How Hayao Miyazaki’s Films Continue to Take Us to the Skies -    

When characters take flight in the films of the master animator, there is always a deeper meaning.

Few filmmakers can claim the same heights of whimsy, artistry and storytelling as writer-director Hayao Miyazaki, whose modern-day fables seem to prove that having one’s head in the clouds isn’t a fault, but a virtue — in more ways than one. From his 1988 breakthrough “My Neighbor Totoro” to his 2001 Oscar-winning animated feature, “Spirited Away,” the sky is one of Miyazaki’s favorite playgrounds, where flight is about more than just elevation; it’s about transcendence.

Characters in flight often traverse physical and spiritual realms. They move between worlds and states of being. And in the case of Miyazaki’s latest, “The Boy and the Heron,” flight even serves as a gateway between life and death.

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Europe’s technology startups are doing just fine - The Economist   

Never has a crisis been so exciting. Startup valuations are plunging, tech layoffs abound and fresh venture capital (VC) is hard to come by. But at Slush, a big annual tech shindig which wrapped up in Helsinki on December 1st, founders and their financiers were partying almost like it was 1999, the height of the dotcom bubble. More than 13,000 people, a record number that included 5,000 entrepreneurs and 3,000 investors, spent two days in a cavernous trade-show, witnessing presentations, panels and lots of laser beams.

Like startups everywhere, those in Europe have been hit by rising interest rates, which make their promise of rich future profits looks less alluring today. This year they are forecast to attract just $45bn in investments, according to “State of European Tech”, an annual report released at Slush by Atomico, a VC firm based in London. That is down by 38% compared with last year and by 55% from a scorching 2021. The median valuation of more mature “growth stage” startups now hovers below the five-year average. Whereas in 2021 Europe created 107 “unicorns” (unlisted firms worth $1bn or more) and last year it produced another 48, so far in 2023 it has added just seven. Many more have been “dehorned”, according to Atomico: 50 this year, on top of 58 in 2022.

Take a longer-term view, though, and Europe’s startup scene as a whole is holding up surprisingly well. In some ways, it is dealing with the crisis better than America’s more established one. Investments in European startups may be down over the past two years, but they are still up by 18% compared with 2020 (see chart 1), except for Britain where they dropped by more than 2%. In America they declined by 1% over that period. And whereas valuations are shrinking overall, “down rounds”, where startups accept a lower valuation when raising fresh capital, are less widespread than one might expect. They comprised only 21% of all rounds this year.

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Israel is strangling the West Bank’s economy - The Economist   

The war in Gaza has ushered in a grim new economic reality in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the West Bank. Supermarkets have hired security guards to fight off shoplifters. Thousands of businesses have closed. One official reckons the current economic crisis is worse than that caused by the covid-19 lockdowns.

About 160,000 Palestinians employed in Israel and in Jewish settlements in the West Bank have had their work permits revoked since October 7th. Tens of thousands more worked in Israel illegally. Before the war their salaries pumped some 1.4bn shekels ($370m) a month into the West Bank’s economy.

Because it does not control its own borders, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has to rely on Israel to collect import taxes on its behalf, which account for 64% of its total revenue. When the Gaza war broke out, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, refused to transfer any of this money to the PA, though the Israeli cabinet later compromised, saying it would withhold the portion paid by the PA to Gaza. Though Hamas has controlled the strip since 2007, the PA still covers Gaza’s power bill to Israel and pays the salaries of thousands of public workers including those in the health ministry and the official Palestinian security forces, who are paid to stay at home. In response Shoukri Bishara, the PA’s finance minister, furiously rejected the whole amount. Accepting it would, he says, have been a “violation of our social contract” with Palestinians in Gaza.

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Particle Physicists Agree on a Road Map for the Next Decade -    

A “muon shot” aims to study the basic forces of the cosmos. But meager federal budgets could limit its ambitions.

Friday, Dec. 8: This story was updated to include a vote that occurred after it was first published.

Scientists approved a blueprint for the next two decades of particle physics in the U.S. on Friday. It aims to restore American primacy in high energy particle physics.

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