出國趣

Leaders | Generation AI How AI is rewiring childhood The technology presents (3 meanings) dazzling opportunities—and ominous risks Dec 4th 2025|5 min read CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS may contain more surprises than usual this year, as children open presents that can talk back. Toymakers in China have declared 2025 the year of artificial intelligence (AI) and are producing robots and teddies that can teach...

"Watch who you’re calling childless Women in America are having as many babies over their lifetimes as they did two decades ago A set of public signs showing women, pregnancy, baby care, strollers, and children playing Dec 18th 2025 | 5 min read **A colony of **sentient lizards, living on a distant planet. It comprises 100 females and 100 males. Each lives for 100 years. There is only one male and...

Christmas Specials | Single men in possession of good fortunes Was Mr Darcy the richest of all Jane Austen’s characters? It depends how you count their wealth Dec 12th 2025|2 min read Mr Darcy is handsome, smouldering and rich. According to the 1995 television adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice”, he is also an excellent swimmer. But in Austen’s next novel, “Mansfield Park”, she introduces a man **...

He Yanxin was the steward of a women-only language The last natural inheritor of nushu died on October 23rd, aged 86 Nov 27th 2025|5 min read In the summer of 1949, the year the Communists came to power in China, you might have found He Yanxin, then ten, sitting with her grandmother under a tree. It was cooler there, in the heat of the day. An ordinary scene, except that her grandmother was** insc...

Nov 10th 2025 4 min read By Tom Standage, Editor, The World Ahead 2026 This is Donald Trump’s world—we’re all just living in it. The disruptor-in-chief was the biggest factor shaping global affairs in 2025, and that will be the case for as long as he remains in the White House. His norm-shattering approach has caused turmoil in some areas (as in trade) but has also delivered diplomatic results (as...

The hidden risks in Taiwan’s boom A weak-currency policy is punishing consumers and storing up financial risk Taiwan is ENVIED for its exporting prowess: it is home to all of the world’s cutting-edge chipmaking. Just as extraordinary, but much less appreciated, is its towering current-account surplus, the result not just of a trade boom but of a long-undervalued currency. This aided Taiwan’s expor...

All over the rich world, fewer people are hooking up and shacking up Social media, dating apps and political polarisation all play a part Nov 6th 2025|New York and Singapore|14 min read “I don’t date conservative or moderate men,” says Nancy Anteby, a 30-year-old New Yorker who works in social media. “I only date** liberal **men.” Politics is not her only concern. She is also looking for someone a...

Hong Kongers support gay marriage. Their leaders, not so much The city has rejected** reform** even as other places in Asia embrace it Nov 6th 2025|Hong Kong|3 min read In 2023 Hong Kong’s highest court ordered the city’s government to introduce rules offering a degree of legal recognition to unions between people of the same sex. That Hong Kong had no legal framework relating to civil partnership...

What is Taiwan’s plan B? It is starting to hedge against the risk that America abandons it Oct 23rd 2025|Taipei|6 min read Officials in Taiwan were quietly optimistic when Donald Trump was re-elected. Among his advisers were several diehard China hawks determined that America stand by its vow to help Taiwan defend itself against any attack from the Chinese mainland. Taiwanese diplomats and militar...

United States | Build, baby, build California tries to fix its housing mess The YIMBY movement wins a big victory Oct 14th 2025|Los Angeles|4 min read ONE OF THE most contentious and consequential housing reforms in California’s history was almost sunk by a former reality-TV star. American millennials might remember Spencer Pratt as the blonde bad boy they loved to hate on “The Hills”, an MTV show...

Kim Seong Min risked everything to escape from North Korea The activist, poet and broadcaster died on September 12th, aged 63 Sep 25th 2025|5 min read He could not shake the shackle off. At the other end of it was a North Korean officer, who went with him everywhere. If Kim Seong Min as much as used the lavatory, the officer came along too. For three days they were yoked like this, hostile twins,...

Are red-light face masks worth the hype? Used properly, the right ones can help combat the signs of ageing Sep 26th 2025|3 min read HOLED UP AT home when no one else is looking, people indulge in their covert, sometimes embarrassing, self-care routines. One of the newest involves donning a mask that would make the greatest movie villains envious. Strap it around the face, switch it on and ominous...

Culture | Back Story First, they come for the comedians But, try as strongmen might, the jokes always get away Sep 22nd 2025|4 min read Josef Stalin loses his pipe and informs his security chief. Later he finds it behind the sofa. “That’s impossible,” says the henchman (黨羽), “three people have confessed to stealing it!” Lots of jokes were told about the Soviet generalissimo, proliferating long a...

United States | Stay in place It is getting much harder to get evicted in New York City Tenants win. Potential** tenants** lose One in one out Sep 25th 2025|NEW YORK |3 min read There are few things that unite all New Yorkers, but one is an obsession with talking about the housing market. And so it is no surprise that it is dominating the city’s mayoral election on November 5th. The Democratic can...

United States | Lexington The real collusion between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin It may be scarier than their critics long suspected Aug 14th 2025|5 min read To DEFY Donald Trump is to court punishment. A rival politician can expect an investigation, an aggravating network may face a lawsuit, a left-leaning university can bid farewell to its public grants, a scrupulous civil servant can count...

Business | Marketing missteps How do you pronounce Biemlfdlkk? The brands lost in translation As they race to go global, many Chinese companies are choosing new names A brand you’ll never forget Sep 11th 2025|SHANGHAI|3 min read Biemlfdlkk is a mouthful. It is not exactly clear how to enunciate the eight-consonant jumble in the Chinese golf-apparel brand’s English name. It is even hard to write. B...

不唸書的下場是我們的政治越來越愚蠢了? Is the decline of reading making politics dumber? As people read less they think less clearly, **scholars **fear Sep 4th 2025 The experiment was simple; so too, you may have thought, was the task. Students of literature at two American universities were given the first paragraphs of “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens and asked to read and then explain them. In o...

**The rise of **beer made by AI Customers love it Aug 27th 2025 WHEN BECK’S, a storied German brewery founded in the city of Bremen in 1873, celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2023 it decided to bring in a new brewmaster to mark the occasion: ChatGPT, an artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot. The company asked it to whip up a recipe using only hops, yeast, water, and malt. The result was “Beck’s A...

Erotic writing is becoming more explicit Gardening metaphors are out. Other things are very much in Feb 27th 2025 START WITH the nipples. The lover does in “Mistress and Mother”, a steamy romantic novel from the 1990s. Though, since it was written three decades ago, they are not always called “nipples”. Instead, the author also discreetly describes them as “little buds”. Other erotica from this er...

China | For good or ill Hong Kong is super superstitious Why** prophetic artists** and feng-shui masters hold such sway Aug 14th 2025|Hong Kong|3 min read TATSUKI RYO is the finest diviner since Nostradamus, in the view of many Hong Kongers. In 1999 the Japanese manga artist published a collection of supposedly prophetic dreams warning of a “great disaster, year 2011, month 3.” In March 2011 Japan...

**“Comrade” **is making a comeback in China Or so the government hopes Jul 24th 2025|Beijing DURING THE decades when Mao Zedong ruled China, it was common for people to address each other as tongzhi: “comrade”. Like its English equivalent, the word has an egalitarian ring, as well as a hint of revolutionary fervour. But after Mao’s death in 1976, and the market reforms that followed, the term tong...

Science & technology | Well informed Do** probiotics** work? For a healthy microbiome, eating your greens is a surer bet Jul 18th 2025|3 min read A DAZZLING menagerie of microbes live inside the human gut—by some counts a few thousand different species. Most residents of this gut microbiome are not the disease-causing kind. In fact, many do useful jobs, such as breaking down certain carbohydra...

Why all Indians are** rule-breakers** Because the state makes it impossible not to be Jul 3rd 2025|4 min read IF YOU HAVE ever relaxed with a cold Kingfisher beer at the end of a long, sweaty day in Mumbai, the party capital of India, you have almost certainly broken the law. Specifically, you violated section 40 of the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949, under which you must hold a permit to drink bo...

Simon Groot scattered better plant seeds across the world The seedsman from Enkhuizen died on July 6th, aged 90 What started him thinking was a cabbage. Not any old cabbage, but the variety, “Glory of Enkhuizen”, which his family company, Sluis and Groot, had produced in that town in North Holland in 1899. It was a beautiful cabbage, round, compact, with a light-green head framed in darker leaves....

United States | Welcome to Trader Zoh’s Should cities run their own supermarkets? New York’s mayoral front-runner thinks so Many a New Yorker dreams of not paying rent. So do New York’s shops; **retail space **there is pricier than anywhere else in America, by a lot. Seldom is this wish granted. But for a select few publicly owned grocery stores, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York...