111 MHz: ‘Lapis Manalis.’ The Dutch DJ and producer Thessa Torsing, who records as upsammy, is back with Strange Meridians, a new album of ambient music. And by that, I mean completely beatless—although in this track, pretty and psychedelic, you can imagine where a beat might appear.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Winter has come in the Islamic Republic. Iran is facing a major power outage in the middle of a cold spell. Government offices have cut their opening hours. Schools have closed. Street lights are switched off. Last month, there were scheduled two-hour power cuts across most of the country; this month, they’re random and last longer. One Iranian official said the country has lowered its industrial manufacturing output by 30 to 50 percent. The government has responded by inaugurating a campaign to encourage people to lower the temperature of their homes by 2 degrees. “God willing,” said Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, “next year we will try for this not to happen.”

But Iran has the third-largest oil reserves and the second-largest natural gas reserves in the world. Energy really shouldn’t be a problem here. How could this have happened at all?

As residents of Iran are wont to tell you, Iranian officials are neither incorruptible nor remarkably competent. “Blackouts on top of everything else!” Javad, a Tehran-based engineer, said to the Financial Times. “This is the result of ineffective managers and officials who are all talk and no action.”

Those same managers and officials have blamed the people of Iran for their “excessive” consumption. But if Iranians consume lots of gas, it’s not least because the government offers extremely generous subsidies—on which the International Monetary Fund estimates Iran spends more than one-quarter of its GDP. As a result, a liter of gas at the station costs less than three U.S. cents, making Iran one of the world’s cheapest countries to purchase gas. The government has tried to scale these subsidies back, but it fears repeating the circumstances of a 2019 gas price hike that led to widespread street protests.

Meanwhile, the government in Tehran has long prioritized gas to residential neighborhoods over industrial facilities. More than nine-tenths of Iranian households are connected to gas pipelines, which has caused industrial outages in crunch times. Last month, the government had to choose between supplying residential homes or power plants: On Wednesday of last week, officials said they’d temporarily closed 13 power plants. By Friday, they had closed 17, with the rest only operating partially.

Diversifying the country’s energy supply might’ve helped, but Iran hasn’t; roughly seven-tenths of its energy comes from natural gas.

Iran's energy infrastructure is in need or modernization. It lacks the technology to minimize gas flaring, which burns off tonnes of gas. And the country has struggled to transport gas from the resource-rich south to the big cities in the north. That problem got worse this February, when Israel blew up two gas pipelines inside Iran, forcing the Iranian government to tap into its strategic reserves. But instead of investing in its infrastructure, the Iranian government has spent billions propping up its regional allies.

Apart from these structural problems, there’s the sanctions regime imposed on Iran, principally by the United States—what Donald Trump called the “maximum pressure” strategy. The sanctions have limited Iran’s capacity to trade with the rest of the world—and precluded international investment in the country. So it lacks the refining technology to keep its output in line with its vast resources.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘Iambic 9 Poetry.’ Tom Wilkinson, who records as Squarepusher, has been a leading player in the Warp Records stable for many years now—and they’ve just remastered his 2004 album Ultravisitor. In his drumming and bass, you can hear Wilkinson’s jazz fluency among the layers of electronics.

—Brendan Hasenstab

111 MHz: ‘Saisons Mouvement 3.’ Here, on the new album Saisons, the Belgian composer Alice Hebborn teams up with the pianist Nao Momitani to take on the theme of climate crisis. The track is full of drama, as galloping tympani convey both danger and reassurance around piano and electronic soundscapes. And then the rain comes in.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Judging the judges. Over the past few years, Americans appear to have lost trust in their judicial system, quickly and dramatically. Now, only about 35 percent say they have confidence in U.S. courts, according to a Gallop poll published on December 17. It’s a steep decline from 59 percent just four years ago.

Gallup surveys public opinion on legal systems in 160 countries, and only nine times since 2006 have they recorded a drop over four years greater than what they’re seeing in the U.S. now. Those nine instances were typically in countries experiencing civil war (Syria), a military takeover (Burma), or profound economic and political crisis (Venezuela).

The United States lags 20 points behind the median level of confidence in the wealthy countries of the OECD. Global data from 2023 show the U.S. in 92nd place in a ranking of countries by public confidence in their judiciaries—putting it behind Russia, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Hungary. Why is this happening?

The Gallup poll suggests the court cases against President-elect Donald Trump are likely factors in the decline of confidence. Many, particularly among Republicans, believe the prosecutions against Trump have been politically motivated; many others, particularly among Democrats, are upset that the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity from some of the felony charges against him—or have viewed the Court for years as being essentially in the Republican camp.

In July, Christopher W. Schmidt looked at accusations in the U.S.—on both the right and the left—that the judicial system has been politically captured. Schmidt says the idea is an old one in America—including as a way to mobilize partisans to vote. What’s new is that the U.S. political center—and the institutions traditionally aligned with it, like the mainstream media or the legal profession—are now rallying less and less to show public support for the judicial system and stepping back more and more to challenge it.

—Michael Bluhm

The pond gets wider. The U.S. and Europe are drifting apart, economically. The American economy grows and grows, worker productivity rises reliably each year, and the world’s top tech companies are headquartered in California.

Europe can’t compete. In 1995, worker productivity was about the same in the two regions, but now European productivity lags 20 percent behind U.S. numbers. The gap between U.S. and European GDP has meanwhile doubled over the past 20 years. U.S. start-ups have taken on about five times more in venture capital than European start-ups have over the past decade. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better in 2025.

In October, the International Monetary Fund adjusted its forecast for U.S. GDP growth next year up to 2.2 percent—and for the eurozone, down to 0.8 percent. What’s happened to Europe?

Today, Martin Wolf looks at what’s expanding the gap between America’s and Europe’s economic fortunes—and what it means for European life, among poorer people especially.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Personare.’ The Austrian guitarist and composer Christian Fennesz is back with his first new record in five years. Curiously, the press materials suggest this song was inspired by 1980s pop from West Africa. Which is either strangely elusive or intentionally funny. Cinematic, blissed-out, and warm, yes—but hardly Ghanaian highlife.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: Bandits. While there are roughly 1,000 shootings a year in New York City, there’s been unusual intrigue in the recent murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan. The 26-year-old suspect now in custody, Luigi Mangione, appears to have planned the crime extensively—the evidence including the words “deny,” “delay,” “depose” etched on the shell casings, in an apparent reference to a 2010 book on the American health-insurance industry, Delay, Deny, Defend.

Remarkably, a significant number of Americans have either celebrated the crime or said that, even if they couldn’t condone murder, they could nevertheless understand why it happened here. When UnitedHealthcare expressed the company’s sorrow about Thompson’s death, the post received more than 80,000 laughing-emoji reactions. Some gave Mangione the nickname “the adjustor,” in reference to insurance adjustors who evaluate claims. And Delay, Deny, Defend sold out in bookstores within hours of news about the shell casings. As the title of an article in one local newspaper put it, “Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows C.E.O.’s Killing.” What is all this?

While edgy, hostile, or even outright terrible behavior may now be common on the internet, the killing does seem to have tapped into an unusual reservoir of frustration in U.S. society—at a time when about half of Americans say they have trouble meeting health-care costs. Polling indicates that most Americans consider the killing unjustified, yet more young people have a favorable view of Mangione than of UnitedHealthcare or the U.S. health insurance industry as a whole.

But the killing may also tap into a cultural trope with a very long history: the romanticization of the “social bandit,” the outlaw who—as the late British historian Eric Hobsbawm explores in his 1969 classic, Bandits—many admire for fighting what they see as injustice. Sometimes, the figure is a “noble robber,” like England’s Medieval Robin Hood; sometimes, a terror-bringing avenger, like Mexico’s nineteenth-century Joaquin Murrieta. “Such is the need for heroes and champions,” Hobsbawm writes, “that if there are no real ones, unsuitable candidates are pressed into service.”

—Gustav Jönsson

Reputational hazards. Back in 2019, when I lived in Hong Kong, the police began ordering financial institutions to freeze the bank accounts of clients tied to the then-ongoing protest movement. The banks complied, and they've kept complying. Last year, for instance, HSBC closed three bank accounts belonging to the League of Social Democrats, one of Hong Kong’s last remaining pro-democracy groups. The practice, sometimes called “debanking,” is an established part of the autocratic playbook for crushing political dissent.

Recent claims, including from the prominent American venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, imply that something comparable may now be happening in democratic countries, too. Is that true? And if so, how common would it be?

Today, Victoria Barnes explores what's behind the obscure but politically charged practice of debanking.

—Gustav Jönsson