111 MHz: ‘8th Deadly Sin’ The former Lush front woman Miki Berenyi is back with a sleek trio that includes her husband on bass. Some dream pop with an indie tilt and lyrics expressing a matured sense of urgency about the world. From the album Tripla, due out April 4.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: Generation Gap. Donald Trump, 78, is now the oldest person ever to assume the presidency of the United States. His predecessor, Joe Biden, 82, was the oldest president ever—and became so infirm in office that his own party forced him to drop his reelection campaign. Last month, the former House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, 84—who by all accounts orchestrated Biden’s ouster—fell and broke her hip. Also last month, someone leaked photographs of the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, 82, being pushed in a wheelchair. The trend line behind these scenes: In 2002, 8 percent of lawmakers in Congress were over the age of 70; by 2022, that share had risen to 23 percent. Why is Congress so old?

There might be several reason. America itself is getting older: In 1980, the average age was 30; today it’s above 38. And older vote at far higher rates than the young. What’s more, running for office takes time and money, which the old typically have and the young typically don’t. Nevertheless, Congress sometimes gets marginally younger.

But as Kevin Munger explores in Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture, America’s gerontocracy is also a product of the country’s political institutions. European populations have gotten older too, but their political leaders have stayed relatively spry. That, says Munger, is partly because they have proportional representation, which means youthful insurgent parties can credibly contest elections. In the U.S., though, the old guard has its hands on the two parties—and longtime incumbents, if they manage to ward off unknown and underfunded challengers in the primaries, can then breeze to victory in safe seats.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘VFS.’ Some liminal, spooky music, from the debut record of the London artist who goes by Partial Defrag. You’ll hear a lot of layered sounds and moods. Something else you mightn’t have known you were hearing: a game engine he used in the composition. The result? A track that sounds very nighttime-on-the-streets-of-London.

—Brendan Hasenstab

The price of China’s trade success. In 2024, China posted a trade surplus of almost US$1 trillion, according to data published by Beijing this week. It’s the biggest annual surplus any country has ever recorded, even adjusting for inflation.

This dominance is largely from manufactured goods: China is the largest exporter of cars globally, for example, and makes almost all the world’s solar panels. The country now produces about a third of the total of all manufactured goods—more than the U.S., Japan, Germany, South Korea, and the U.K. combined. How is Beijing doing it?

The governments of countries around the world share an answer they don’t like: They accuse China of intentionally producing vastly more than its own economy can buy and then selling the excess at cut-rate prices abroad, pushing local manufacturers out of their markets. Hence a rise in anger with Beijing in these countries—and the accompanying rise in tariffs on Chinese imports. Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Turkey have all imposed them, in an attempt to protect domestic manufacturers. The EU and U.S. meanwhile raised tariffs last year on Chinese car imports—and incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has long said he plans to raise tariffs on Chinese goods drastically.

In May, Alice Han looked at the causes and consequences of China’s export surge. What might appear as an unprecedented success, Han says, is also a sign of fundamental weakness. Despite decades of attempted incentives from the central government, household consumption in China remains relatively low. And with other problems in the economy, the Chinese Communist Party has only one way to generate economic growth—and jobs—that citizens have come to expect: exports. That’s why Beijing has been making its massive investments in manufacturing—and why massive trade surpluses, increasing tensions, and tariffs have come with them.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Aey Nehin.’ From the Pakistani singer and musician Arooj Aftab’s May 2024 album Night Reign, a beguiling track, with poetic lyrics by the actress and writer Yasra Rizvi. Here, Arooj makes it all her own in a live-in-studio version for the Mahogany Sessions channel on YouTube.

—Brendan Hasenstab

5 W Main: Japan in the American Century. Earlier this month, U.S. President Joe Biden blocked Nippon Steel’s US$14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel, overruling opposition within both his team and the U.S. government more broadly. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), which vets cross-border mergers for national security risks, couldn’t reach a consensus: The Treasury, Defense, and State Departments were reportedly satisfied that the takeover posed no prohibitive risks, but both the U.S. Trade Representative and the Energy Secretary raised objections. Now the two companies are suing the United States government in a bid to overturn Biden’s veto. Why the controversy?

Both Biden and President-Elect Donald Trump see political value in retaining manufacturing in America. Deindustrialization has struck American steel towns hard: American steel mills employ 84,000 workers today, compared with 190,000 in the late 1980s. No president wants to endanger those remaining jobs, but here, both companies are claiming that Biden’s political considerations have outweighed true national-security interests in the CFIUS review.

The question of whether the takeover poses national-security risks—in a broad sense that includes long-term economic security—rests on how reliant it’ll make America on imported steel. The United States currently imports roughly three-fourths of its steel—mainly from Canada, Mexico, and Brazil—and has seven primary steel plants, of which U.S. Steel owns three.

Both companies have also sued David McCall, the president of the United Steelworkers (USW), for allegedly “preventing the transaction.” Thousands of steelworkers expressed their support for Nippon Steel’s takeover, fearing that their legacy steel mills might close without significant new investment. Nippon Steel has promised to invest $2.7 billion in modernized plants and equipment, $1 billion of that in Mon Valley, Pennsylvania, which is more than U.S. Steel says it can invest on its own. The USW, however, says Nippon’s promises won’t be legally enforceable. What’s more, Nippon insisted on a force majeure clause which could potentially have voided its investment promises in the case of labor strikes.

Another consideration that’s weighed on the minds of American officials is Washington’s relationship with Tokyo, which lobbied vigorously if ineffectually in favor of the takeover. As Kenneth B. Pyle explores in Japan in the American Century, Japan has gone in just a couple of decades from more or less passively relying on the United States to actively partnering with it on near-equal footing. Today, it’s not only the top foreign investor in the U.S. but the foremost counterweight to China in the Western Pacific region. Tokyo may feel spurned by Biden’s veto, but its relationship with Washington is deep and unlikely to break over a single dispute—even one with this level of investment at stake.

—Gustav Jönsson

111 MHz: ‘Port Gentil.’ In 1996, Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig released one of the cornerstone classics of the dub techno genre under the name Porter Ricks. What you hear, here, is a nautical take on the genre—and a bold departure from its Detroit roots. The atmosphere is thick, with texture and washes of sound giving it a seaport feel, mixing with a relentless four-four.

—Brendan Hasenstab

From revolution to civil war to genocide. The U.S. State Department just published a report finding that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia fighting a civil war against the country’s military, had committed genocide during Sudan’s ongoing civil war. Washington has meanwhile backed this finding up by imposing sanctions against the RSF’s leader, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as “Hemedti,” and seven companies owned by the RSF in the United Arab Emirates, which have been backing the militia in the conflict.

As we noted on Monday, it’s a conflict that’s driving tremendous suffering in the country, where upward of 25 million people are experiencing acute hunger—and both armed forces have been using starvation and the control of humanitarian aid as weapons of war. The U.S. says both sides have committed war crimes during the civil war, which has killed more than 28,000 people and displaced more than 11 million—almost a quarter of Sudan’s population—since fighting began in April 2023.

And yet this is the same country where, in 2016, a mass uprising toppled the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir, who’d subjected Sudan to 30 years of autocratic rule. Why couldn’t Sudan seize the opportunity to build a stable democracy?

Unity among Sudan’s revolutionaries enabled them to form a civil-military council for managing the planned transition to democracy. They even scheduled elections for 2022. In October 2021, however, the military launched a coup, arresting the prime minister and dissolving the government. The military was able to contain the widespread protests that followed the coup, but the persistent opposition ultimately led to the civil war. It was a pattern familiar from other Arab countries where longstanding tyrants fell during the Arab Spring: Civil wars continue in Yemen, Libya, and Sudan, while new autocrats have seized power in Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria—with a new transition just beginning in Syria.

In November 2021, just after the military coup, James Robinson explored the obstacles facing countries trying to build democracies after despotism. The key, Robinson says, is to create political institutions and an economy that include a vast majority of the people. But in Sudan—as in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world—the military under Bashir controlled a significant share of the economy, and the popular coalition that overthrew him was unable to give the armed forces enough incentives to give up their economic power.

—Michael Bluhm

111 MHz: ‘Solaris.’ In 2021, when so many of us were stuck at home, Kevin Richard Martin—who records as The Bug and under other names—decided to rescore the 1972 Soviet sci-fi classic Solaris, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and based on the Stanislaw Lem novel from 1961. As Tarkovsky is known for his dreamlike, long camera shots, Martin’s chords are languorous. You can hear the emptiness of deep space here.

—Brendan Hasenstab