought so. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” wrote Tucker Carlson privately when he was still the host of Fox News’s most popular evening show. “I truly can’t wait.” Mr Carlson did not get his wish. Our statistical forecast, which we launch this week, gives Mr Trump a two-in-three chance of winning in November. This is the same model, plus some refinements, that made Joe Biden a strong favourite to become president in 2020. Tested on election data from previous elections (with no knowledge of the outcome), the model gave Barack Obama about the same chance of winning in 2012 at this point in the race as it gives Mr Trump now. Like most pundits, it thought Hillary Clinton likelier to win in 2016—a reminder that models, though they offer a rigorous way to think about the world, are not crystal balls.

SOMETIMES YOU have no choice but to roll the dice. That is where France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, found himself on the night of June 9th. He had just received a thumping in elections to the European Parliament, in which the National Rally (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, won twice as many votes as his own party, Renaissance. Already, in his own national parliament, he has to govern with a minority, cobbling together support as best he can to get his government’s domestic legislation through. The boost to Ms Le Pen’s standing from her big Euro-win risked making him a lamer duck than ever, with the very real prospect that the opposition would anyway force an election later in the year by voting down his budget.

It was an untenable position. As in the United States, French presidents cannot pass much of their domestic agenda without a majority in the legislature. At the moment, Mr Macron’s party has no majority, but neither can anyone else form a majority government. And so he seized the initiative by calling a snap election at the end of this month, a full three years early.

People love lists. The 1,000 richest people, the 100 places to see before you die, the ten most-wanted fugitives; lists promise to make the chaos of life more manageable. Benjamin Franklin was a superfan, using lists to explain everything from the 13 virtues necessary to be successful to eight reasons to choose an older woman as a lover.

Since the first list of bestselling books was published in America in 1895, critiques have piled up like the stacks beside a bibliophile’s bed. In 1932 M. Lincoln Schuster, a co-founder of Simon & Schuster, a publisher, warned that: “The current procedure for compiling…the so-called ‘bestseller’ lists has led to many abuses.” He argued that cumulative sales should count. Currently, only “fastsellers” qualify, leaving the most popular book of all time, the Bible, out of the rankings.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS’S “The Second Coming” was written as a warning about the state of the world. Although “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” has perhaps become the most famous line of his poem, it is two other lines that should concern us all. As an estimated 2bn people across the world head to the polls in 2024, Yeats’s warning that “the best lack all conviction” while “the worst are full of passionate intensity” resonates loudly.

Democracies are being torn apart by extremism and polarisation. The gains made by the far right in the European parliamentary elections in recent days are only the latest sign of the rising dangers of populism. Its impact will continue to be felt across European politics for years to come.

CUTTING-EDGE FINANCIAL technology is fast becoming the handmaiden of organised crime, helping some of the world’s most dangerous crooks to move and hide ill-gotten gains. This situation will only get worse, unless governments and the technology industry can find common ground.

Money-laundering has a history almost as long as crime itself. But it became much more sophisticated during the cocaine-cowboy era of the 1980s, when narcotics flooded into America.

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.

JOE BIDEN’S job-approval rating stands at 39%, putting him roughly in a tie for lowest of any president at this point in his term in the history of American polling. In all six states that could prove decisive in November he trails by between one and six percentage points. In the two where he is closest, Wisconsin and Michigan, Democratic candidates’ margins have underperformed the final polls by an average of six points in the past two elections. Even if he wins both, Mr Biden would still need one more swing state to secure the 270 electoral votes necessary for re-election.

These numbers suggest that the race is hardly a “toss-up”. True, the five months before the vote give Mr Biden time to make up ground, and the polls may underestimate his true support. But it is also possible that the candidate to benefit from any polling error could be Donald Trump.

Tony Evers, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin, is known in his state for his Midwestern grandfatherly air. On June 8th, speaking in a casino in Milwaukee at the state Democratic convention, he leant into that. First, he argued that Democrats “are getting shit done and delivering for Wisconsin”, before apologising for swearing. Then he talked about one of his proudest achievements. In February Mr Evers signed into law new state legislative-district maps that undo one of the country’s worst gerrymanders. This, the governor said, with a wink, was a “bfd—and that means a big fine deal.”

Thanks to the new maps, for the first time in decades Democrats have a narrow shot of regaining the Wisconsin state house. But they are dreaming bigger. They are hoping enthusiasm in newly competitive districts will boost turnout among Democrat-leaning voters, and help Joe Biden retain the presidency.

Last year almost 16m guns were sold in the United States. According to a government survey, 16% of adults have used marijuana in the past month. People buying a gun must fill in a seven-page federal form. Question 21f asks: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana” (or any other illegal drug)? Almost certainly hundreds of thousands of people lie on the form, which is a felony. In a typical year, fewer than 300 are prosecuted.

This year Hunter Biden became one of them. On June 11th the president’s wayward son was convicted on all three charges against him, after a six-day trial. In October 2018 he bought a Colt revolver at a gun shop in Wilmington, Delaware. At the time he was, a jury decided, addicted to crack cocaine. In theory he could now be sentenced to as long as 25 years in prison.

Delisha Boyd is the product of a rape. She reckons her mother was violated repeatedly from the age of 13, two years before she gave birth. Ms Boyd, a black Democratic state representative from New Orleans, told her story publicly for the first time when she introduced a bill to carve out rape and incest exceptions from Louisiana’s abortion ban in May of last year. “I can tell you today, in my mid-50s, that my mother never recovered from it. She was dead by the time she was 28 years old,” she said. The bill was voted down.

This spring she told her story again at the state’s capitol in Baton Rouge, to buttress a starkly different proposal. Her new bill, co-authored with another Democrat, authorises judges to sentence child-rapists to surgical castration upon release from prison. Tough-on-crime Republicans lined up to support the bill, the first of its kind in America, while the legislature’s black caucus and most Democrats opposed it. It passed resoundingly and on June 4th was sent to the governor for sign-off.

“Are we alone in the universe? That’s the core question we’re trying to answer here,” Meenakshi Wadhwa, a planetary scientist with ties to NASA, tells her spellbound class. As she explains that to answer this “we need to go back to Mars to collect rocks”, one student scribbles notes while another holds up an iPhone to take a snap of the slides. In many ways this lecture hall at Arizona State University (ASU) is like any other. A group of keen women sit attentively in the front row; the men are spread out in the back. But the hearing aids hint at how unusual this class is.

Mirabella, a 20-storey “university retirement community” on ASU’s campus, is home to over 300 pensioners. When it opened its doors in 2020, the senior-living facility was nearly fully subscribed, despite the pandemic. Most residents are having a ball. They get a university pass, which allows them to attend the same classes and cultural events as students, but with the distinct benefit of not having to take exams. Golf buggies can drive them around the sprawling campus, though many are still fit enough to mountain bike.

There are not many cities in the world where the local government puts on a house-music festival—and even fewer where it would be as delightful as the one held in Chicago over the first weekend of June. On a sunny Sunday people of all races and ages filed into Millennium Park downtown, many clutching blankets, coolers and camp chairs. One attendee, however, was clearly not welcome. At sunset the headliner, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, a storied Chicago DJ, invited on a special guest. As Brandon Johnson, the mayor, jogged onto the stage, a chorus of boos rang out. Within 45 seconds he had left, his seemingly truncated message that Chicago is “the greatest frickin’ city in the world” not enough to silence the din of dissent.

Booing politicians is a tradition in the Windy City (savvier ones know the best time to appear is early, before the crowd starts drinking). Yet Mr Johnson, who won a surprising election victory last year, is already unusually unpopular. According to a poll conducted in late April, a year after his election, just 9% of Chicago residents consider him to be doing an “above average” job; a majority say his work is below average. Even among non-white voters—his base—below-average ratings outnumber above-average ones by four to one.

To rewatch the two debates of the presidential campaign in 2020—an undertaking no kind person would recommend—is to encounter, amid the insults, two rather poignant moments. In each debate Donald Trump, then president, predicted that vaccines against covid-19 would be available by the end of 2020. Each time, moderators confronted him with his own advisers’ doubts, while his rival, Joe Biden, called him a fantasist if not a liar. “There’s no prospect that there’s going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American people before the middle of next year,” Mr Biden scoffed in the second debate, on October 22nd.

In fact, in what in an alternative political universe might shine as a model of public service by successive administrations, Mr Trump’s Operation Warp Speed supplied vaccines in December, and President Joe Biden’s programme to distribute them delivered 200m vaccinations before May 2021. How different might American attitudes be about their politics and government if each president was able to applaud the work of the other?

Follow a lorry laden with Brazilian-made cars as it inches down the hairpin bends of the Paso Internacional Los Libertadores (pictured) into Chile and the challenges of trade within Latin America become clear. Four times the lorry grinds to a halt as workers repair the road ahead; snow, ice and avalanches will soon smash it up again. The delays are so long that drivers hop out to smoke, staring up at the surrounding peaks. There is at least one crash a week, reckons a border official. This is the busiest trade crossing between Argentina and Chile, but treacherous ice means in winter it operates for just 12 hours a day. For about 40 days of the year, smothered in snow, it shuts altogether.

Latin America’s international trade, measured as exports plus imports as a share of GDP, has crept up over the past two decades, but it still trails most emerging markets. Strip out Mexico’s super-strength in manufacturing for export to the United States and the picture is even worse. In South America trade in goods is worth less than 30% of GDP. In other emerging markets it is worth around 50%.

Colombia’s first avowedly left-wing president came to power in August 2022 promising to reduce inequality in one of the world’s most unequal countries. Since taking office Gustavo Petro has been pushing through a series of reforms in pursuit of this goal. In particular, Mr Petro wants changes to health care, labour and the pension system.

But almost two years into his term, the bills underpinning his signature reforms have stalled. There is opposition in Congress and on the streets. Mr Petro is losing patience. He is pressing Congress to pass the laws before the end of the legislative session on June 20th. His moderate allies are attempting to rein him in, lest his intransigence push his approval below the 34% it has been stuck at for months.