Plutocrat Billion

Plutocrat Archipelagos

Jack Self | MacGuffin | 28th September 2024 | U

The ultra wealthy, especially those who inherited money rather than made it, cut themselves off from the world by walls by visible and invisible. The physical barriers include "razor wire fences; galvanised spikes; electrified perimeters; soaring planes of solid brickwork, blockwork and concrete". The intangible separation is achieved through "paranoia, distrust and fear" (2,100 words)

The First Billion Years Comes Into View

Rebecca Boyle | Quanta | 9th October 2024 | U

The "firehose" of new, bright images from the James Webb Space Telescope is not even fully open yet. Much of what we have seen so far is strange. "Galaxy size, brightness, mass and shape are all weird. Black holes are weird. The efficiency of star formation is weird; the correlation between brightness, astronomical power and an object’s mass are not as astrophysicists expected" (3,900 words)