Notes

Starting today, on Fridays—or Saturday mornings, if you’re reading this in Asia or Oceania—we’ll make feature interviews from our archive freely available for the week.

The idea:

For those on our free list, it’s a chance to take in the conversations our members have unlimited access to.

For members, it’s something you can share with anyone you think might like it. You'll continue to have exclusive access to all new features and the full archive.

This week:

The Signal’s contributor Philippe Aghion was just awarded the Nobel Prize in economics—even to our surprise, Philippe is our second Nobel laureate in economics in as many years.

This summer, he showed why successful European start-ups stumble when they try to grow, why Stockholm loses companies to New York, and what “flexicurity” in Denmark reveals about the real innovation barriers on the Continent.

The feature is available through October 24. If you think of someone who’d appreciate it, please send their way.

And be in touch anytime: concierge@thesgnl.com.

—Hywel

Chicago’s Jeff Tweedy, of Wilco fame, has a new triple-album (!) solo release, Twilight Override, out on September 26. This single may sound a little primitive—but then, you might not want to pair too much musical complexity with lyrics like, “Rock & roll ain’t never going to die, / As long as you and I are alive.”

Now to Stockholm for a new single out of the psychedelic soundscape of Dungen, or Gustav Ejstes—and friends, when on tour. For those few Signal readers who don’t speak Swedish, not to worry, this one’s all instrumental—with some very polite fuzz guitar that won’t wake the neighbors … and an unexpected flute break in the middle.

Over to Oslo for some new indie-pop from Anna of the North, a.k.a. Anna Lotterud. Anna described this song saying, “It’s about that one time someone came into my life, lovebombed me, and left as quick as they entered.” It’s a consolation for the rest of us that she got this from the experience.

The title track of Suede’s latest album has all of the wrenching emotions and ‘90s bombast of the band’s Britpop-era golden run—but it belongs to a second run they’ve now been on since 2013’s Bloodsports. It’s impressive, too. Here, Brett Anderson sings of the help he gets from his meds—and how fleeting it can be.

Does anyone rock out anymore? The answer is, yes: Austin, Texas’ Spoon. If the name doesn’t entirely ring a bell, they are one of America’s finest indie-rock bands and have been since the 1990s. This new track is part of a two-song release, mainly because they’ve only finished these two in the studio on the way to whatever will eventually become their eleventh album. Keep your eyes out in 2026.

We were able to share a preview of the modernist composer Max Richter’s new album, Sleep Circle, in July. It’s out in full now. Here, in “Patterns / Solo (Pt. 1),” Richter plays lulling melodies on piano while a string quartet paints the sky with dusk. It’s brief, so it probably won’t make you doze off–even if that’s what Richter has in mind.

The Bristol-based producer who goes as A Sagittariun (you may remember him) has a new EP out, here with a full-throttle, Detroit-style techno at 139 beats a minute. It’s as frantic as watching the pedestrian traffic in Times Square subway station at rush hour, only on fast-forward.

The Liverpool band Ladytron has a new single out featuring a chilly house thump—and an ominous cult-like video to go with it. Fun to hear them do an up-tempo number, with Helen Marnie sounding as aloof and remote as ever.

The long-running British pop outfit Saint Etienne have released what they apparently intend to be their final studio album, International. This track is a perfect example of how the group approaches their mixture of nostalgia and longing with an upbeat melodic piano house banger, albeit about a former relationship. It’s true, there’s some “keep on climbing” positivity here—which you may welcome—but this is no less another memorable moment of the kind of sublime melancholia they’ve always been so distinctively able to evoke.

Who are Saint Etienne?

Another strange week in America: Federal judges block the domestic deployment of U.S. military troops while the president continues the operations anyway. His administration fires agency officials who resist radical policy reversals. Congressional investigations now target the investigators of the circumstances surrounding the January 6 riot. All in the same week. Each commanding attention as a separate emergency that demands immediate reaction—along with some tense music and a chyron at the bottom of the screen.

Step back from that screen, though, start talking to the right people, and something else might come into view: For all the endless, sometimes breathless descriptions of Donald Trump’s governing style as “unprecedented,” it actually follows a historical pattern some good scholars have been able to recognize. The Signal’s contributor Stephen Hanson identifies it as patrimonialism—a political tendency to build personal power and authority, at the expense of democratic institutions and standards, by treating government like a family business where loyalty matters more than rules—or much of anything else.

Why does that matter? Because the “achilles heel” of patrimonialism, as Steve has put it, is corruption. It’s how patrimonial politics gets done, and it’s how patrimonial politics can come apart. This week, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto discovered, to his immense surprise and consternation, what happens when patrimonial corruption becomes too much for the people his legitimacy depends on: Housing allowances for Prabowo-friendly legislators worth 10 times Jakarta’s minimum wage triggered deadly protests that forced the popular strongman into immediate retreat. Prabowo’s corruption may be relatively simple to see and understand, but it raises a question no patrimonial authority operating in a democracy can entirely answer: How long can I get away with this?

This week’s member’s despatch explores what makes patrimonial politics vulnerable—and why understanding corruption as one of its defining means, and inevitable ends, might change how we see what happens next.

The Ottawa native Kathleen Edwards has a new album out titled Billionaire. Her rootsy Americana music has a bigger sound than usual on this LP—partly on account of the producer, Jason Isbell, and partly on account of his band, The 400 Unit, sitting in. The title of this track might make it sound like a kiss-off song—but it isn’t; it’s about closing her coffee shop and returning to music after a few years off.

Adrian Sherwood, the longtime dub maestro and head of the label On-U Sound Records, returns with his second true solo album since 2012’s Survival & Resistance. This is deftly crafted dub music in the style of Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mad Professor. Sherwood mourns the loss of some collaborators and friends on this record, but you can hear his hope for better days to come.

Most of us have noticed at one time or another, if we aren’t noticing it all the time, the way contemporary news coverage feels designed to compel us to check it constantly—even while the experience seems to make it harder to track what’s actually going on as it unfolds in the world over months or years, or longer.

At The Signal, we certainly notice this. And think about it a lot. Every once in a while, that will lead us to make some adjustments in what we do—as I’m glad to say we’re doing this month.

David Grubbs, the avant-garde guitarist and piano player (in Gastr del Sol and other bands), has put together a collaborative record with the Athens-based cellist Nikos Veliotis, the Japanese electronics ace Taku Unami, and the American percussionist-composer Sarah Hennies. As you might expect, none live in the same city—so they emailed files to each other to make this haunted drone-based record … under the name Bitterviper.

So far, 2025 has been a fairly quiet season for tropical systems in the Atlantic Ocean—but Hurricane Erin did its best to stir things up, even if it missed the East Coast and delivered only a glancing blow to the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos—and a brush past Bermuda.

Now it’s off toward Ireland and the United Kingdom …

But when it gets there next week, Erin will be an extratropical cyclone—a cold-core storm that will pack less of a punch than a warm-core storm would. The GFS model shows Erin spinning in the waters between Iceland and Ireland for several days, bringing rains from Tuesday all the way to Saturday in Dublin.

Then, a combination of wind shear and sinking air over the Atlantic will throw a blanket over hurricane season for a while. But the season for tropical systems in the Atlantic doesn’t end until November 30, meaning there’s plenty of time for more tropical mayhem in 2025.

The cover of Farshad Akbari’s new album, Echoes of Nothingness, shows a sand-bleached skull sitting on dunes of empty desert as far as the eye can see. In this track, you can hear echoes of soaring, symphonic synth artists of the 1970s and 80s, like Vangelis or even Tangerine Dream—but also more dissonant sounds that can be characteristic of Persian and Afghan compositions: Akbari was born and raised in Tehran, and now lives in Kabul. This is music to drift away to.

What is that dissonant sound in Middle-Eastern music?

Throughout July of last year, Bangladeshi student-led protests swelled in Dhaka and other cities. Prime Minister Sheikha Hasina, whose party, the Awami League, had arrogated power over the judiciary and the security services during her 15 years in office, insulted the demonstrators as “razakars”—a pejorative for people who’d collaborated with Pakistan’s armed forces in 1971, when most Bangladeshis wanted or even fought for their country’s independence.

This insult brought people from all classes—including, crucially, many women—into the streets. Some women used sticks and stones to fight against police and Awami League enforcers, and images of their courage only drove more support for the demonstrators. Police and paramilitary units reportedly killed at least 800 protesters, which violence in turn inspired more Bangladeshis to join the rebellion.

On August 5, Hasina fled the country to India, as protesters stormed the prime minister’s residence. The country installed a provisional government led by Muhammad Yunus, the 85-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who’d successfully used microcredit to promote economic development in Bangladesh. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi prosecutors charged Hasina with crimes against humanity, the country’s Anti-Corruption Commission filed corruption charges against her, its International Crimes Tribunal sentenced her for contempt of court, and its interim government revoked her passport.

Yet one year later, the interim government appears to be following some of the tactics from Hasina’s authoritarian playbook: They’ve arrested critics and former Awami League supporters—on plainly bogus charges, including aiding genocide. They’ve banned the Awami League, which still has significant voter support; it’s the oldest party in the country and helped lead its struggle for independence. Neither is the government seriously pursuing the documentation and prosecution of human-rights abuses, including forced disappearances, of Hasina’s regime. Yunus’s government had delayed national elections, which only now, one year after the overthrow of Hasina, he’s finally scheduled for February.

What’s gone wrong?

Block out some time to take in Jens Lekman’s new single, from his upcoming album, Songs for Other People’s Weddings, out September 12. It runs a little longer than 10 minutes, telling the story of a wedding singer traveling to Leipzig for a marriage in a church where Bach used to work—and ends up sitting with strange people at the singles table. Don’t be fooled, now, by the fake ending around 4:30 …

The Northern Californian singer-songwriter Cass McCombs has a new LP out, Interior Live Oak, on August 15. It’s some easy-going Americana, with a leisurely beat and a tight backing band that mostly stays in the background. McCombs is telling you he doesn’t dream of hitting the open road: “You know I never lie in my songs. And I never dream about trains.”

Southern Europe continues to roast in its fourth heat wave of the season, with thermometers topping out above 40 degrees Celsius across Spain—and Paris isn’t far behind, with 36 Celsius at Orly Airport. On Tuesday afternoon. Malpensa Airport in Milan hit 33. And the heat is heading to the northwest, so it may get to London before long. (On Tuesday afternoon, Stanstead Airport in the U.K. pushed 31.)

Météo-France placed more than half the Republic under heat-wave warnings on Monday, with 12 out of 96 mainland French administrative units under the highest red alert, while Spain’s Aemet warned of “extreme danger” in Zaragoza and the Basque Country—issuing yellow and orange warnings for almost all the rest of the country.

Both weather agencies forecast temperatures above 40 degrees in the coming days and called for vigilance, forecasting “a very intense, even exceptional” heat wave in parts of the Continent.

French meteorologists say the heat is likely to break records on Monday and Tuesday, with temperatures passing 42 Celsius in the southwest. Last weekend, in the village of Tourbes, near Béziers, temperatures hit a record high of 41.4.

In Spain, Aemet expects temperatures to rise further on Monday in the Ebro basin—the southern and eastern thirds of the Iberian peninsula—and the eastern Cantabrian Sea. And it anticipates 37-to-39 degrees Celsius across the interior of the Iberian peninsula, with maximum temperatures above 40 in the interior of the Basque Country and highs that could reach above 44 in the lower Guadalquivir.

Scorching.

The Jamaican singer and songwriter Naomi Cowan mixes pop, R&B, and reggae in her new album, Welcome to Paradise. Produced by the British DJ (and reggae aficionado) Toddla T, this track blends in ska horns and some one-drop rhythm for a dreamy recollection of a sound the world heard from Bob Marley in the 1960s and ‘70s.

What’s one-drop rhythm?

On July 26, Taiwan held recall elections for 24 members of the Legislative Yuan, the country’s legislature. To be clear, 24 is more than 20 percent of the Yuan as a whole.

The center-right Kuomintang (KMT) and their ally, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), won a majority in the Yuan after last year’s elections, but the center-left Democratic People’s Party (DPP) backed the recall effort to try to flip control of the chamber.

The DPP had controlled it—and the country’s presidency—since 2016, but President Lai Ching-te, a.k.a. William Lai, has met immovable opposition in the Yuan since the last elections.

The recall effort failed, but the campaign—and the months of divided government—have shown a deepening and dangerous partisan polarization in the country. The KMT wants a friendlier approach to mainland China, while Lai and the DPP see Beijing as an existential threat and want closer ties with the U.S. and the West.

But now the Kuomintang and the TPP are pushing to give the legislature greater powers over the presidency and to freeze spending—which the DPP says serves the interests of China.

The KMT-TPP allies say Lai and the DPP want a war with China and are using anti-democratic means to silence opposition: The government indicted TPP leader Ko Wen-je on corruption charges last December. During the recall campaign, KMT leader Eric Chu compared the DPP to the Nazis and Lai to Adolf Hitler. Yuan members from opposing parties even got into a huge brawl inside the chamber in May of 2024.

And amid all this, the Chinese Communist Party is stepping up social-media propaganda campaigns to demonize Lai and the DPP and to promote misinformation and conspiracies.

Is Taiwan’s democracy in trouble?

Black Sites is a duo out of Hamburg, composed of DJ Helena Hauff and mastering engineer Kris Jakob (AKA F#X). R4 is their first new record in 11 years. This track features a wonky 8-bit melody that sounds almost like someone left a Tetris machine out in the rain. But the thump under it never wavers.

How about some lush deep house—from Sofia Kourtesis’s new EP, Volver. This track layers so many loops—bass, drums, high hat, congas—but Kourtesis never loses control. Thirty-nine years after Mr. Fingers’ “Can You Feel It,” house music is still vital and evolving.

Last week, wee looked at the heat searing Türkiye. This week, it’s Asia. In Japan, the national temperature record fell on Wednesday, as the city of Tamba in western Honshu reached 41.2 degrees Celsius breaking the previous record from 2020 by 0.1 degrees. On the same day, local temperature records broke in 39 locations—including in Kyoto, which reached 40 degrees for the first time—with almost a third of the Japan Meteorological Agency’s weather stations reporting highs above 35 degrees.

In South Korea, Seoul had a record-breaking 22 consecutive “tropical nights”, a term used by the Korea Meteorological Administration when overnight temperatures fail to fall below 25 degrees. On Thursday, the minimum overnight temperature in the capital was 29.3.

Vietnam also roasted, with the capital Hanoi experiencing its first-ever August day above 40 degrees Celsius on Monday. That beat the city’s previous August record of 39.8 degrees set in 2021.

Long-term forecast models suggest temperatures will trend above average throughout the latter part of August and into September—and may still set new records before autumn.

The Cambodian hip-hop artist VannDa has a new album on the way, and he starts it off with a blistering track on the border conflicts between his country and Thailand, which have raged and ebbed since, believe it or not, the Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1904. Recently, in July, the conflict flared again, before the two countries announced a ceasefire on August 1. You hear pain in VannDa’s voice here about “losing my brothers to a war we never chose.”  VannDa burst onto the scene in 2021 in the post-Covid collaboration “Time to Rise” with the aging Cambodian lute star and singer, Master Kong Nay. The video was filmed inside Phnom Penh’s National Museum of Cambodia, showcasing the building’s distinctive architecture and featuring both VannDa and Master Kong Nay in traditional Khmer clothing.

A little more than a decade ago, a shot rang out in the courtyard of a Chinese government building. Practically nothing is known of what really happened, only that it was an execution—and that the execution was a reminder to Chinese state employees of the consequences of treason. The executed had sold secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency. Neither was it the only such case. Between 2010 and 2012, Chinese authorities killed at least a dozen sources working for the CIA and imprisoned more. One after another, they were arrested, tortured, and executed.

“The creation of the Chinese spy network,” Tim Weiner writes in The Mission, “was one of the highest achievements in the history of the clandestine service, its destruction an unsurpassed debacle.”

How could this happen?

This past week, Polish authorities arrested 32 people they suspect of coordinating with Russia on sabotage operations within Poland—remarkably direct evidence, if the cause for the arrests is true, of Moscow’s clandestine activities against a NATO member state. But it’s not an isolated campaign—and it’s not just Russia in the broader pattern. Earlier in July, Ukraine detained two Chinese nationals spying on missile programs, while China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi privately told EU officials that Beijing emphatically does not want Russia to lose the war—fearing it would free the Americans to focus on China.

Meanwhile, reports in February exposed Chinese companies rebuilding factories and infrastructure in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, helping legitimize territorial conquest through economic investment. Throughout 2025, European intelligence sources have reported to Reuters, Chinese factories have been producing Russian attack drones for the war effort. In Georgia, months of democratic backsliding culminated in the government awarding strategic port contracts to sanctioned Chinese firms—while also courting Iran, which has been rearming proxy groups across the Middle East with advanced weaponry, disrupting oil production in Kurdish Iraq through drone attacks, and ending months of calm in the Red Sea with strikes on commercial ships.

Each incident might seem isolated. Russian saboteurs here, Chinese spies there, business deals elsewhere. But the pattern suggests something potentially more systematic: autocratic powers dividing labor to undermine democratic institutions. China provides economic muscle and technology, Russia delivers military aggression and sabotage, Iran offers regional destabilization.

Is this an emerging, coordinated anti-democratic axis?

The Belgian outfit Soulwax—principally, the brothers David and Stephen Dewaele—have appeared here with some collaborators and an up-tempo dance number about running away with “the music.” It’s hard to argue with.

And now, the very essence of cheesy European 1980s synth-pop—a catchy candy track from Baltimora with a chorus that echoes Johnny Weissmuller’s famous cry from the 1930s Tarzan films. Fun for anyone up for the kitsch of it—but also a prime example of Italo disco that made it into the top-five on the charts during the summer of ’85 across West Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Norway, and eventually the United Kingdom.

What is Italo disco?

Last Friday, just before noon, local time, Silopi in southeast Türkiye hit a blazing 50.5 degrees Celsius (122.9 Fahrenheit ), which is a new all-time maximum temperature record for the country. The last one was set in August 2023, at 49.5 Celsius (121.1 Fahrenheit) in Türkiye’s northwest—the real surprise here being that the new record beat the old one by more than a whole degree. Usually, new records are only by fractions of a degree. Meanwhile, 132 weather stations across Türkiye also reported record-breaking high temperatures the same day.

The United States government is trying to get Apple out of China, threatening to slap its products with tariffs unless it moves production back home. In response, Apple has promised to invest US$500 billion in the U.S, building plants from coast to coast and hiring 20,000 people over the coming four years. At the same time, it’s ramping up assembly operations in India and Vietnam.

And yet Apple has made such promises before: During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, it said it would build three new plants in America; instead, it ran out the clock on Trump. Apple’s leadership concluded that leaving China would be far too risky.

Why?

The German-British composer and pianist Max Richter has a new album, Sleep Circle, out on September 4. The new work both revives aspects of his 2015 Sleep and From Sleep albums—which he combined for an eight-and-a-half hour listening experience—and extends them in an ode to REM sleep. The violinist Lousia Fuller and the cellist Max Ruisi accompany with achingly beautiful lines over Richter’s piano—here, with an invitation to slow down and connect with our inner selves.

After U.S. President Donald Trump declared his Liberation Day tariffs on April 2, stock markets around the world—and the value of the U.S. dollar—plummeted. The market for American bonds plunged dramatically, too, a consequence that plausibly helped push Trump to pause the tariffs just a week after unveiling them.

Which didn’t help the dollar. Its value against other currencies has declined more in the first half of 2025 than in any year since 1973. America’s first-quarter GDP fell by 0.5 percent, its first negative quarter since the pandemic. Economists worldwide have marked down their forecasts for U.S. growth this year, and many analysts were saying the era of U.S. global economic primacy was over. Meanwhile, Trump still says that on August 1, he’ll impose his tariffs on every country that hasn’t cut a new trade deal with Washington.

But U.S. markets—and the broader economy—don’t seem bothered by any of this. Not only has the S&P 500 stock index regained everything it lost after April; it hit an all-time high in late June—and has just kept rising. In the second quarter of this year—right when Trump declared nearly universal tariffs—the S&P provided returns of 10.9 percent to investors, higher than the index’s average annual return over the past 100 years.

The NASDAQ exchange, led by tech firms, also set new records in June—and is also still climbing. Tech giants like Nvidia and Oracle have never been more valuable, while investors bought more U.S. tech stocks this year than in any year since 2009. Prices of U.S. government bonds are now up for the year. And despite all the tariff chaos and uncertainty, the country’s GDP appears to have grown by 2.4 percent in the second quarter, according to the latest estimate by the Federal Reserve.What’s happening here?

What’s happening here?

The British DJ and composer who records as Facta (Oscar Henson to his friends) got his start in electronic music back in the post-dubstep 2010s—and his bass tones are still booming. Facta’s latest album is titled GULP, and its mechanistic tech house is a twitchy joy—seven songs, clocking in at an economical 27 minutes.

We set the dials on the time machine for 1974 with a track that helped launch a whole radio format, known as smooth jazz. The keyboardist Bob James had a big hit with this song, even if he later embraced a more classic jazz style. “Nautilus” features a soaring performance on a Fender Rhodes electric piano, laid down in the famous Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. It’s also had a remarkable afterlife, having been sampled by numerous hip-hop artists, including Ultramagnetic MCs in 1986, Run-DMC in ‘88, and Naughty by Nature in ‘91.

Does anyone still listen to smooth jazz?

In last week’s member’s despatch, we looked at the sudden disappearance of Lac Rouge in central Quebec. One day it was there, the next, its banks overflowed, and its water rushed into the next lake, Lac Doda, six miles to the northeast.

It turns out that the sudden disappearance of lakes has become a trend in the contemporary world. It may happen because of geology, as it does each year for Lost Lake in Oregon. Or South Prairie Lake, in Washington State. Because the Northwest U.S. had so much volcanic activity thousands of years ago, that corner of the nation is riven with what are called lava tubes, some big enough to drain lakes in summertime—but not big enough to handle winter’s snow and ice.

Then there’s the classification of GLOFs, or glacial-lake outburst flood. Glacial lakes are under threat from the warming climate—not least, from jökulhlaups, the Icelandic word for GLOFs, in which meltwater created by volcanic activity breaks open a lake’s banks. Eyjafjallajökull is an Icelandic volcano completely covered by an ice cap. Memorably, it erupted in 2010, cancelling more than 95,000 flights all across Europe for more than a week—and causing a number of jökulhlaups, too.

Lakes disappear for other reasons, too. Some wither in prolonged droughts. Geologists tend to think China’s Poyang Lake resulted from a diversion out of the Yangtze River. Mongolia’s Hulun Lake has lost 291 square kilometers of surface area to farming since 1996. Bolivia’s Lake Poopó, likewise.

Before the 1970s, the financial sector produced less than 20 percent of American corporate profits; by the turn of the century, the number had risen to 40 percent. Much the same is true in Europe. Between 2005 and 2014, Sweden’s financial corporations reported more profits than all Swedish non-financial corporations put together; in Germany and Britain, they took nearly half of the total profits.

Investment, too, has flowed toward finance rather than industry. From 1979 to 1989, investment in British financial services grew by 320 percent while investment in manufacturing rose by less than 13 percent. Before the 1970s, British banks held assets equal to roughly half the national GDP; by the time of the 2008 financial crisis, they held more than five times the GDP.

How’d this happen?

Polynation is a pair of producers from Amsterdam, Stijn Hosman and Hessel Stuut. Together, they make a pastoral and warm sort of electronic music, some of which could work in some club settings—though hard to imagine it here. “Wald” blends synthesizers with guitars and uptempo drums, seamlessly. It’s gentle, melodic, and fun.

It looks like a new era for Europe’s military defenses. Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz signed a security pact on July 17, with each country pledging to defend the other.

Three days earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that NATO’s European members would buy huge stocks of critical—and expensive—weaponry like missile-defense systems, along with ammunition, to send to Ukraine’s armed forces.

At the NATO summit in late June, member countries agreed to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, after decades of pressure from Washington for them to pay more of the costs of security on the Continent—and in the face of Russia’s increasing aggression across it. Germany even changed its Constitution so it could spend more on defense.

But this picture is more complicated. Spain, the sixth-largest country in NATO, got an exception to the budget increase. All member countries will have 10 years to meet the new target. And it’s not really 5 percent of GDP on defense—it’s 3.5 percent on defense and another 1.5 percent on security-related outlays, which they defined to include infrastructure like roads and bridges.

And their expenditures won’t be coordinated but broken up into 29 member-country budgets and militaries. They won’t pool resources for greater purchasing power, so some spending could—and almost certainly will—be redundant. European countries will probably continue to favor domestic arms producers, raising questions about the interoperability of the countries’ equipment.

What are Europeans actually getting for their new defense spending, then?

The Melbourne-based synthpop band Cut Copy has its first new album in five years coming out on September 5—and what we have here is its opening track, “Solid.” The band is calmer and more mature now than they were in 2008, when their second album, In Ghost Colours, blasted across America after the Brooklyn cool set picked it up: “Make it if you want it, baby / We’ll be solid.”

There’s a rich collection of Arab-pop performances kept alive by reissue labels like Habibi Funk Records, based in Berlin, and this a standout example from 1983 Egypt recorded by Hamid al-Shaeri. Al-Shaeri was born in Benghazi, the son of an Egyptian mother and Libyan father. This style you hear came to be known as Al Jeel—“the generation”—for its smooth mixture of Arab rhythms and instruments with new Western synthpop. Al-Shaeri’s success stretched from the ‘80s to well into the 2000s—here, with an ode to “her eyes.”

What’s Habibi Funk Records?

In last week’s member’s despatch, our weather report was on the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki Laki. In the days since, we have seen new eruptions in Iceland, where Sundhnúkur has ripped open a new fissure in the barren landscape. Hawaii’s Kilauea is one of the world’s most active volcanoes, and it’s also been erupting this summer, shooting lava jets as high as 350 meters into the air in May. Volcán de Fuego erupted in Guatemala in June. Elsewhere in June, Sicily’s Mount Etna erupted.

While it isn’t yet well understood, there appears to be a link between volcanic eruptions and the climate. When a volcano erupts, it emits volcanic gases, aerosol droplets, and ash into the stratosphere. Some of those volcanic gases, like sulfur dioxide, can cause global cooling at that altitude. But eruptions can also release a lot of carbon dioxide, which can do the opposite.

The observed impact, however, is striking: “Several eruptions during the past century have caused a decline in the average temperature at the Earth’s surface of up to half a degree (Fahrenheit scale) for periods of one to three years,” according to scientists at the United States Geological Survey.

Before June 13, when Israeli forces struck Iran, the United States had been negotiating with it over its nuclear program: In exchange for curtailing parts of its nuclear capabilities, Tehran would get some measure of sanctions relief.

Now, after two weeks of intense fighting, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says, “Iran has in recent days received messages indicating that the U.S. may be ready to return to negotiations.” U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff says the two countries were discussing the resumption of talks. U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, says, “They had a war, they fought, now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”

But for now, it’s sanctions redux: The U.S. maintains Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy from his first term, sanctioning much of Iran’s economy in the hope that Tehran will make a deal.

Has this ever worked?

Saint Etienne is building up to the release of their “final” album, International, due on September 5, 2025—but this is a non-album single made in collaboration with the Spanish house music veteran David Penn. It may be a chorus in search of a song, but with beats like this, who’s gonna complain?

Even after Western countries cut off nearly all trade with Russia—and hit it with unprecedented sanctions—Moscow surprisingly recorded strong GDP growth, above 4 percent in 2023 and 2024. The U.S., having the strongest economy in the developed world, didn’t manage growth of even 3 percent either year, while the EU was under 1 percent.

The Kremlin still found plenty of eager buyers for its oil and natural-gas exports, mostly in China and India, and its domestic war machine provided plenty of jobs and demand for goods and services.

But now, things seem to be changing. GDP growth for the first quarter of this year was only 1.4 percent. In June, President Vladimir Putin hosted the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum—a massive, spectacular show meant to attract new investment and display Russian strength. But no Western companies attended the event, and even Moscow’s allies mostly sent junior officials and businesspeople. At the forum, Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov said the country was on the brink of a recession.

Is it?

Gelli Haha is a new alias of the Los Angeles-based singer Angel Abaya. Here she’s linked up with Sean Guerin, of De Lux, to launch an alter ego of sorts. It’s high-concept dance pop, with a line of surreal humor running through the lyrics. Is it better to be known as funny or serious? Listen in on the debate.

Sonita Alizadeh is one of the leading rappers in the Afghan hip-hop scene, and this is her new single. Alizadeh wants freedom and equality for Afghan women and girls—and to make sure the message is received, she delivers it in English and Dari.

There’s an Afghan hip-hop scene?

Last week, in the member’s despatch, we looked at the recent phenomenon. More than 350 millimeters of rain fell there on June 18. As it happens, the same region was hit with catastrophic flooding in 2024 that reached all the way to Porto Allegre, Rio Grande do Sul’s capital city, significantly to the east of the 2025 flooding.

That system, in April 2024, dropped more than 300 millimeters of rain in less than a week, closing the international airport, sweeping through major sports stadiums, and closing several highways. The floodwater didn’t recede for a month.

While the American media’s news cycle has become higher-paced than ever, millions among the American people are turning away from it. According to the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute, there’s “a clear decline in interest in news” in the U.S. 43 percent of those polled say they avoid some form of the news, and 8 percent follow it either less than once a month or never.

What’s happening?

The British synth ace James Holden has collaborated with the Polish clarinet star Waclaw Zimpel before, mostly on singles and short formats—but now, they’ve moved up to a first full, freeform-improvisational album. It’s deeply spacey and warm, like a stroll along a burbling stream. On this track, Holden plays instruments including “walnuts” and “teacups” while Zimpel plays a radiant lap steel guitar.

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs on nearly every country in the world on April 2, it seemed like the day might transform the global economy. But one week later, after stock and bond markets plummeted worldwide, Trump paused the tariffs for 90 days.

Except on China.

What began as a round of universal tariffs turned into an exceptional new trade war with Beijing. Each side raised rates multiple times, with the U.S. eventually putting a 145 percent tariff on Chinese imports and China imposing import duties of 125 percent on American goods.

But a month later, in Geneva, each side agreed to reduce tariff levels by more than 100 percentage points. Soon after, though, the U.S. enacted a new array of tough trade restrictions on China, mostly on high-tech items. Yet by June, Washington had canceled those policies. At the end of the month, Trump declared the trade war was over and the two countries had made a deal.

Neither side has released details of the agreement, but it looks like China didn’t have to make any concessions or change anything in the way it had traded with the U.S. before the tariff fight.

Why not?

The Canadian electronic musician Dan Snaith, who releases music under the names Caribou, Manitoba, and Daphni, has done something surprising with this new single. It’s a sequel to his 2022 hit ‘Cloudy.’ Same sort of descending piano riff, and a slow-to-emerge vocal sample. It’s a touch faster—but if you listen to the two back-to-back, you won’t miss it.

Michael Gordon is a prolific classical composer based in New York City. Here, back in 2021, he collaborated with the European ensemble Cello Octet Amsterdam. In the studio, they played in a circle—an arrangement they seemingly ended up reflecting in the album’s cover art. Best experienced with good headphones. And if you happen ever to have heard of the influential art-music collective Bang on a Can, Gordon is one of its founders.

What is Bang on a Can?

In the West, people invoke “the West” so often, you might take it for granted. If you’re from Colorado or Cornwall, you might be unlikely to stop and think about what it really means. But when you think about it, it’s kind of a strange term. And if you’re from Chongqing or Chennai, what it really means might not feel so obvious. The French call it “L’Occident,” but imagine saying that in English—“the Occident.” The very word would raise the question of what it meant. But in the West, the simplicity and habit of the term “the West” help that question go unnoticed.

So what does it mean?

The decorated New York City jazz guitarist and bandleader Mary Halvorson has a new record out, About Ghosts—a cause to rejoice for fans of contemporary jazz. This song from the album is rich in guitar and horns, trading lines in a way that feels like a game of beanbag. Notable: The eclectic American jazz magazine DownBeat rated her as the best guitarist in her field from 2017 to 2019.

The U.K. electronic mastermind Kieran Hebden, who records as Four Tet, is back with a single that turns a sample from Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See from 1993 into the loop in a dance track. It’s uptempo; it’s also nice to hear Hope Sandoval’s sleepy tones on a club track. For anyone who happens to have made it to the Barcelona Music Festival Primavera Sound earlier this month, Jamie xx played this tune there in his set.

A native of Rio de Janeiro, Amon Tobin now lives in Montreal, after living, well, literally all around the world. His father is Irish, and at the age of two, he and his family moved to Morocco, the Netherlands, London, Portugal, and Madeira. As a teenager, he then settled in the United Kingdom—where, in Brighton, he started composing his own takes on downtempo, breakbeat, and trip-hop styles of music. It’s all given him an extremely eclectic set of influences. Still, against it, you can hear the lope of samba drums—particularly the pandeiro—ticking behind it on this track.

What’s a pandeiro?

You’ll have seen them if you’ve been to Miami or Monaco, or perhaps you’ve read of Russian billionaires having theirs seized off the coast of Greece or Spain: the superyachts. They’re huge—and hugely expensive: Jeff Bezos’s 127-meter Koru cost him half a billion dollars and has a mast so tall that after its construction it couldn’t sail under Rotterdam’s iconic Koningshaven Bridge. Dissemble the bridge, Bezos suggested. Locals replied, threatening to pelt Koru with eggs.

And there are now more and more of them. Since 1990, the number of yachts longer than 250 feet (76.2 meters) has gone from less than 10 to more than 170. In the past 20 years, the average length of a yacht has grown by a third, to 160 feet. But they’re terrible assets. As the Financial Times once put it, “Owning a superyacht is like owning a stack of 10 Van Goghs, only you are holding them over your head as you tread water, trying to keep them dry.”

So why buy them?

Off to New Zealand for some A-grade indie rock by Yumi Zouma, a Christchurch-based four-piece. Someone has mistreated their singer, Christie Simpson, and she’s not taking it lying down. To the offending party, “Blister,” she wails, “Why you gotta do me like that?”

Early in the morning on Saturday, June 14, a man drove a black SUV with flashing police lights to the home of Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman, a top Democrat in the state legislature. He was wearing a badge and tactical vest and carried a taser. When she answered the door, he introduced himself as a police officer—and then shot and killed her and her husband, Mark.

Now infamously, he wasn’t a cop. He was planning a killing spree in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Before assassinating the Hortmans, he shot state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette. When the true police caught him the next day, they found a list of about 70 intended targets—mostly Democratic politicians but also doctors and officials at Planned Parenthood centers.

On the same day as the killings in Minnesota, Arthur Folasa Ah Loo was shot and killed while demonstrating in Salt Lake City as part of the nationwide protests against U.S. President Donald Trump. At another demonstration, in Culpepper, Virginia, a man drove an SUV into a crowd of protesters.

Neither are these the only recent examples of political violence in America. Just in the last three months, Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro’s house was set on fire while he and his family were asleep inside; two Israeli Embassy workers were shot and killed in Washington, D.C.; protesters in Boulder, Colorado, calling for the release of Israeli hostages were set on fire; and in New Mexico, the Republican Party headquarters was firebombed—along with a Tesla dealership.

It seems political violence in America is getting worse.

Is it?

This single, from Los Angeles-based Neggy Gemmy’s upcoming album, is a perfect lost Saint Etienne song. It begins with a flute loop, then the 1990s club beats come in, and we’re off to the races. And what about this mysterious girl? “She smells of L.A. / She’s only going to break your heart.”

Buscabulla is a duo that met and started working together in Brooklyn, though they’re both from Puerto Rico. This track is off their just-released record, Se Amaba Así—and you’ll hear a lot of Brooklyn synth-pop in it. The album title translates to “The way love was.” It’s their first new recording since they were vaulted into prominence through a collaboration with Bad Bunny on his 2022 album, Un Verano Sin T.

Bad Bunny?

How important is innovation to winning wars? Matthew A. Tattar, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, thinks it’s less important than conventional wisdom would have it. To win wars, military leaders often think they have to innovate as early as possible once the fighting starts—and as often as possible as it progresses. This idea is reflected, for example, in many of the breathless reports from the battlefields of Ukraine on the race for the latest drone technology. Tech, of course, is crucial in combat. But in Innovation and Adaptation in War, Tattar makes the case that militaries imitate and learn to counter new technology so swiftly that the benefits of being the first to have it evaporate before long. By now, for instance, both Ukraine and Russia have drones—and both sides know how to counter them. Adapting, not innovating, is what matters most. … See Michael Bluhm, “Welcome to the machine.”

This majestic piano-and-vocals track is a blues for climate change from Ben LaMar Gay, the Chicago-based cornetist and composer: “Ain’t gon’ snow no more / Rain gon’ pour and pour / Fire don’t stop no more.” The jazz flourishes here build to a sense of cataclysm.

As protesters and law enforcement clashed in Los Angeles throughout the week, one of the most striking and defining images of the battle over immigration in the U.S. has been the Mexican flag. It’s become divisive: Many protesters carry it as a sign of support for Mexican immigrants; others, for other reasons—including, apparently, as a symbol that American citizens with roots in Mexico are Americans, too. Critics say it shows the pervasiveness of illegal immigrants in the city—and an unpatriotic, anti-American sentiment.

But meanwhile, Mexico itself just began an experiment that many are now saying could be a turning point for democracy in the country: On June 1, voters elected judges nationwide, as Mexico became the first country to choose all judges through popular elections. Half of all judicial offices were on the ballot in early June; the other half will be elected in 2027.

Former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, proposed the new system, saying that giving voters control over judges would root out corruption and elitism in the judiciary and help cut down on the widespread violence of the country’s drug cartels—and the culture of impunity reinforced by lax prosecution. The change, AMLO said, would also rein in the damage done by powerful foreign corporations: “The corrupt judges—are they going to continue defending foreign companies that come to loot, rob, and affect the economy of Mexicans?”

Yet critics call the popular election of judges a grave threat to the country’s democracy. Local and international business elites, bar associations, and democracy activists argue that elections would only serve to increase the power of AMLO’s political party, the Movement for National Regeneration, or Morena, which controls most state governments—and handled the decisions about which candidates appeared on ballots. Critics point out that the Supreme Court blocked many of AMLO’s constitutional reforms, and the elections give Morena a chance at a more favorable Court.

In the end, only 13 percent of the electorate cast ballots, and Morena’s preferred candidates seem to have won in many jurisdictions—including a majority on the Supreme Court.

What’s all this mean for democracy in Mexico?

This coming September, Baxter Dury will return with his ninth album, produced by Paul Epworth. The R&B signer JGrrey is here with the hook, as the woman in the story who ultimately stands Baxter up before he slinks back to his hotel in the rain. Baxter is the son of the post-punk icon Ian Dury—with a half-singing, half-talking style similar to his dad’s. He’s made plenty of hip-hop in recent years but this time, he apparently told Epworth he wanted to make a record like Charli XCX’s Brat.

This past week, we lost two giants of 1960s music: Sly Stone, the bandleader and composer for Sly and the Family Stone, and Brian Wilson, the primary songwriter and composer behind The Beach Boys. Both cast long shadows.

What’s so important about Sly Stone and Brian Wilson?

In the 1990s, London was the number-one destination for corrupt businessmen from the former Soviet Union, most of whom had made their fortunes by leveraging their political contacts when their country’s state-owned enterprises were privatized. Russians bought Kensington mansions, Mayfair townhouses, and all kinds of business interests. Perhaps most famously, the oil magnate Roman Abramovich bought the legendary Chelsea Football Club. In time, London was home to so many ex-Soviet billionaires that it became known as “Londongrad.”

Why London?

Sofia Kourtesis, the blazing, Berlin-based DJ, has teamed up with Dan Snaith (AKA Caribou), as his dance-music alias, Daphni, for a new album, Volver. It comes out August 1. What we get in this track: a foundation of disco house with the Salsoul Orchestra strings, big chunky beats, and high hats.

It was a shocking operation. Ukrainian officials say they spent almost a year planning it. They smuggled drones deep within Russia, many just a few miles from the country’s most important military airfields. And then, on Sunday, they all took off together, destroying more than 40 Russian planes capable of carrying nuclear and ballistic missiles.

With video of the operation available everywhere on social media in the days since, it’s a major, spectacular success for Kyiv—and a profound embarrassment for the Kremlin.

But how much difference did it make? Just two days later, Russia launched a ballistic missile and 103 drones at targets throughout Ukraine. Overnight on Thursday, Russian bombs demolished the state administration building in the major Ukrainian port city of Kherson.

Russia still has another 80 strategic bombers like the ones destroyed on Sunday. This year, Russian armed forces have detonated more than 27,000 bombs and more than 20,000 drones in Ukraine—much higher numbers than in the first half of last year. And Ukraine’s stunning drone operation didn’t alter positions on the war’s front line by an inch.

So what’s the actual state of the war?

The Icelandic composer and multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds has a new record coming out July 11, A Dawning—cut with Eion French, the late Irish singer-musician who worked as Talos. This early track is cinematic in scope, with swelling synths and a processed handclap beat. A beautiful little present from the beyond.

Yussef Dayes is a British jazz drummer known for exploring polyrhythms far outside the American-jazz frame of reference—here, with a second percussionist in the mix. A lot of that exploration has been in South London, where he’s from, collaborating with artists in the area’s drill-rap scene.

What’s drill rap—and what happens when you mix it with American jazz?

There are all kinds of ways life might conspire to make other people’s experiences difficult for you to imagine. When I was a kid, my friends and I would spend hours at a time fighting off the Nazis who kept invading the abandoned forts of Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, Nova Scotia—decades after the end of World War II. It didn’t get funner than fighting Nazis. My grandmother, who lived through the Depression, saved wrapping paper, collected rubber bands, and washed aluminum foil. Weird.

Today, for all the anxiety about democratic society giving way to autocratic corruption in the United States—and all the general anxiety gripping democratic societies around the world—our frames of reference for life under dictatorship tend to be limited. The very idea that peacefully taking issue with your government might get you not just in trouble, or not just in jail, but completely wiped out financially, to the point of having no resources to keep yourself going or even feed your family—I mean, how does that happen? It’s a shocking concept.

By the way, what do you think about Bitcoin? I’ve read it’s a scam—just an inflated digital asset with no inherent value that people make money on by selling to greater fools. It’s super-volatile, vulnerable to price manipulation, and consumes a lot of energy, at that. “Crypto bros” are into it; make of that what you will. But now someone’s telling me Bitcoin is somehow indispensable to dissidents in autocratic states—a “freedom technology” for getting around dictatorial surveillance and confiscation. Not sure what to make of that.

I also just heard something about central banks across 98 percent of the global economy starting to work up their own digital currencies. China’s is apparently the big one—the digital yuan— enabling unprecedented government command over people’s money. Beijing can program it with expiration dates and monitor transactions through a centralized database of users’ financial activities, all while creating the largest repository of financial information in the world. Can you believe that? Seems incredible.

The Australians-moved-to-London indie rockers HTRK are bringing new life to the tradition of Mazzy Star and the dream-pop genre as a whole. They pronounce their name, “hate rock”; but don’t expect this track—which sounds like a lazy, care-free summer day—to help you understand whatever they might mean by that.

The Stockholm-based post-punk band Viagra Boys put out their fourth album last month, and this, the closing track, may be the most sincere thing they have ever recorded. Piano and horns, and two vocalists telling details of the simple pleasures they enjoy. Not their usual sound—but an enchanting effect.

Smerz is a Norwegian electronic music duo that splits their time between Oslo and Copenhagen. Big City Life is their second album. A detail: Smerz say their name comes from the German word herzschmerz—“heartbreak.” Who knows, but you might imagine this track evoking a doomed romance sparked in a nightclub, in that big-city life.

Victor Granic writes in re. Pavel Durov’s detention in France: “… the question is why Durov and not Musk or Zuckerberg. And for that matter why not arrest every software company exec whose company made tools that were used for nefarious pursuits. Why not sue or arrest Gates for causing security breaches because of bugs in the Windows operating system. Etc. The answer to me is clear—just because you built the gun doesn’t mean you committed the murder. So, it's unclear to me why Durov is being singled out.”

The Human Rights Foundation’s CEO Thor Halvorssen put the question to Durov at the Oslo Freedom Forum on Tuesday. Durov’s response:

“Well, I can only theorize about the reasons I was selected. I seem to be held to higher standards than most other platforms. We actually made some research; we compared Telegram with Instagram, with Facebook, with Snapchat, with other platforms here in France, and it seems that everybody has the same issues—with Telegram is actually more efficient in terms of moderation than all of these other platforms. And you’re right, you can accuse everybody in the same things that we were accused of. So we were quite puzzled. The reasons—maybe, because, I don’t know, we’re the only non-U.S. company; we’re not protected by this big American government that is very powerful. I’m not quite sure.”

A French court has denied a request by Pavel Durov, the co-founder of the encrypted-messaging app Telegram, to travel to Norway to speak at the Oslo Freedom Forum on May 27. The Human Rights Foundation—a partner organization with The Signal—invited Durov to OFF discuss free speech, surveillance, and digital rights.

• Durov is on bail in France for charges related to alleged criminal activity on Telegram. French authorities haven’t accused him of committing any crimes personally but argue that he’s legally responsible for criminal uses of his platform by others.
• Durov is on bail in France for charges related to alleged criminal activity on Telegram. French authorities haven’t accused him of committing any crimes personally but argue that he’s legally responsible for criminal uses of his platform by others.
• The Human Rights Foundation noted that blocking Durov affects not just the conference but planned private meetings with “dozens of human rights defenders from totalitarian regimes” who rely on Telegram to communicate freely.
• The Human Rights Foundation’s CEO Thor Halvorssen: “It is unfortunate that French courts would block Mr. Durov from participating in an event where his voice is so needed. Technologies like Telegram are basic tools for those resisting tyranny. This is more than a disappointment for our community; it is a setback for freedom.”

The courts have previously granted Durov permission to leave the country while on bail, making this denial unexpected—and suggesting either a changing attitude toward his case generally or concern about the nature of this high-profile speaking engagement specifically.

Earlier this month, a top U.S. official said the country had agreed on a “path forward” with the Democratic Republic of the Congo to close a deal giving Washington greater control over the development of the DRC’s vast mineral resources in exchange for new U.S. support for the government in Kinshasa.

The arrangement would allow the United States to manage the mining of some of the country’s massive deposits of lithium—and its similarly large reserves of copper and cobalt—all of which are known as critical minerals. These minerals are critical because it’s impossible to make most advanced technologies without them: They’re required in cutting-edge military hardware, renewable energy, robotics, and AI; and they’re in every semiconductor chip. They’re in the device you’re reading this on.

The DRC deal is just the latest instance of U.S. President Donald Trump’s pursuit of access to critical minerals. His desire to make Greenland part of the U.S. seems far-fetched—but his desire for its critical minerals, repeatedly stated, is very real. When Trump began negotiating with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, one of Trump’s first requests was an agreement for American access to Ukrainian critical-mineral deposits.

But this pursuit may also look a little odd. The U.S. has reserves of many critical minerals around the country. The world’s largest reserves of the key critical mineral lithium are in Australia and Chile, two longtime U.S. allies. And the previous administration of Joe Biden also worked on a raft of deals to secure the rights to critical minerals in the world.

What’s going on?

Corruption is everywhere. Or so you might think—because narratives of corruption are everywhere.

In the United States, Democrats and Republicans talk chronically of their opponents as being defined by it—Democrats seeing corporate influence, dark money, and foreign interference; Republicans, deep-state conspiracies, voter fraud, and graft in federal agencies. When either looks into the possibility that one or another of these things might be happening, the other claims the investigation is politically motivated. Which is to say, corrupt.

Neither is this tendency entirely new. From colonial-era anti-monarchists to contemporary conspiracy theorists, time and again, Americans have understood corruption as an existential threat to their republic—sometimes perceiving elaborate plots in sparse arrays of evidence. The country’s founders established the checks and balances characteristic of their constitution partly to limit what they saw as the corrupting influence of concentrated power.

Nor is the tendency unique to the U.S. In the United Kingdom, it’s common for Labour supporters to see the Tories as enmeshed with wealthy donors, tax-avoidance schemes, and privileged access for corporate interests—and for Tories to see Labour as corrupting Britain through union influence, local-council mismanagement, and left-wing bias in public institutions. You can find similar themes from Canada to Australia and throughout the democratic world. You can trace them back to the republican city-states of the Italian Renaissance, or back from there to ancient Athens.

And there are at least grains of truth to a lot of them.

If anything’s fundamentally different today, it’s that media is now everywhere; its dominant business model is based on engagement—the time you give to it; nothing drives engagement like fear, anger, and hate; and nothing drives fear, anger, and hate like narratives about internal enemies corrupting your country. People are freaking out about corruption all the time. It’s a lot for a democratic society to bear.

Unfortunately, there’s another problem with narratives of corruption being everywhere—which is that it can create a kind of interpretive smog, making it harder for us to see the worst forms of corruption right in front of our noses: Around the world, literal dictators and the autocratic governments they run are appropriating their countries’ wealth and using it to buy power and influence in democratic countries.

It’s been happening for years. It’s been getting worse. And now, it’s getting worse still. As we go to press with this, The Signal’s second print extra, new leadership in the U.S. Department of Justice is significantly scaling back anti-corruption enforcement—dropping high-profile corruption cases, firing anti-corruption prosecutors, and disbanding efforts to enforce sanctions against Russian oligarchs. An executive order from the president is meanwhile formally suspending the application of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the landmark 1977 law that prohibits Americans from bribing foreign officials.

Corruption may be everywhere, because human beings are everywhere. But if we want to see it in real proportions, not just as our political biases want us to see it, we have to be able to follow real clues—not least, the money. And in 2025, that’s only getting tougher and more urgent.

—John Jamesen Gould

The Oakland-based guitarist and composer Chuck Johnson conjures other worlds, with cathedrals of shimmering guitar. Here on his new album Sun Glories, supported by the saxophonist Cole Pulice, Johnson evokes the great outdoors on a beautiful morning.

From this year’s The Primordial Pieces, here’s the pianist and composer Leo Chadburn with a kaleidoscopic piano piece that swirls and swoops, dives and shifts in alternate time signatures. The song might give you the sensation of whirling through the clouds. It features just one real chord change, which appears only briefly before disappearing into the churn.

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump over the weekend, injuring the former U.S. president—and killing Corey Comperatore, a firefighter from Sarver, Pennsylvania—has triggered a lot of understandable anxiety, not least in the media. In the U.K., the BBC declared that “the illusion of security and safety in American politics—built over decades—has been dramatically shattered.” In the U.S., The Atlantic, a publication founded in 1857, led its coverage of the crime by announcing in a banner at the top of its homepage that the incident was “part of a terrible new era of political violence.”

Is this true?

America has a long record of political violence, at times deadly, going back to the country’s founding. In 1804, Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. secretary of the treasury, was killed in a duel with Aaron Burr, then Thomas Jefferson’s vice president. Between 1830 and 1860, historians have documented some 70 physical fights—including a caning—among members of Congress.

Four U.S. presidents have since been assassinated, and 13 others survived attempts—including Ronald Reagan in 1981. More recently, Gabby Giffords and Steve Scalise—a Democrat and a Republican, respectively—were shot while serving in Congress; and in 2022, Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, was badly wounded in their home by an attacker wielding a hammer. In 2020, Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer was the target of a kidnapping plot, ultimately foiled by law enforcement.

From the 1960s through the ‘90s, much of the developed world went through an era of regular political violence. Between 1970 and 1998, the Red Army Faction—also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang—carried out a series of bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings in West Germany. In 1978, the Red Brigades killed Italy’s former prime minister Aldo Moro. And beginning in the late 1960s, groups like the Weather Underground undertook a program of political violence in the United States. Even in Canada, globally renowned as easygoing, the Front de Libération du Québec—a militant Québécois separatist group—kidnapped and killed a government minister in 1970. Over these same decades, thousands of British and Irish died in the conflict over the political status of Northern Ireland.

As recently as 2022, the former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot and killed, while Pakistan’s PM survived a shooting the same year—as Slovakia’s did this May. Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, was stabbed while campaigning for office in 2018.

So no, there’s no reason at the moment to think a terrible new era of political violence is upon America or the democratic world. We’ve been living through one for a generation.

What may be changing, however, isn’t the quantity of political violence but its quality. The leftist bombings of the 1960s and ‘70s, along with the jihadi operations of more recent decades, have receded. But it appears they’re being replaced by attacks rooted in domestic political polarization and ethnic identity. During the recent election campaign for the European Parliament, German police recorded at least half a dozen assaults, almost all involving supporters of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. Across Europe, meanwhile, recent years have seen more and more Jews and immigrants—mostly Muslims—subject to brutality, neofascist and otherwise.