Gucci is cheap and eggs are pricey in Russia’s surreal economy - The Economist (Full Access)   

Winter in Moscow is a time for parties. A friend told me recently about a particularly lavish one he went to in a nightclub. DJs played hypnotic psychedelic trance, champagne flowed and red lights strobed across the heaving dancefloor. Nearly two years into the war in Ukraine, Muscovites seem to be recovering their capacity for hedonism.

Straining to make themselves heard over the thumping beats, revellers at my friend’s party swapped stories of profit-making in the new Russian economy. Difficulties in accessing dollars had created fresh opportunities in rouble-denominated transactions. Construction projects were under way. Western partners were keen to keep business flowing. And new customers were being found in China and India.

My friend, a European business consultant, was struck by the elation of the moneyed Russians, the kind of people who would normally have been skiing in Courchevel at this time of year. “They know they won’t be allowed back to the French Alps for 25 years,” he said. “Until then they can go to Dubai or party here – it’s pretty wild.”

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What is the world’s loveliest language? - The Economist (Full Access)   

LINGUISTS TEND to say that all languages are valuable, expressive and complex. They usually attribute negative attitudes to prejudice and politics. That is probably why no one has carefully studied the touchy question of which ones are seen as beautiful or ugly.

That is until three scholars—Andrey Anikin, Nikolay Aseyev and Niklas Erben Johansson—published their study of 228 languages last year*. They hit upon the idea of using an online film about the life of Jesus, which its promoters have recorded in hundreds of languages. Crucially, most recordings had at least five different speakers, as the film has both exposition and dialogue. The team recruited 820 people from three different language groups—Chinese, English and Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew and Maltese speakers)—to listen to clips and rate the languages’ attractiveness.

What they found was that nearly all the 228 languages were rated strikingly similarly—when certain factors were controlled for (of which more below). On a scale of 1 to 100, all fell between 37 and 43, and most in a bulge between 39 and 42 (see chart 1). The highest-rated? Despite the supposed allure (at least among Anglophones) of French and Italian, it was Tok Pisin, an English creole spoken in Papua New Guinea. The lowest? Chechen. The three language groups broadly coincided in their preferences. But the differences between the best and worst-rated languages were so slight—and the variation among individual raters so great—that no one should be tempted to crown Tok Pisin the world’s prettiest language with any authority.

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Taiwan election poll tracker: who will be the next president? - The Economist (Full Access)   

Lai Ching-te, also known as William Lai, is a softly spoken former doctor who has held almost every top political post in Taiwan. He was a legislator for over a decade, then a popular mayor of the southern city of Tainan. Mr Lai is most appealing to hardline independence supporters, but in the past he has also been popular with centrist voters. Distrusted by China, he once described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence”. Mr Lai has promised to stick to Ms Tsai’s careful dictum: that because Taiwan is already independent, it needs no further declarations. Still, if he wins, China seems sure to continue to threaten and isolate Taiwan.

Hou Yu-ih is a burly former policeman who in 2006 headed Taiwan’s National Police Agency. Born to street-market pork dealers in Chiayi, a pro-independence stronghold in the south, he has a “Taiwanese flavour”, in the words of a former DPP legislator. There are hopes in the KMT that he will counter the party’s elite image and appeal to voters outside the party’s traditional base of mainland immigrants and their descendants. Last year Mr Hou easily won re-election as the mayor of New Taipei City (the exurbs surrounding the capital) as a moderate with a reputation for efficiency. He advocates talks with the Communist Party to lower cross-strait tensions.

Ko Wen-je was a surgeon until he ran for mayor of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, as an independent in 2014. He defeated a KMT politician in a landslide, despite having no prior political experience, and served for two terms until 2022. Four years ago he founded the Taiwan People’s Party. Mr Ko casts himself as a “rational” and “scientific” technocrat, and has focused more on domestic concerns such as energy and housing than relations with China. His TPP is not strong enough to win a legislative majority and his best hope is that it ends up holding the balance of power in parliament. Mr Ko advocates a coalition with the KMT. Mr Ko claims to offer a “third choice” for voters between provoking China and deferring to it. In fact, his China policies are closer to the KMT’s.

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Mike Sadler guided the first SAS raiders through the North African desert - The Economist (Full Access)   

To an American who met Mike Sadler in 1943 his most remarkable feature was his eyes. They were round and sky-blue, staring out of a sun-baked face grizzled with beard. They looked like the eyes of a drug-addled French poet, a man who at any minute might do some crazy thing.

In fact, he just had. For five days he had been trudging on foot through 100 miles of Tunisian desert. The SAS group he was with had been caught by the Germans, but he and two others had dropped into gullies and, by nightfall, got clear away. Knowing the lie of the land, and reading the stars, he led them through mountains and between salt lakes until they reached an area controlled by the Free French. A few dates were their only food, and their water a trickle tied in a goatskin. Now his hair was bleached and wild, his exposed skin blistered and his feet in tatters. But, as usual, he had steered his colleagues to safety.

In the fledgling SAS, founded only two years before, his skills were essential. Their top-secret task was to destroy the Axis bases and airfields strung out along the North African coast. Their modus operandi was to lurk deep in the desert to the south, presumed empty, and attack from behind the enemy lines. His job was to get them there in their customised Willys Jeeps (no top, no windscreen, open to wind, sand and sun) through a pathless landscape littered with boulders and creeping sand dunes hundreds of feet high. Without him, they would have been completely lost.

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