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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><rss version="2.0"><channel><title>The Economist</title><description>The Economist全文RSS。获取更多全文RSS：https://feedx.net</description><link>https://www.economist.com</link><item><title><![CDATA[The absurd language used by job adverts]]></title><link><![CDATA[https://www.economist.com/business/2019/07/06/the-absurd-language-used-by-job-adverts]]></link><description><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190713_WBD001.jpg" alt=""><div><time itemProp="dateCreated" dateTime="2019-07-06T00:00:00Z">Jul 6th 2019</time></div><div itemProp="description"><p>THERE IS an old Army joke about a sergeant-major who asks his platoon whether any of them are interested in music. When four hands go up, the sergeant says “Right, lads. You can carry this grand piano down to the officers’ mess.”</p><p>Job recruitment has become more sophisticated since that story first did the rounds. Today’s careers require a lot more than just raw muscle but that sometimes makes jobs hard to define. The unfortunate result is a form of “adjective inflation” in recruitment ads as employers attempt to make routine tasks sound exciting. </p><p ></p><p>Candidates must sometimes wonder whether they are applying for a 9-to-5 role or to become part of the Marvel “Avengers” franchise. On the Indeed website, a cocktail bar was recently looking for “bartenders who are people-focused, quality-driven, (and) have superhero hospitality powers.” The ability to give customers the correct change was not mentioned.</p><p>Another British company advertised for “a call-centre Ninja, a superhero in people”, a job description which sounds a little over-the-top for what was in fact a role at an insurance broker in Isleworth. Lest you think that ad was an aberration, Indeed also featured jobs for “a black-belt prioritisation ninja”, and another demanding a “ninja-like attention to detail”. Short of turning up for the interview dressed from head-to-toe in black, and then sneaking up behind the managing director at his desk, it is hard to see how candidates could demonstrate their ninja-ness.</p><p>Not all companies require candidates to possess the qualities of a Japanese warrior, of course. Instead in an echo of the 1960s slogan, “make love, not war”, they require applicants to be passionate. The Bluewater shopping mall in south-east England was looking for “passionate sales-driven brand ambassadors” while “passionate crew members” were needed at a pretzel-bakery in west London for a wage of just £8.23 ($10.32) an hour.</p><p>Bartleby feels passionate about his wife, the fortunes of England’s sports teams and the absurd and alarming notion that Boris Johnson might become his country’s prime minister. But when it comes to work, passion may not always be the most appropriate emotion. Would patients prefer a “passionate” surgeon or one renowned for keeping a cool head? As emotions go, pride in one’s performance seems important, as does a degree of empathy for colleagues and other people (customers, patients, readers) affected by what you do. In any case, passion is pretty hard to maintain consistently for 40 hours a week, month after month.</p><p>There are undoubtedly jobs in the caring professions where people’s devout belief in the social usefulness of their role persuades them to put up with long hours and low pay. But selling pretzels or shoes is not in the same category.</p><p>Instead of talking about passion, employers should really be asking for enthusiasm. Workers may not learn to love their jobs, but with the right attitude, they can get enjoyment from the simple act of performing their task well. As well as keeping workers content, it ought to be enough for most bosses.</p><p>Alas, another newish management mantra is “bring your whole self to work”. This slogan, dreamed up by Mike Robbins, a motivational speaker, seems well intentioned. Workers should not have to suppress their personalities. They should not hide the fact that they are gay, for example, or caring for children or elderly relatives at home.</p><p>But it is easy to see how the slogan can be turned into the idea that workers should give 100% commitment all the time. That is asking too much. It is great when people enjoy their work but the fact is a lot of people are doing their jobs to pay the bills, and dreaming of the few weeks in the year when they can take a holiday. They may have hobbies and interests outside work, but the word “outside” is key. Those are the moments when the company has no claim on its employees. Workers should be allowed to leave parts of themselves at home.</p><p>Job applicants should take their cue from the kind of adverts that companies place. Think of it like a first date: if the other person started talking of marriage and how many children you will have together, you might avoid seeing them for a second time. So if a job advert talks about passion or superheroes, run away faster than a speeding Batmobile. Being a ninja should be reserved for teenage mutant turtles.</p></div></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Jul 2019 19:39:58 +0800</pubDate></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Women's World Cup is drawing record audiences]]></title><link><![CDATA[https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/07/05/the-womens-world-cup-is-drawing-record-audiences]]></link><description><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190713_WOC964.png" alt=""><div><time itemProp="dateCreated" dateTime="2019-07-05T00:00:00Z">Jul 5th 2019</time></div><div itemProp="description"><p><span>IT HAS BEEN described by some as David v Goliath. On July 7th America will face off against the Netherlands in the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup final in Lyon. As the three-time World Cup champion, America’s squad is the clear favourite. They have won 11 consecutive World Cup games; their last loss was in 2011. Yet for all their swagger (tea anyone?), the Americans failed to win any of their knockout matches by more than one goal. And the Netherlands’ team, the reigning European champions, have not trailed in any of their matches so far. During the knockout stage, they allowed just one goal. </span></p><p>Regardless of the outcome, the match is expected to draw one of the largest audiences in history. This year’s tournament has smashed TV viewing records. In Britain, England’s semi-final match against America, with nearly 12m viewers, was the most-watched TV programme of the year. France’s quarter-final match (also against America) attracted 10.7m viewers, making it this year’s most-watched French TV programme, too. Indeed, numbers are up across the board. In 2015, 750m people tuned in to watch the tournament on television; 86m watched on other platforms. This year FIFA expects viewership across all platforms to reach 1bn (the men’s tournament in 2018 was watched by 3.5bn people).</p><p ></p><p>The blockbuster audiences can be attributed in part to better-quality play. According to Opta, a sports-data firm, in this year’s women’s World Cup, the average number of passes per game—a measure which tends to be higher among higher-skilled teams in more competitive leagues—has increased to 830, up from 750 in 2015. That 10% increase exceeds the rise in any major men’s competition over the same period (see chart).</p><p>Money is another factor. Between 2013 and 2017 the number of professional and semi-professional female players in Europe nearly doubled, to 3,600. In 2017, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), which governs football in Europe, unbundled sponsorship rights for women’s football from the men’s, opening a pathway for brands to enter the market. According to Deloitte, a consultancy, around 60% of major women’s football teams have front-of-shirt sponsors that are different from their men’s team. By the next World Cup in 2023, the company reckons that figure could reach 100%.</p></div><br><hr><div>获取更多RSS：<br><a href="https://feedx.net" style="color:orange" target="_blank">https://feedx.net(永久域名，墙)</a> <br><a href="https://feedx.co" style="color:orange" target="_blank">https://feedx.co(临时域名)</a></div></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Jul 2019 03:41:28 +0800</pubDate></item><item><title><![CDATA[When American evangelicals fall out]]></title><link><![CDATA[https://www.economist.com/erasmus/2019/07/05/when-american-evangelicals-fall-out]]></link><description><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_BLP515.jpg" alt=""><div><time itemProp="dateCreated" dateTime="2019-07-05T15:26:12Z">Jul 5th 2019</time></div><div itemProp="description"><p>JULY 4TH of all days should be a time of amity for Americans. So many generations have joined in celebrating “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as basic human entitlements, whatever the myriad interpretations they have put on those exhilarating words.</p><p>At this year’s unusual festivities, featuring a thunderous military parade, President Donald Trump tried to strike a unifying note of sorts: “We all share the same heroes, the same home, the same heart, and we are all made by the same almighty God.” In truth, the nation divides down the middle in its visceral reaction to almost anything he does, and the parade was no exception. America cannot even agree, these days, on whether the signatories of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 were villains or heroes. Incorrigible slave-owners, as many on the left now say, or Christian crusaders?</p><p ></p><p>More striking still is the widening ideological and personal schism within the very group of citizens who should be a conservative president’s most natural supporters. That group is the white evangelical Christians, of whom 80% are thought to have voted for Mr Trump. Leading evangelicals are not just sparring over metaphysics, they are also trading insults. Think of the war of words that erupted after June 25th when Russell Moore, a distinguished theologian who heads the Ethics and Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, protested over the fate of migrant children on the Mexican border.</p><p>Mr Moore (pictured left), whose job involves running the public-policy arm of America’s largest Protestant denomination, had tweeted that conditions for youngsters trapped at the frontier with Mexico should “shock all our consciences” given that all “those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion.” </p><p>Jerry Falwell junior (pictured right), president of Liberty University and a champion among pro-Trump evangelicals, shot back with a personal sneer: “Who are you Dr Moore? Have you ever built an organisation of any sort from scratch? You’re nothing but an employee - a bureaucrat.” Other Trump-minded Christians chimed in to say that protesting over the immigration crisis amounted to an unpatriotic slur on the United States Border Patrol.</p><p>Mr Moore is a solid theological conservative and a leading figure in dialogue with Catholics, but also a longstanding critic of Mr Trump, in particular his personal morality. Those close to Mr Moore found Mr Falwell’s line of attack a bit rich: after all, he himself inherited the administration of Liberty University from his namesake and father, a pioneer of the Religious Right, rather than starting from zero. </p><p>Admittedly, evangelicals have never been a monolith. As behoves people who take their spiritual destiny seriously, they argue perpetually about many things: for example over whether the fate of a human soul is predetermined, or how exactly a believer can be redeemed from the “total depravity” which is, in the view of John Calvin (1509-1564), the natural state of humanity. Debates which raged between Europe’s 16th-century reformers are rumbling on in America’s influential seminaries.</p><p>But according to a new book, “Believe Me”, by John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, all these theological disagreements are being transcended by a more salient issue: whether or not to support Mr Trump wholeheartedly and therefore overlook his character flaws. These days, by far the most important distinction is between what Mr Fea calls “court evangelicals”, who stridently support the president and are rewarded with access to him, and every other kind of evangelical. As a new coalition lines up to fight next year’s election, some of the battle formations which formed in the 2016 contest are coming back into view, with even sharper spears.</p><p>Among those who inhabit the court, Mr Fea discerns three main groups: first, a section of the mainstream religious right whose origins go back to the 1980s; second, a cohort of independent “charismatics” who claim the gifts of the Pentecostal tradition (visions, miracles and direct revelations from God) but do not belong to any established Pentecostal group; and third, advocates of the “prosperity gospel” who resemble the second category but put emphasis on the material rewards which following their particular version of Christianity will bring. What defines all these “courtiers” is an insistence that loyalty to Mr Trump must be unconditional. In their world, the president is presented not just as the least-worst political option whose merits outweigh his flaws, but as a man assigned by God to restore America to its divinely set course, and therefore almost above human criticism. </p><p>To get round the problems posed by Mr Trump’s ruthless business career, messy personal life and scatological language, they use several arguments, of which one is a comparison with Persia’s King Cyrus, who liberated the Jews from captivity in Babylon and allowed them to return to Israel. From the Jewish or Christian point of view, Cyrus was a pagan, not a worshipper of the one God, but he was still an instrument of God’s purpose. Likewise Mr Trump can be regarded as a divinely ordained ruler, regardless of any personal flaws. Indeed, as Mr Fea notes, the more strongly people believe in a divine hand in history, the more open they are to the idea that God can choose anybody at all to serve his inscrutable purpose.</p><p>Another popular view holds that Mr Trump’s rude and rumbustious character is really a merit in a time of great geopolitical and spiritual danger. As Robert Jefress, a megachurch builder and Trump favourite, told a newspaper in his native Texas: “When I’m looking for a leader who’s gonna sit across the table from a nuclear Iran, or who’s gonna be intent on destroying [the jihadists of] ISIS, I couldn’t care less about that leader’s temperament or his tone or his vocabulary. I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find.”</p><p>More pragmatically, pro-Trump evangelicals point out that the president has already given them many things they were hoping for: appointing conservative judges, recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and advancing “religious liberty” as conservatives define it, including the right of Christian campuses to impose their own standards on student behaviour and academic life. Having handed the evangelicals so many longed-for prizes, and offered more, why should people jeopardise this by carping when the president occasionally disappoints them? At its purest, Mr Fea adds, pro-Trump sentiment among evangelicals exudes a kind of fascination with political power as an end in itself.</p><p>This differs sharply from other Christian approaches to earthly politics, including some which are popular among non-conformist Americans. Among Baptists, there is a still-strong school of thought which insists on the highest possible “wall of separation” between church and state, a phrase coined by Thomas Jefferson. Others recall the Biblical prophets whose mission was to speak truth to power. Others still, drawing on New Testament imagery, say Christians’ response to worldly authority should be one of “salt and light”: in other words they should challenge rulers by exposing their hypocrisy, but without aspiring to wield power themselves. </p><p>As an example of a rigorously conservative Baptist who keeps his distance from Mr Trump, take Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who said during the 2016 campaign that the candidate’s character flaws risked destroying the moral credibility of evangelicals. As a prolific commentator on politics, he always has harsh words for America’s political left and holds traditionalist views on social and bioethical questions. But in the currentwith-us-or-against-us climate, people inside the Trump circle regard Mr Mohler as an adversary, not a critical friend, according to Mr Fea. </p><p>In fact, there is a neatish convergence between debates over the present day, and disagreements over America’s foundation. As Mr Fea notes, those who insist that Mr Trump serves a divine purpose are usually the same as those who see the founding fathers of 1776 as instruments of God. </p><p>Other American Christians read the Declaration of Independence as a definitive break with old-world ideas of divinely anointed rulers, combined with a bold insistence that man must take responsibility for determining his own destiny in the light of reason, conscience and experiment. That view is not inconsistent with belief in a deity but it stresses the freedom that God has placed on man’s shoulders.</p><p>Who is right about 1776? Depending on which founding father you choose and the context, America’s creators can be seen as prayerful Christians or as free-thinking products of the enlightenment. The one thing the 1776 fathers all seemed to have felt was that the sectarian wars which had torn Europe apart should not divide the new republic, and the best way of avoiding that was a regime of religious freedom. In the Trump era, the divisions that imperil America’s cohesion are about the definition of that freedom.</p></div><br><hr><div>获取更多RSS：<br><a href="https://feedx.net" style="color:orange" target="_blank">https://feedx.net(永久域名，墙)</a> <br><a href="https://feedx.co" style="color:orange" target="_blank">https://feedx.co(临时域名)</a></div></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Jul 2019 00:39:55 +0800</pubDate></item><item><title><![CDATA[How do central banks deal with a riskier world?]]></title><link><![CDATA[https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2019/07/05/how-do-central-banks-deal-with-a-riskier-world]]></link><description><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_blp516_1.jpg" alt=""><div><time itemProp="dateCreated" dateTime="2019-07-05T16:00:55Z">Jul 5th 2019</time></div><div itemProp="description"><p><strong>THE GOVERNOR of the Bank of England</strong> explains how central banks are preparing for a riskier world. <strong>Mark Carney, who is due to step down next year</strong>, singles out climate change as a significant emerging risk for insurance companies and markets. But what can central bankers do about it? He also responds to critics who say he&#x27;s overstepping the bounds of his role and discusses why he feels that his Brexit warnings have been vindicated. And, was he a fan of Stormzy&#x27;s Glastonbury performance? Anne McElvoy hosts. Runtime: 24 min</p><p><div ><iframe src="//embed.acast.com/theeconomistasks/theeconomistasks-markcarney" width="560" height="215" frameBorder="0" scrolling="auto"></iframe></div></p><p ></p><p>Listen on: <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1108555682">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://open.spotify.com/show/7vD0FHksvrnjDVSktbdCVF">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYWNhc3QuY29tL3RoZWVjb25vbWlzdGFza3M">Google</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttp://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=142125&amp;refid=stpr">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/The-Economist-Asks-p999213/">TuneIn</a></p></div><br><hr><div>获取更多RSS：<br><a href="https://feedx.net" style="color:orange" target="_blank">https://feedx.net(永久域名，墙)</a> <br><a href="https://feedx.co" style="color:orange" target="_blank">https://feedx.co(临时域名)</a></div></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jul 2019 23:39:56 +0800</pubDate></item><item><title><![CDATA[Now playing: yacht rock]]></title><link><![CDATA[https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/07/05/now-playing-yacht-rock]]></link><description><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_BKP510.jpg" alt=""><div><time itemProp="dateCreated" dateTime="2019-07-05T15:34:06Z">Jul 5th 2019</time></div><div itemProp="description"><p>LISTEN TO yacht rock, and an image starts to form in your mind: one of ocean views from California’s Highway 1, cold beers and blood-orange sunsets. The sound is smooth, with a soft bassline and minimal drums, and it combines elements of funk, jazz and R’n’B. The piano carries the melody, but often gives way to gentle guitar or saxophone solos. The songs’ lyrics might explore what it means to live a carefree life, but melancholic themes recur, too—particularly yearning or foolish love. </p><p>The subgenre was born in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the early 1970s. Many of those who had protested against war and preached free love in the decade before had grown up, settled down and bought homes and cars. Songwriters found a home for their gently catchy tunes on radio stations that were aimed at the drivetime listener. Seals and Crofts’s appealing “Summer Breeze” (1972) was an early hit, soon followed by Steely Dan’s “Reelin’ in the Years”. The Doobie Brothers (pictured) dominated the airwaves with their more upbeat, finger-tapping rhythms, known as the “Doobie Bounce”, in songs such as “It Keeps You Runnin” (1976) and the Grammy award-winning “What a Fool Believes” (1979). Toto perfected the artform in “Africa”, which reached the number one spot on America’s Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1983, and in “Rosanna”.</p><p ></p><p>But listeners soon tired of the music’s earnestness. MTV had launched in 1981 and was keenly promoting New Wave music, which relied heavily on electronic sounds and disco influences. Compared with Duran Duran’s “Rio”, Hall and Oates’s “I Can’t Go For That” lacked boldness and urgency. Other music fans had turned to the grittier and less aspirational tunes provided by alternative-rock bands such as R.E.M.. Yacht rock came to be dismissed as schmaltzy and uncool, consigned to wedding parties and dusty record collections. </p><figure itemType="https://schema.org/ImageObject" ><div ><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190713_WOC222.png" alt="" srcSet="/sites/default/files/imagecache/200-width/20190713_WOC222.png 200w,
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/sites/default/files/imagecache/1600-width/20190713_WOC222.png 1600w" sizes="(min-width: 600px) 640px, calc(100vw - 20px)"/></div></figure><p>Now it has come back into fashion again. An online series, released in 2005, dramatised the careers of American “soft rock” stars and coined the term “yacht rock”. An official playlist on Spotify has hundreds of thousands of followers. Toto’s “Africa” enjoys enormous popularity: it has been played nearly 600m times on the music-streaming service; its video, first released in 1983, has been watched more than 500m times on YouTube. Google searches for “yacht rock” have steadily climbed since the early 2010s (see chart), with spikes in traffic in the summer months. “I Can Go For That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock”, a two-part documentary, was broadcast on the BBC in June. </p><figure role="presentation" itemType="https://schema.org/WPAdBlock"></figure><p>With this renewed attention has come some debate over what qualifies as yacht rock. The Spotify playlist features artists such as George Michael, Billy Joel and Fleetwood Mac alongside Journey, Foreigner and Kenny Loggins. The term “roughly corrals music that shares a DNA”, says Katie Puckrik, the host of “I Can Go For That”. It is not “groundbreaking, manifesto-making music”, she says, but “a mellow, easy, teflon-covered sound”. </p><p>That DNA is evident in the work of modern hitmakers: listen to “Fragments of Time” by Daft Punk, “Fun, Fun, Fun” by Pharrell Williams (a self-confessed Steely Dan fan) and “White Sky” by Vampire Weekend and you will find the same light melodies. <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/06/24/late-night-feelings-mark-ronsons-new-album-is-a-delight">“Late Night Feelings”, Mark Ronson’s recent album</a>, brings modern production techniques to bear on the same retro sound. Thundercat took his tribute to the era even further, featuring vocals from Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins on his song “Show You The Way”. </p><p>People may be tuning in to yacht rock now for the same reason they did in the 1970s and early ’80s. Back then the music provided a blissful escape from the news of the Watergate scandal, the bloody end of the Vietnam war, the energy crisis and economic stagnation. It lifted you out of your car or your office, and transported you to sunny California. “A sign of the times is what ends up being mainstream music,” Ms Puckrik says. “Because there was so much upheaval and dissatisfaction, it was the perfect time for this music to flourish.” The presidential scandals may be different, and new environmental anxieties have arisen, but the satisfaction provided by a feel-good tune remains the same. </p><p><div ><iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/47ljKoQq8eeSLDVlNpbP72" width="300" height="380" frameBorder="0" scrolling="auto"></iframe></div></p></div></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jul 2019 23:39:55 +0800</pubDate></item><item><title><![CDATA[“The country still bears the scars of its economic crisis”—Greece heads to the polls]]></title><link><![CDATA[https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2019/07/05/the-country-still-bears-the-scars-of-its-economic-crisis-greece-heads-to-the-polls]]></link><description><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_blm512_0.jpg" alt=""><div><time itemProp="dateCreated" dateTime="2019-07-05T11:30:29Z">Jul 5th 2019</time></div><div itemProp="description"><p>KYRIAKOS MITSOTAKIS looks likely to lead his <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.economist.com/europe/2019/07/04/family-trouble"><strong>New Democracy party</strong></a> to victory in this weekend’s snap election in Greece. But can he deliver on all the promises of his big-tent campaign? We examine the controversy and the politics surrounding the <strong><a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/07/04/what-caused-the-shameful-scenes-at-americas-southern-border">detention of migrants at America’s southern border</a></strong>. And it’s clear that <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.economist.com/game-theory/2019/06/24/womens-football-is-flourishing-on-the-pitch-and-off-it"><strong>the quality of women’s football is rocketing</strong></a>—we’ve got the data to prove it. Runtime: 22 min</p><p><div ><iframe src="//embed.acast.com/theintelligencepodcast/f4bad0ef-7637-49e3-a756-53b110c08586" width="560" height="215" frameBorder="0" scrolling="auto"></iframe></div></p><p ></p><p>Listen on: <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1449631195?mt=2&amp;ls=1">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://open.spotify.com/show/12zKAMNyS2GNentUzxq9QN">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYWNhc3QuY29tL3RoZWludGVsbGlnZW5jZXBvZGNhc3Q">Google</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=357733&amp;refid=stpr">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://tunein.com/podcasts/News--Politics-Podcasts/The-Intelligence-p1186979/">TuneIn</a></p></div></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jul 2019 19:39:56 +0800</pubDate></item><item><title><![CDATA[The murky world of Madagascar’s roaring vanilla trade]]></title><link><![CDATA[https://www.economist.com/news/2019/07/05/the-murky-world-of-madagascars-roaring-vanilla-trade]]></link><description><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_EFP001.jpg" alt=""><div><time itemProp="dateCreated" dateTime="2019-07-05T00:00:00Z">Jul 5th 2019</time></div><div itemProp="description"><p><em>This piece is from <a href="https://www.economist.comhttp://www.1843magazine.com/">1843</a>, our sister magazine of ideas, lifestyle and culture. It was published in the June/July 2019 issue.</em></p><p>I follow Felicité Raminisoa and her father, Romain Randiambololona, up a narrow track along the forested slopes of her family’s farm in southern Madagascar. It is lychee season and, as we walk, we break off branches of fruit and peel off the pink, spiky shells. Large yellow jackfruit grow like Chinese lanterns among loquat and clove trees, pepper vines and coffee plants. Sapphire dragonflies flash by as they chase each other over ponds of tilapia dammed into the valley. The air is muggy under the banana leaves but grows fresher as we climb. In all directions we can see vanilla vines winding around tree trunks. Each zigzag stem has been trained so that it grows no higher than Raminisoa can reach. Every so often she stops at a pale-yellow bloom and parts its waxy petals. With a spike snapped from an orange tree, she delicately scrapes away the membrane separating the anther from the stigma in order to pollinate the flower. This is a task that requires perfect timing. Each flower must be pollinated by hand on the morning it blooms or the beans won’t sprout.</p><p ></p><p>The family began to plant vanilla vines about 20 years ago mostly as “decoration”, says Randiambololona, his big grin punctuated by a missing tooth. At first the family sold fresh green vanilla pods to tourists, surprised that they would pay anything for them. But in 2014 the price of vanilla began to rise. Over the next three years it went from less than $40 per kilogram to more than $600 per kilogram. It felt like money was growing on their trees. In 2016 Raminisoa travelled to the northern region of Sava, where vanilla has been grown for generations, to learn how to cure the green pods into the commodity that was in such demand: pungent and wizened black beans.</p><p>It can be difficult to grow vanilla in plantations, where it becomes susceptible to disease. But the humid heights of Madagascar offer the right climate for the plant to thrive. And the large pool of poor smallholders on the island provides abundant workers to grow this labour-intensive plant.</p><p>Curing vanilla pods requires precise judgment and intuition, like winemaking. The beans, which grow in long green-fingered bunches, are harvested individually. Green vanilla must be blanched in hot water at a temperature of between 62°C and 64°C within a week of being picked. Over the next three months, the vanilla is wrapped in blankets, then massaged and spread in the sun to dry. Green vanilla is flavourless. The enzymes that transform the glucovanillin in the plant into vanillin – the molecule that gives vanilla its distinctive aroma – emerge only through curing. One expert described the smell of high-quality cured vanilla to me as a combination of prunes, leather and Play-Doh.</p><p>When Raminisoa returned from the north she built a curing hut on the slope behind her parents’ house. “You have to have everything prepared,” she says. “Charcoal to heat the water, large pots, blankets and drying racks. In the north they have a special song they sing, about paying attention, about having patience.” Working with vanilla, she explains, “needs discipline and passion”.</p><p>The family income rose with the price of vanilla. But this has put their crops – and even their lives – at risk. In 2015 the whole family congregated for a funeral. When they returned home they found that all the trees in the lower part of their property had been stripped of their pods. Everyone knew who the culprits were, says Raminisoa, but the police did nothing.</p><p>Few Malagasys have much confidence in the state. A coup in 2009 scared away foreign investors and tourists. The soaring price of vanilla has been accompanied by an opportunistic crime wave: raiders rip out whole vines to transplant them elsewhere and armed robbers hold up warehouses. Estimates vary but upwards of 15% of the crop is stolen each year.</p><figure itemType="https://schema.org/ImageObject" ><div ><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_EFP002.jpg" alt="" srcSet="/sites/default/files/imagecache/200-width/20190706_EFP002.jpg 200w,
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/sites/default/files/imagecache/1600-width/20190706_EFP002.jpg 1600w" sizes="(min-width: 600px) 640px, calc(100vw - 20px)"/></div></figure><p>Like vanilla farmers all over Madagascar, Raminisoa’s father and brothers now patrol their fields at night. They band together with neighbours and hired guards, and brandish machetes. Bush justice can be brutal. There are stories of beatings, even decapitations. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights says that over 150 Malagasy died between 2016 and 2018 because of vigilantism.</p><p>Over the past two years, despite thefts, a drought in 2016 and rain during the drying period last season, Raminisoa’s family has earned more than $20,000 in a country where the average income is less than a dollar a day. Previously the family scratched a bare living from growing bananas, coffee and rice. The vanilla boom has enabled them to buy a cow, a new electricity dynamo and a rice-planting machine that they hope to rent out. Raminisoa bought a house in the nearby town so her four children can live closer to their school. She finished her education at 13; her kids, she hopes, will go to university.</p><p>Though Madagascar now produces 80% of the world’s vanilla, the vine is native to Mexico. The Maya were the first to cultivate it in the jungles of the Yucatan peninsular. They flavoured their chocolate drink with the spice. When the Spanish conquistadores arrived early in the 16th century, they took both cacao and vanilla back to Europe. By the end of the 18th century, Mexico was exporting a million vanilla beans a year to Europe.</p><p>Vanilla was considered a luxury. Its delicate flavour is best expressed in the presence of fat, which is why the creams and custards of the elite’s pastry chefs became its natural milieu. One of its earliest appearances was in a recipe for “vanilla ice” in a cookery book published in Naples in the 1690s. Thomas Jefferson fell in love with French food when he served as the American ambassador to France in the 1780s. He transcribed many recipes including one for “ice cream”, using egg-yolk custard simmered with “a stick of vanilla”. When he became president in 1801, Jefferson served these dishes in the White House – his import eventually became a classic American desert.</p><p>But for well over a century real vanilla remained out of the reach of most Americans. Spain controlled the Mexican trade and though a number of people tried to grow vanilla elsewhere, the blooms failed to produce beans because they lacked natural pollinators. It took a young slave boy called Edmond Albius, working on a plantation in the French colony of Réunion, to discover a method for hand-pollinating vanilla flowers in the 1840s. His technique quickly spread to nearby Madagascar, where French administrators encouraged its cultivation.</p><p>Artificial vanilla was developed around the same time. Nearly 200 molecules give vanilla its subtle flavour. Artificial vanilla synthesises just one of these – vanillin. This used to be obtained from cheaper products such as cloves and wood (today the vast majority of artificial vanilla is derived from petrochemical by-products). The development of artificial vanilla went hand in hand with the industrialisation of food production in the mid-to-late 19th century. New manufacturers such as Fry’s, Cadbury’s and Nestlé all used it at that time to make their chocolate silkier and more buttery. Vanilla essence (as distinct from vanilla extract, which is the concentration of natural vanilla pods in alcohol) found its way into cakes and biscuits. Vanilla is now used in thousands of the food products we find in our supermarkets. Over the years, it has come to describe anything that is bland, unchallenging and ordinary.</p><p>Häagen-Dazs shook things up. In the 1990s the company started selling its ice cream as a premium, indulgent treat. Their advertising campaign was sexy and risqué – beautiful people tempering their lust with a ball of the frozen stuff. It was a triumph of branding. The name Häagen-Dazs was confected to suggest European sophistication (the firm is American). The picture of a vanilla bloom on the carton drew attention to the vanilla extract that gave the ice cream its rich flavour. The Häagen-Dazs moment was one cause of the vanilla rush.</p><p>Another one was broader and more recent. Over the past 15 years, food companies have faced increasing pressure from consumers to use natural, ethically sourced ingredients. Flavour companies began to trace beans back to their original villages and farms in order to earn certifications of fair trade and sustainability that commanded top prices. In 2015 Nestlé announced that it would eliminate artificial flavouring from its chocolates sold in America, citing consumer interest in more natural ingredients. Other multinationals followed. It didn’t hurt that the price of natural vanilla was low. Among artisanal and mass-market producers alike, flecks of vanilla became a proxy for quality.</p><p>Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, according to the World Bank. Near-impossible logistics reinforce its poverty. The island is close to the size of France, and in the rainy season the bush roads turn into impassable rivers of mud. It can take four days to drive from Sava to Antananarivo, the capital, a distance of 550km. The towns boast banks, public transportation, clinics and high schools. The bush has almost no amenities.</p><p>Even within rural regions in this small nation there are clear variations in wealth. In the Central Highlands, where the hills are terraced into rice paddies, hand-pulled rickshaws are the main form of transport in the towns. When I flew north, to the heart of vanilla county, I could see new fleets of yellow motorised tuk-tuks. On the drive, I noticed fancy new “vanilla mansions”. Several storeys high, painted red or bright blue and mounted with balconies, these are fenced off by concrete balustrades and garishly lit up at night in a country where most people have no access to the electricity grid. Sava is in the grip of a heady vanilla boom. By some estimates, over $800m poured into the region in the 2017 season alone as foreign buyers bought vanilla.</p><p>For many years Madagascar&#x27;s government set the price of vanilla at around $80 a kilogram. Harvests were variable and sometimes ravaged by cyclones. A portion of the crop was stockpiled as insurance against years when yields were low. This forestalled shortages and prevented price fluctuations. Between 80,000 and 100,000 smallholders sold their green pods to middlemen known as “collectors”. These, in turn, sold them to preparers, who owned curing warehouses, or exporters (often Chinese-Malagasy families who had been in the business for generations). The beans were then bought by international traders or large foreign flavour companies such as Symrise and Firmenich in Europe, and Virginia Dare in America. These rendered the vanilla into high-quality extract to supply the big multinationals: Nestlé, Unilever, Mars.</p><p>It was a stable if swampy system, but not all buyers felt they had fair access to Madagascar’s vanilla. In the early 1990s, as part of a wider privatisation policy, the World Bank insisted that vanilla prices be allowed to float. Yet no market institutions or regulations were put in place. In the ensuing free-for-all, the price of vanilla plummeted to below $40 a kilogram and farmers neglected the crop.</p><p>The path from pod to pot of ice cream is a long one and could not be hurried in the face of rising demand. Many vanilla vines grow on forested slopes and often lie several days walk from paved road. A newly planted vine takes three years to bear pods. Even once it does, says Henry Todd of Virginia Dare, it can take another two years for the fruit to reach a tub of ice cream. Todd, a boyish American in his early 50s, is the son of a vanilla trader who sent him to France for his education so that he could learn the language of the flavour fluently. He has spent his working life in Madagascar immersed in vanilla production. “The supply chain is long and complex and a little bit opaque because of the lack of infrastructure,” he says. For many years, collectors acted as the hinge in the market, linking farmers with exporters, the bush with the road. They brokered deals and financed loans.</p><p><div ><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oguPMXcrOVY" width="640" height="360" frameBorder="0" scrolling="auto"></iframe></div></p><p>After the market was liberalised – but before the current boom – exporters generally set the price of vanilla. They weighed the expected global demand against the size and quality of a harvest. But as demand rose, many collectors – the middle men in the system – tried to pay low prices to growers while selling to exporters for much more. By 2017, some exporters were paying exorbitant sums for poor quality beans. As the price mounted, speculation and stock-piling became rife. Several hundred collectors multiplied into thousands of middlemen frantically buying and selling, often to each other. Farmers played the market too, half curing their vanilla and then preserving it in vacuum packs until the price rose again. This created more fluctuations in the market and damaged the all-important vanillin content of the beans.</p><p>“Every week, a different price,” shrugs one man, hanging out with a group of small-time collectors on a side street in Antalaha, the vanilla capital of Madagascar. “Last year was good, we had many millions,” says his friend, who wears a medallion around his neck and has tattoos on both shoulders. “A lot of people bought four-by-fours, big motors. We bought everything, even leather sofas.”</p><p>I spent almost two weeks in Sava observing the vanilla market. Every time I thought I had worked out the relationship between supply and demand, quality and processing, the hierarchy of middlemen and the relative price of green and black vanilla, I found that a new factor – currency fluctuations, corruption, cyclones – confounded me anew. “That’s about right,” Todd sympathises. “That’s one of the things vanilla people love about the business: it’s never the same season twice.” But why did the price rise so high? Though demand had risen, it hadn’t grown tenfold in three years. And although the Enawo cyclone blew through Sava in March 2017, it didn&#x27;t destroy 90% of the vanilla vines.</p><p>In 2018, the price fell back a little to around $400, from a peak of over $600. Foreign buyers like Todd believe that the industry is still in “crisis” and publically rue the deterioration of quality caused by speculation. But privately, Todd and almost everyone else I speak to agree that money from the illegal rosewood trade fuelled the vanilla boom.</p><p>Rosewood is a beautiful hardwood that grows abundantly in the forests of Madagascar’s national parks in the Sava region. It is prized for its deep-red hue, particularly by furniture-makers in China. Logging from national parks is illegal but has always been carried out on a small scale. But after storms toppled many trees in 2007, Madagascar’s president granted export licences to several traders to buy wood felled by “acts of god”. Some interpreted this as permission to start cutting down trees again. The brokers of illegal rosewood sales often operated in vanilla regions and had connections to vanilla collectors.</p><p>In 2010 the international community, concerned about deforestation, pushed the Madagascan government to close the loophole allowing rosewood exports. The vast sums that had been made needed an outlet. Much of the rise in vanilla prices seems to have been fuelled by money laundering.</p><p>Todd and executives at other large flavour companies have been grappling with the varying quality and price fluctuations of Madagascan vanilla for years (along with logistical challenges, such as transporting tens of thousands of dollars in rucksacks across the bush to pay for pods). Virginia Dare’s main client is General Mills, which owns Häagen-Dazs, one of the world’s largest customers of natural vanilla. No matter the price, Häagen-Dazs’s brand identity requires its use.</p><p>In 2017 the quality of beans plummeted: so much green vanilla was being stolen from the vine that many farmers were picking their pods early and unripe. Even so, prices were higher than they had ever been. Todd and other buyers realised, with increased urgency, that the only way forward was to strengthen direct relationships with farmers and cut out the middlemen who were manipulating the market.</p><figure itemType="https://schema.org/ImageObject" ><div ><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_EFP003.jpg" alt="" srcSet="/sites/default/files/imagecache/200-width/20190706_EFP003.jpg 200w,
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/sites/default/files/imagecache/1600-width/20190706_EFP003.jpg 1600w" sizes="(min-width: 600px) 640px, calc(100vw - 20px)"/></div></figure><p>Over the past four seasons, Virginia Dare has worked directly with a farmers’ co-operative in the village of Belambo, north of Sambava, to ensure that they have a reliable supply of vanilla. They pay farmers a fair price and train a new generation to cure the stuff. Belambo is 18km from the paved road, and takes an hour to reach on the back of a dirt bike. Chickens peck at scraps; zebu, a species of humped cattle, loll under jackfruit trees. At a handful of “hotelys” – small eateries – you can buy a dish of delicious zebu stew with local red rice. Yet the young men wear new American sports gear and rev shiny dirt bikes. Some sit in the shade chewing qat or playing music from handheld speakers. “Three or four years ago, the bush was silent,” Todd tells me, “now it’s full of music.” It’s also better lit than it used to be. Almost every house has a cheap Chinese solar panel on the roof to provide electricity.</p><p>According to Madagascar’s Central Bank, between $340m and $450m is stashed under the new mattresses in Sava. Many farmers don’t trust the banks, which anyway are far away and hard to reach. Most people pay their day-to-day expenses using mobile-phone accounts. But there is no infrastructure to handle the large number of bank notes needed for transactions during vanilla season. Prices in Sava are often double those in Antananarivo, the capital. At $10, a chicken costs more in Belambo than it does in Paris.</p><p>In 2015, the first year that the vanilla price jumped, everyone splashed out. One man apparently filled an inflatable pool with beer; another took to sleeping on four mattresses. People treated themselves to mobile phones, solar panels, TVs and dirt bikes. In the second year people went for four-wheel-drive pick-ups, rebuilt their houses with new wood, corrugated iron or even cement, which is incredibly expensive to transport into the bush. In the third year, they bought houses in towns so that their children could attend better schools. Now people are beginning to think about longer-term investments: buying land and starting small businesses, making furniture to satisfy new demand.</p><p>Rabezaka, who is probably in his 60s and is one of the older Belambo co-operative farmers, rolls his eyes at the excesses of some of the villagers. He has seen it before: in 2003 the vanilla price briefly shot up to $500 a kilogram after a cyclone hit, but soon crashed. That year he earned enough to build and furnish a wooden house. This time he has rebuilt his home with concrete and painted it pink, his wife’s favourite colour. And, he says, “it was the cheapest.” His wife, Juliette, wears an old T-shirt on which is written “Burberry”, a gold chain with a medallion and gold earrings. His granddaughter, Suamarie, who looks about 11, tells me she likes mathematics and wants to become a doctor. “And a vanilla farmer!” calls out her grandfather.</p><p>When I ask the women how their lives have changed since the vanilla boom, they laugh as if to say “not much”. Juliette shows me her kitchen, a low hut adjacent to the house, and squats down to add more wood to the fire under a big stew pot, coughing and squinting to show me how uncomfortable and smoky the unventilated space was. But, she says, they eat much better food now. For the first time they can buy yogurt in the village. “The thing we don’t know is how to prepare the vanilla to cook with,” admits Rabezaka. I say that the best thing is to infuse it into milk or custard. Rabezaka and his wife and daughter are unimpressed; vanilla does not feature in Malagasy cuisine.</p><p>Rabezaka, like the rest of his generation in Belambo, rues the social changes that prosperity has brought, even as he enjoys the new comforts. People had once been willing to lend a hand when required, he says. Now they expect to be paid. Girls flock around the rich young collectors. Boys don’t want to continue their education. All anyone wants is a piece of the vanilla pie. And it has become less safe.</p><p>I visited the Virginia Dare warehouse, where members of the Malagasy army were guarding $5m-worth of vanilla. Workers – mostly women – are frisked by hand every time they leave. An alliance of local vanilla networks, exporters and the military have tamped down the violence. But the benefits of the boom have been unevenly distributed. A small tax is supposed to be levied on each vanilla transaction, but most sellers sidestep this. Export taxes are imposed according to volume rather than value. The Malagasy government has made little effort to cash in.</p><figure itemType="https://schema.org/ImageObject" ><div ><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_EFP004.jpg" alt="" srcSet="/sites/default/files/imagecache/200-width/20190706_EFP004.jpg 200w,
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/sites/default/files/imagecache/1600-width/20190706_EFP004.jpg 1600w" sizes="(min-width: 600px) 640px, calc(100vw - 20px)"/></div></figure><p>The contrast between private wealth and impoverished public services is striking. In Belambo people complain that there is no drinking water, that the school building is dilapidated, the teachers barely literate and that there is no clinic or doctor nearby. The lack of services is so axiomatic in Madagascar that it rarely provokes much outrage.</p><p>In recent years, some multinationals have begun to fill the void. Symrise, a big flavour company, has set up a health-insurance scheme for several dozen villages. Alban Bonnet, their sustainability manager, explains that these efforts are part charity, part capacity-building and part self-interest.</p><p>Many observers believe that a crash will occur soon – and fear that villagers are ill prepared for it. Todd’s great hope, shared with farmers in Belambo, is that the village co-operative will eventually cure its own vanilla and become an exporter in its own right. It would be much easier, says Todd, to take delivery of cured black vanilla without the investment and complications of operating in Sava. It’s a model that would change the relationship between Western consumers and developing-world producers, eradicating tiers of middlemen. But the volatility of the vanilla market means that multinationals could ultimately be forced to look elsewhere for supplies. Historically market corrections have been catastrophic; most buyers would prefer a stable and fair price – around $100 to $150 per kilogram – to a dirt-cheap but potentially volatile one.</p><p>High prices have driven down demand by 30% from its peak, as food companies have started to incorporate artificial vanilla again. Some artisanal ice-cream makers no longer offer the most basic flavour. Gilles Marchal, a Parisian pâtissière, says that many of his colleagues have stopped using vanilla altogether. “When the price got to €500 ($560) a kilo they just said, ‘that’s enough’.”</p><p>In December 2018, the talk in Sava was of the lateness and paucity of the vanilla blooms. A poor harvest could send the price soaring again, prolonging the uncertainty. But it could also be the last gasp for the pod boom. Indonesia, Uganda and Papua New Guinea are all planting vanilla. American agriculture researchers are exploring ways to genetically engineer a more labour-efficient plant.</p><p>The villagers of Belambo are enjoying the glory days while they last. I watch as one of the new bicycle vendors arrives with an insulated box from which he produces milk-flavoured choc-ices at 20 cents a pop. It’s the kind of consumption – an everyday luxury – that flourishing economies are built on. I ask 12-year-old Willis Law if he likes ice cream. “Of course,” he says, “it’s good to have something cold when it’s hot, and it’s rich and cold and sweet.” The kids lick and slurp, then cheerfully drop the wrappers onto the road.</p><p><em>Wendell Steavenson is a writer based in Paris</em></p></div></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jul 2019 17:39:59 +0800</pubDate></item><item><title><![CDATA[Are extraterrestrials extra patriotic?]]></title><link><![CDATA[https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/07/04/are-extraterrestrials-extra-patriotic]]></link><description><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_WOC365.png" alt=""><div><time itemProp="dateCreated" dateTime="2019-07-04T00:00:00Z">Jul 4th 2019</time></div><div itemProp="description"><p>IN THE FINAL scene of “Independence Day”, a blockbuster film from 1996, Captain Steve Hiller (Will Smith), having saved the world from alien annihilation, watches as exploding debris from a UFO mothership lights up the sky, just in time for the American holiday. Turning to his stepson, he says with a smile, “Didn’t I promise you fireworks?” For Americans, such pyrotechnic displays are an important Fourth of July tradition. Can the same be said for UFOs?</p><p>Perhaps. According to the National UFO Reporting Centre (NUFORC), an American non-profit organisation that has collected reports of unidentified flying objects since 1974, UFO sightings tend to spike on July 4th. Between 1995 and 2018, around 2% of all sightings recorded by NUFORC fell on this date; seven times more than would be expected by chance. What explains this strange phenomenon?</p><p ></p><p>Hollywood may be partly to blame. In the two years before the release of the Will Smith flick, NUFORC recorded an average of seven UFO sightings on July 4th (eight in 1995 and six in 1996). In 1997, a year after aliens burst onto the big screen, there were 74—more than ten times as many. Traditions of the July 4th holiday may also help explain the spike. Independence Day is typically spent outdoors. Heavy alcohol use is not uncommon. Intoxication may cause some to confuse celebratory fireworks with alien aircraft.</p><figure itemType="https://schema.org/ImageObject" ><div ><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_WOC367.png" alt="" srcSet="/sites/default/files/imagecache/200-width/20190706_WOC367.png 200w,
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/sites/default/files/imagecache/1600-width/20190706_WOC367.png 1600w" sizes="(min-width: 600px) 640px, calc(100vw - 20px)"/></div></figure><p>UFO sightings cannot be blamed entirely on drunkenness. They often have earthly explanations. Some of the biggest spikes in reported UFO sightings in recent years have later been explained by meteors, missiles or debris from satellites re-entering the atmosphere. Or so the government would have you believe.</p></div></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jul 2019 03:40:59 +0800</pubDate></item><item><title><![CDATA[Ari Aster returns with “Midsommar”]]></title><link><![CDATA[https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019/07/04/ari-aster-returns-with-midsommar]]></link><description><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/20190706_BKP508.jpg" alt=""><div><time itemProp="dateCreated" dateTime="2019-07-04T17:19:40Z">Jul 4th 2019</time></div><div itemProp="description"><p>THE NEW wave of high-class horror rolls on with “Midsommar”, a sinister, slow-burning film by Ari Aster, which is being hailed by many critics as one of the best of the year. Following the director’s acclaimed debut, “Hereditary”, Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” and “Us”, John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place” and Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria”, “Midsommar” is a horror movie with crossover potential. It has the resonant themes, painstaking cinematography and Oscar-worthy acting to pull in viewers in the mood for a prestigious drama; but it will also appeal to those who just fancy seeing close-ups of good-looking youngsters being mutilated.</p><p>The film’s star, Florence Pugh, is especially impressive. A British actress best known for indie dramas (“The Falling”, “Lady Macbeth”), Ms Pugh is as expressive when she is glaring silently as when she is collapsing in a fit of racking sobs. The reason for these sobs is that the sister and parents of her character, Dani, are killed in the film’s opening minutes: like “Hereditary”, “Midsommar” explores grief. Dani’s passive-aggressive dolt of a boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) isn’t much help, and he blames her for his neglectful behaviour as well as for her own woes.</p><p ></p><p>Before the deaths, Christian had been planning to break up with Dani but, more out of cowardice than compassion, he decides in the circumstances to let her tag along on his boys’ holiday to northern Sweden. His American graduate-student buddies (Will Poulter and William Jackson Harper) are not too pleased, but his Swedish friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) reassures Dani that she is more than welcome. He has invited them all to a nine-day solstice festival in the woodland commune where he grew up, and he seems suspiciously sure that Dani will fit right in. On arrival, she agrees. The ancient rites and the perpetual sunshine in Pelle’s remote enclave may be disorientating, but the white-robed tribespeople are warm and beatific, and the psychotropic mushrooms they hand out turn the meadows into rippling oceans of wild flowers. It is quite a while before Dani learns how much trouble she is in. </p><p>Too long, perhaps. As anyone who has seen Robin Hardy’s British cult classic “The Wickerman” (1973) will know, things never end well for outsiders who poke their noses into an isolated community’s pagan festivities—sex and ritual sacrifice are usually involved—and “Midsommar” comes to much the same conclusion as that film, or indeed any other folk-horror mystery. The difference is that it takes 140 minutes to get there. </p><p>Not that Mr Aster wastes the time. A lot funnier than “Hereditary”, “Midsommar” is in part a cheerful comedy about bickering Americans who are befuddled by the customs and cuisine of a foreign country. The screenplay floats some provocative ideas about the sense of belonging offered by religions, however anachronistic and illogical they may appear. There are so many odd little details scattered throughout the gorgeously designed film that it never stops being intriguing. The runic inscriptions and the pictographs on the barn walls are all very well, but why is there a live bear locked in a wooden cage?</p><p>Yet as well-crafted as “Midsommar” is, viewers still have to wait an hour before anything unpleasant happens in the commune. When it does happen, it is so unpleasant that it is hard to believe that Dani and the others would not run for the hills, instead of shrugging and going along with the programme of solemn al fresco meals and exhausting maypole dances devised by their hosts. Many viewers will go along with it, too, though others will feel that Mr Aster is cheating. Given that two of his characters are anthropology students who ask the commune’s elders about their myths and traditions, they seem oddly incurious about the more brutal practices. </p><p>Nor do they seem to care that their friends keep disappearing without trace, or that there is a locked-up bear in the vicinity. The careless plotting means that “Midsommar” is ultimately more frustrating than frightening. It gives viewers plenty of time to appreciate its myriad artistic touches, but also to notice how ridiculously implausible it is.</p><p><em>“Midsommar” is screening in Britain and America now</em></p></div></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jul 2019 01:39:59 +0800</pubDate></item><item><title><![CDATA[Conservatism's crisis, hard truths from Shell's boss and insects become fish food]]></title><link><![CDATA[https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2019/07/04/conservatisms-crisis-hard-truths-from-shells-boss-and-insects-become-fish-food]]></link><description><img src="https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/editors_picks_13.jpg" alt=""><div><time itemProp="dateCreated" dateTime="2019-07-04T16:40:28Z">Jul 4th 2019</time></div><div itemProp="description"><p>A SELECTION of three essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, the <strong><a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/07/04/the-global-crisis-in-conservatism" data-tegid="08hrcro5f43n94sfe0n8qp9g599565ol">global crisis in conservatism.</a></strong> Royal Dutch Shell’s boss delivers some hard truths on <strong><a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.economist.com/business/2019/07/06/shells-boss-delivers-some-hard-truths-on-oil-and-climate-change">oil and climate change</a></strong> (10:18). And, <strong><a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/07/06/beetles-and-flies-are-becoming-part-of-the-agricultural-food-chain">insects become fish food</a></strong> (18:00). Runtime: 27 min</p><p><div ><iframe src="//embed.acast.com/theeconomisteditorspicks/editor-spicks-july4th2019" width="560" height="215" frameBorder="0" scrolling="auto"></iframe></div></p><p ></p><p>Listen on: <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id313848583">Apple Podcasts</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://open.spotify.com/show/3a5n4DoT1xrV5rgBWBPxnR">Spotify</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYWNhc3QuY29tL3RoZWVjb25vbWlzdGVkaXRvcnNwaWNrcw">Google</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=18376&amp;refid=stpr">Stitcher</a> | <a href="https://www.economist.comhttps://tunein.com/podcasts/Politics/The-Economist-Editors-Picks-p987585/">TuneIn</a></p></div></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jul 2019 01:39:58 +0800</pubDate></item></channel></rss>