‘Daydream.’ If Liam Dutton’s name isn’t instantly recognizable to you, you must not live in U.K., where he’s a broadcast meteorologist for Channel 4 News. But in his spare time, Dutton is a musician, and luckily for us, he’s started releasing his compositions on YouTube. This is an ambient track, which might make you look forward to springtime even more than you already are.

—Brendan Hasenstab

The European question. As the U.S. pulls back its support for Ukraine, Europe is clearly saying that it wants to pick up the slack. But can Europe pull it off?

European countries have increased defense spending by about 30 percent since 2021—but as John R. Deni says here in The Signal, they’re now running into serious budget problems that could thwart their desire to send more aid to Ukraine.

German law prevents the government from running a deficit larger than 0.35 percent of GDP, though the incoming cabinet has said it wants to revisit the limit. The U.K. and France—the next two largest economies in Europe—are already facing severe fiscal shortfalls; the new British budget cuts government spending, while France just passed a budget with a deficit amounting to 5.4 percent of GDP, violating the EU limit of 3 percent—for the sixth year in a row.

—Michael Bluhm

From this week’s member’s despatch …

111MHz: ‘Takoba (Injustice Version).’ Last May, the Nigerian guitarist and singer Mdou Moctar released Funeral for Justice, but never one to rest, he and his power trio have reworked all the songs on that record for acoustic and traditional instruments, which they’ve titled Tears of Injustice. It’s like “Mdou Moctar Unplugged,” and it’s a joy—not least if you like the Tuareg-style theatrics they’re known for.

—Brendan Hasenstab

111MHz: ‘O, Dark Mother.’ Masma Dream World is an artist from Milwaukee who specializes in a choral sort of drone music hovering at the midpoint between dream and nightmare. Experimental stuff—but refreshing to hear an artist blending Gregorian chanting with modern concerns and computerized editing.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Monarchs of the sea. On February 26, Beijing’s navy conducted live-fire exercises about 45 miles from Taiwan’s largest port, Kaohsiung. As part of the drill, more than 30 aircraft from the Chinese army also flew near the island.

The site overlaps several shipping lanes in the Taiwan Strait that connect East Asia to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. For some reason, Beijing didn’t offer the usual advance notification for shipping and air traffic in the area.

Just a few days earlier, Chinese naval vessels had undertaken two days of live-fire drills in the waters between Australia and New Zealand. Those drills forced commercial flights between the countries to divert around the exercises. New Zealand’s defense minister, Judith Collins, says Beijing had never sent a force armed with such “extremely capable” weapons to conduct a drill like that: “It’s certainly a change.”

Those exercises came a week after a Chinese fighter jet fired flares in front of an Australian surveillance plane over the South China Sea. Australia lodged a complaint with Beijing over it.

What is China doing?

In this week’s member’s dispatch, we connect the dots to our conversation with Isaac B. Kardon on China’s preparations for a potential invasion of Taiwan and even bigger ambitions in the region …

—Michael Bluhm

111MHz: ‘Puddle (of Me).’ This is Saya Gray, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter-producer from Toronto. Here on her new record, Saya, in certain moments she blends lyrical uncertainty with upbeat guitar-driven pop, in this track singing, “You know how obsessed I can get/With your needle and thread pulling in and out of me.”

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: Visions of Inequality. For most of the Cold War, economists—not just in the West but in the Soviet Bloc, too—spent little time researching income inequality. The Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson’s influential textbook Economics spans some 900 plus pages, but it dedicates only two pages to the subject. Another Nobel laureate, Robert Lucas, formerly the president of the American Economic Association, said that “of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, … the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.” And it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Journal of Economic Literature, the foremost classification system of economic papers and books, introduced a code for economic inequality.

But in recent years, as Branko Milanovic writes in Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War, inequality studies have “exploded.” Perhaps most famously, the 2014 English translation of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century probably sold more copies in its first year than any other economics book ever. And it’s not just the study of income inequality that’s gained traction; the politics of it has gained traction also. Inequality has become the watchword of left-populist movements, like Jeremy Corbyn’s in the United Kingdom or Bernie Sanders’s in the United States. Why? This week, in the member’s dispatch, we take a look—at the question and Milanovic’s ambitious crack at answering it.

—Gustav Jönsson

111MHz: ‘Millions Are Lost (Are We All in This Together?).’ Half of the great early 2000s British duo Johnny Boy, Lolly Hayes, released a new tune for tough times mid last year. It’s smart, charming, and unmistakably Lolly Hayes.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Set adrift. The first move was economic: On February 13, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to prepare for reciprocal tariffs in April on countries that put import duties on American products. Speaking afterward, Trump singled out European Union trade practices as “brutal”; the order designates the value-added tax, a staple across the European Continent, as a trade barrier for reciprocal measures. Brussels issued a statement that it would respond “firmly and immediately” if the U.S. goes through with the tariffs—but so far has otherwise done nothing.

Then came the challenges to European, especially Ukrainian, security: The U.S. and Russia arranged talks with one another in Saudi Arabia last week, excluding Ukraine and Europe, while European leaders met separately in Paris—where they ignored the tariffs and struggled to align their positions on Ukraine’s future security arrangements.

Why can’t Europe get its act together? In this week’s member’s dispatch, we return to our conversation with Matthias Matthijs about the simultaneous, epochal problems the Continent is facing—and why its political systems are struggling to produce the kind of strong government necessary for the moment.

—Michael Bluhm

From the weekly Signal member’s despatch.