Stanley Pignal

Another Tuesday

With Israel going to the polls this Tuesday, I can't imagine the news cycle out of Brazil and Serbia is particularly cheering for one Binyamin Netanyahu.

France may be running out of money, political stability and public patience; it is not running out of influence. Register for free to discover why the EU still treats the country as a blueprint bit.ly/4zP97Ii Illustration: Javi Aznarez

A couple of months into the pandemic, the New York Times ran this chart on how quickly a covid-19 vaccine might emerge. Even if you skipped some vital steps (like waiting for academic research) it was still assumed we'd be waiting another *two years* for a vaccine www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

My Charlemagne this week is on the Paradox of Paris: or how France became ungovernable at home yet unstoppable in Brussels. From "strategic autonomy" to managed trade, French ideas are in the ascendant at EU level—even as Paris burns. www.economist.com/europe/2026/...

Cool military nugget. Before mounting an attack sailors in the Royal Navy changed into clean underwear. This was part of the protocol for avoiding gangrene in case of shrapnel wounds. From A Hateful Decision, Edward Abel Smith's history of the Mers el-Kébir British assault in 1940.

My Charlemagne this week is on the Paradox of Paris: or how France became ungovernable at home yet unstoppable in Brussels. From "strategic autonomy" to managed trade, French ideas are in the ascendant at EU level—even as Paris burns. www.economist.com/europe/2026/...

I filed 99 lines to Matt yesterday instead of 96 for the slot and man this is what I wake up to. (I later trimmed to 96. True story.)

No city in Europe has the economic oomph of New York or Shenzhen. We explain how this gnaws at the continent’s competitiveness, and puts it at a sizeable disadvantage bit.ly/3W9Iqzi Illustration: Peter Schrank

This weather pattern I call "the Brussels Crescendo"

If a French employer wants to increase the take-home pay of of a worker on the minimum wage by €100 a month, it will cost them €440 (per INSEE). Startling statistic in this excellent column on France's dire situation by @lionellaurent.bsky.social. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

The British media is genuinely a different beast to what you find in other countries. There is an irreverence towards power which you don't find in other places. In America the late-nite hosts are the ones who bring down politicians one peg, in Britain it's reporters screaming questions.

It would be interesting for someone to track the number of books "blurbed" by well-regarded authors. I won't name names but there are a couple of bigshot writers who seem to endorse dozens and dozens of books a year -- not clear how they get to write their own stuff.

My Charlemagne this week on an overlooked European phenomenon: the EU has lots of (lovely!) cities, but too few that matter. www.economist.com/europe/2026/...

Latvian PM has some seriously dodgy maths. Andris Kulbergs says "one beer a year" per European would cover the cost of the Ukraine war effort. 450m EU citizens paying €3 a beer gets you to €1.35bn. That's about 2% of the funding required for Ukraine. I think he means one beer per week?

Clue: "Announcements in The Economist, for short" Answer: "IPOs" OK, New York Times puzzle peope. I see you've been reading us closely. All them IPOs being announced in The Economist!

Good piece. The EU's digital rules probably prohibit the livestreaming of executions (which Meta etc also ban) of the sort the US is planning for December. But if the EU blocks social media for showing it, no doubt JD "free speech for thee, but not for me" Vance will have a conniption. What to do?

This must have been the most underwhelming set of Nobel winners in recent history. I can't gauge science prizes. But literature, peace and economics were all kind of... meh? All brilliant people, no doubt, but didn't quite have that "oh yeah, what a glorious way to crown a majestic career" imo.

Who has a book recommendation? (it really really helps if you explain *why* you think is so good)

Bread and circuses.

There's a ton of attention on AI models and mathematics. If you're looking for an account of humans vying with advanced maths, absolutely go read Cédric Villani's book "Birth of a Theorem", which details his grappling with a problem that ultimately won him the Fields medal. It's so, so good.

There's clearly an AI prompt of "find me the email address of every journalist in the universe, and include it in my distribution list even if it is completely unrelated to their interests". Honestly it's become an absolute deluge in recent months. No point in even unsubscribing it's so dense.

If you're going to read a trashy novel – and everyone should read the odd trashy novel – you can do a lot worse than Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer, who just died. I remember reading it age 15 (not so terribly wise in retrospect) pretty much in one sitting, it's like 600 pages long.

In May I wrote about "Bre-entry"™️, which is back in the news. In short: the EU would *love* to have Britain back (a G7 country with a huge capital market and military). But the main concern will be the enduring fear it would try to leave again. www.economist.com/europe/2026/...

Re-upping my Charlemagne from last month on Europe's budding French debt problem. Alas it turns out to have hit the nail pretty close to the head. www.economist.com/europe/2026/...

S&P 500 unchanged over three months -- with earnings expectations up and price/earnings multiples down. This is *exactly* what you would expect to happen when interestst rates are being driven higher by a mix of growth and inflation. Sometimes markets make sense.

I think the flip-side of diplomatic immunity is you should have to stick to diplomatic business. You can't have a cadre of people shielded from repercussions in their business career because they have diplomatic ties. That was never the idea.

A town in Germany has banned the laying of Stolpersteine, the "stumbling stones" remembering victims of the Holocaust. A couple of years I interviewed Gunter Demnig, the artist who came up with the scheme, and met the family behind one of the over-100,000 stones. www.economist.com/europe/2023/...

Mainstream narrative of China shock decimating EU industry may be overblown • Over past decade, China accounted for just one quarter of growth in bloc's extra-EU imports • China's share of EU’s imports has barely moved over past decade, rising from 20.5% to 22.3% www.economist.com/business/202...

The first thing I will do when I am appointed global dictator is mandate that PDF/report pages have to match, ie if the report page says it's page 28 it HAS TO BE on page 28 of the bloody PDF.

Even as most voters still plump for pro-capitalist outfits, parties on the populist left in Europe feel they have the revolutionary wind in their sails. Register to discover why bit.ly/4rEE7I8 Illustration: Peter Schrank

So I think maybe I just figured out why @timeshighered.bsky.social has not reported anything negative about James Orr. I could very well be wrong, but here we go: In 2024, THE signed an agreement with Hungary's Culture and Innovation Ministry which oversees Hungarian higher education..

This is pretty incredible. Stocks of banks, travel agents, gyms, phone companies and other companies who benefit from "consumer inertia" got wallopped yesterday. The common thread: AI agents will allow people to get better deals. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

If Kissinger didn't have to give back his Nobel after Chile and East Timor then let no one ask this goodly man of peace to return the FIFA Peace Prize.

A couple of years ago, as Trump II was starting, I was looking for a way to write about Canada and the EU in a way that wasn't achingly dull. Here's a thought: why doesn't Canada join the EU? Well, as it happens… Some (bylined!) thoughts in The Economist www.economist.com/europe/2026/...

The CDU/CSU has shed one quarter of its voters in six months.

LMFAO -- Trump is holding an event at the White House right now but there's no audio because the press pool isn't there. The Newsmax host notes that this is an example of Trump's attacks on the press "backfiring just a little bit"

One of those things you don’t notice until it’s pointed out

French-German spreads now at 100bps, the highest level since July 2012 (the month of Draghi's "whatever it takes" speech). This is NOT Greek crisis territory. But it is becoming pretty uncomfortable both politically and economically.

My most contrarian opinion is that, while you have a constitutional right to print whatever you want, you have no constitutional right to an access badge to the White House. It's very disturbing media are excluded from briefings. But it is an order of magnitude less worrying than actual censorship.

People who have seen the De Gaulle films. Do I need to see them in order, and/or is one of them better than the other?

lol www.ft.com/content/65f4... Ozempic confidential: men share their experience of GLP-1s