Stuck in a moment. Since the 1980s, China’s economy has grown more than any other in the world—but those days might be over. It barely advanced at all in the second quarter of this year. Chinese people are losing jobs and spending less—and they tend to have a much darker view of the economy now than they did just a few years ago. Foreign investors are leaving, and forecasts look less rosy. What’s gone wrong?

Today, Victor Shih lays out the critical problems that have emerged from all these years of rapid expansion—and the enormous national debt that’s complicating Beijing’s efforts to solve them.

—Michael Bluhm

111MHz: ‘Movement, Before All Flowers.’ The German composer Max Richter is back with In a Landscape, a new album of pensive, post-classical compositions. Here, his minor piano cords are joined by soaring cello and violin, turning a glum piano line into something much warmer and more hopeful.

—Brendan Hasenstab

It depends on what dictator. When U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris gave her speech to the Democratic National Convention this summer, she said that her presidential rival, Donald Trump, “won’t hold autocrats accountable” and that she “will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators.” It’s a familiar message: The New Yorker recently published a cartoon of a mustachioed caudillo on the psychoanalyst’s sofa, complaining “It’s like Trump is deliberately praising every brutal dictator except me.”

But the U.S. has a long and complicated history of dealing with dictators. Has Trump really represented a shocking kind of departure from it?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, well remembered for leading the U.S. into war against the tyrannies of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan in the 1940s, once praised the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin as “truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia;” Richard Nixon gushed over Spain’s Generalissimo Fransisco Franco when visiting Spain in 1970; and Ronald Reagan once complimented Guatemala’s president Efraín Ríos Montt a “man of great personal integrity and commitment.”

It’s true that when Trump goes so far as to call Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi his “favorite dictator,” that might appear crass and unseemly, even against this historical backdrop. But it’s been official U.S. policy—before and after Trump—to prop up Sisi’s regime.

When Sisi ousted President Mohamed Morsi in 2013, President Barack Obama refused to call it a “coup,” since he would then be legally obliged to cut off military aid—and the U.S. has supported Sisi ever since. Earlier this month, the Biden administration announced it’d override congressional human-rights conditions to send Egypt $1.3 billion in military financing.

—Gustav Jönsson

111MHz: ‘HM.’ The electric guitarist and free jazz exponent Wendy Eisenberg, mostly known for her work with the Bill Orcutt Quartet, is back with a new album, Viewfinder—inspired, apparently, by her recent laser eye procedure. Yes, it brought clarity to her vision—but also a new sense of the limits to human perception.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Sweden’s old-new right. Last week, the government in Stockholm presented its budget proposal for the coming year, which includes significant tax cuts for the wealthy. That might not be surprising or even noteworthy, given that the government is composed of a conservative coalition. Only that coalition depends in turn on the support of the Sweden Democrats, a right-wing nationalist party that was until recently promising to reinvigorate the Swedish welfare state. Now, they’re endorsing the same kind of tax cuts they used to oppose.

Also until recently, Sweden’s more traditional right-wing parties shunned the insurgent SD—which was founded in the late 1980s by members of various fascist groups, including the Waffen-SS. But over the last few years, they’ve started to work closely with it—despite the current prime minister having once promised he’d never “collaborate, converse, cooperate, or co-govern” with SD.

So, what’s behind this rapprochement between the new and old right?

Back in 2022, Sweden’s traditional right-wing parties needed SD’s support in order to keep the left out of power. So they struck a bargain, and now we’re seeing the outcome: The new right has been thoroughly integrated with the old—even on economic matters. Which is to say, SD now look like old-style Swedish conservatives, though without the old-style politesse.

Of course, Sweden is a small country; its population of 10 million is comparable to London’s or Dhaka’s. But the political merger on the country’s political right, though perhaps not of much significance globally, echoes events in capitals from Paris to Washington. As many liberals feared, SD have changed Sweden’s conservative mainstream, making it much more hawkish on immigration. Yet in turn, cooperation with the conservative mainstream seems to have changed the Sweden Democrats. True, every once in a while, one of their representatives still makes a racist statement. But it’s hard now to call them fascists and feel serious about it.

—Gustav Jönsson

Who votes in America? It’s election season in the United States, and American journalists are once again putting a lot of effort into predicting which candidate will win. It’s a tough game. Time and again, highly certain forecasts have proved ultimately wrong, on account of unexpected shifts in turnout—that is, shifts in who actually shows up to cast ballots. In tight elections, even small shifts can swing the whole thing; and in all elections, you never entirely know who’s going to vote until they do. So what can we know about voter turnout in the U.S. at all? Today, Jan Leighley explores the question.

—Gustav Jönsson

111MHz: ‘Tower of Cloud.’ This track, from the Japanese vibraphonist and marimba player Masayoshi Fujita, lets a synthesizer open the mix. Soon, though, the song becomes a dialog between the synth and a vibraphone inspired by the forests around Fujita’s village of Kami Cho in the mountainous Hyōgo prefecture. From his tower, this sample of his new record, Migratory.

—Brendan Hasenstab

A waiting game in Tehran. Speaking at a news conference with domestic and foreign journalists for more than two hours, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said on September 16 that Tehran was “exercising restraint” by not retaliating against Israel for the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran on July 31—after attending Pezeshkian’s inauguration—in a military guesthouse. Reports conflict about whether he was killed by a projectile fired from the air outside the house or by a remotely detonated bomb inside; regardless, the assassination embarrassed Iran and prompted promises of retribution by top Iranian officials.

Pezeshkian says Iran is holding back on retaliation because it doesn’t want the war in Gaza to escalate into a wider conflict. And yet Iran’s proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen—continue to launch rocket and missile attacks on Israel.

On September 17, hundreds of Hezbollah pagers exploded in Lebanon and Syria, killing 11 and wounding more than 2,700—including Iran’s envoy to Beirut—according to Lebanon’s health minister. The next day, hundreds of Hezbollah walkie-talkies also exploded, killing 25 and injuring hundreds. Reports indicate Israel had managed to implant tiny explosives in the devices, which could then be detonated remotely. In April this year, after Israel bombed Tehran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria, killing several military commanders, Iran responded by launching some 300 missiles against Israel—though Israel managed to intercept nearly all of them.

So why is Tehran not taking revenge this time?

It may be uncertain, but as Vali Nasr explored in February, Iran is quite happy with much of the status quo in the region—and it sees itself as gaining prominence and power from the Gaza war. To Tehran’s leaders, Nasr says, the conflict has turned global public opinion against Israel and the U.S.—and caused a lot of friction between the longtime allies. Now and in the near future, Tel Aviv and Washington will have to spend a lot of time and energy dealing with Hamas and the Palestinian question—leaving less time and energy to focus on whatever Iran is up to.

—Michael Bluhm

A question for the chatbot. I expect you remember first hearing about ChatGPT-3 in late 2022. You might also remember all the attention to AI and its potential, wildly differing future paths. The sensation was followed by a flood of money into the AI industry, which is on track to invest more than US$1 trillion in the technology over the next couple of years. Now, though, some investors, and others who follow the sector, are starting to have doubts about the business of artificial intelligence—and the direction it’s heading in. In late August, the prices of AI firms’ shares began to fall sharply. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, will likely lose around $5 billion for the year. What’s happened?

Today, Daron Acemoglu explores the growing doubts about AI—and whether, with the architecture it has, the technology can ever learn to think and do the way humans can.

—Michael Bluhm