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Whether it’s the financial crash, the climate emergency or the breakdown of the international order, historian Adam Tooze has become the go-to guide to the radical new world we’ve entered
In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.
It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.

Harvard still dominates, though it fell to No. 3 on a list measuring academic output. Other American universities are falling farther behind their global peers.

He Jiankui spent three years in prison after creating gene-edited babies. Now back at work, he sees a greater opening for researchers who push boundaries.

Exclusive: US is less feared by its traditional adversaries, while its allies feel ever more distant, results show
A year after Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a global survey suggests much of the world believes his nation-first, “Make America Great Again” approach is instead helping to make China great again.
The thinktank also found that under Trump, the US is less feared by its traditional adversaries, while its allies – particularly in Europe – feel ever more distant.

The new age of empire. Plus: Interview with film director Park Chan-wook
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We’re just a couple of weeks into 2026 and already it feels like an eternity has passed.
From Venezuela to Greenland, a blitz of revanchist US foreign policy moves by Donald Trump has thrown the world into turmoil. Domestically, it’s little better: in Minneapolis, the killing last week of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent – who was defended aggressively by Trump – prompted shock and fury across America.

The prime minister is seeking new markets for Canadian goods and to mend relations with China after years of deep acrimony between the two nations.

China’s surplus reached $1.19 trillion last year, a 20 percent increase from 2024, as Beijing kept the currency weak and pursued self-reliance to replace imports.

In a might-makes-right world, US allies, not to mention the emerging powers of the global south, would begin to hedge their bets in dangerous ways
What is wrong with resurrecting the prerogative of major powers to claim a sphere of influence in which they dictate and others must follow? That idea informs the “” behind the US invasion of to seize . seems to believe that, as the world’s strongest military power, the United States should be allowed to invade other countries at will. Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, “the real world” is “governed by strength”, by “power”, so we should get used to it.
There is a beguiling simplicity to this abandonment of the norms long designed to govern the behavior of states big and small. China has it as the reality that its Asian neighbors must live with. Russia, a third-tier power by but still a nuclear-armed regional heavyweight, has periodically treated the boundaries of post-Soviet states as mere suggestions. But do we really want to return to the law of the jungle in which the guy with the biggest stick calls the shots?

“Blood Money: Lethal Eden” taps into a rising anxiety in China by simulating the experiences of people trafficked for the scam industry.

Using nearly a decade of data (2015–2023) from 800+ U.S. hospitals and more than 700,000 patients, Northwestern researchers found that when Asian American heart failure patients are separated by ...

Results for 2025 risk further unsettling economies about China’s trade practices and overcapacity, and their own over-reliance on Chinese products
has reported a strong export run in 2025 with a record trillion-dollar surplus, as its producers brace for three more years of a Trump administration set on slowing the manufacturing powerhouse by shifting US orders to other markets.
Beijing’s resilience to renewed tariff tensions since Donald Trump returned to the US presidency last January has emboldened Chinese firms to shift their focus to south-east Asia, Africa and Latin America to offset US duties.

Nvidia has been caught in a tug-of-war between the US and China as the countries compete for AI dominance.