Manufacturing the weapons of the new Cold War. The device you’re reading these words on contains maybe the most important military technology in the world: the semiconductor chip. Not only does it power critical drivers of the emerging global economy, such as AI and big data; every piece of advanced military hardware relies on these little wafers—typically, thousands of them.

So in October 2022, the United States imposed a ban on exports of top-end chips and chip-making equipment to China, aiming to slow its economic and defense growth. Since then, the U.S. has struck deals with all five manufacturers of cutting-edge chips to build new plants in the United States—announcing the fifth and final of them, with South Korea’s SK Hynix, in early August.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has been building up its own semiconductor industry—and Huawei, the country’s leading chip firm, recently said it had developed a chip as good as any made in the West. So who’s got the upper hand here? Today, Chris Miller looks at the state of play in the struggle for supremacy over the technology that could determine the coming balance of global power.

—Michael Bluhm

111MHz: ‘Camouflage.’ From The Primordial Pieces (2024), here’s the pianist and composer Leo Chadburn with a kaleidoscopic piano piece that swirls and swoops, dives and shifts in alternate time signatures. The song might give you the sensation of whirling through the clouds. It features just one real chord change, which appears only briefly before disappearing into the churn.

—Brendan Hasenstab

Magliabechi’s: Putin’s War on Ukraine. On August 6, when Ukraine launched its incursion into the Kursk region, it was the first time Russia had been invaded since the Second World War—and a dramatic twist in the current war. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had been hoping to conquer Ukrainian territory, not lose Russian territory. How did he get here?

As Anatol Lieven noted in 2022, three months after Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin believed that the Russian and Ukrainian peoples were bound together historically in a common, great civilization. The Ukrainian state may not have wanted to see their country under Russian rule; but the Ukrainian state, in Putin’s view, was after all run by a fascist clique that had little to do with everyday Ukrainians. So why wouldn’t everyday Ukrainians greet the Russian army with flowers?

Samuel Ramani’s new book, Putin’s War on Ukraine: Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution, takes a complementary view: Putin’s fundamental motivation, Ramani says, was to counter the “color revolutions” in neighboring countries. If Putin could extend Russian hegemony over Ukraine, he could not only reverse its “Euromaidan” uprising of 2014 but ultimately undo its “Orange Revolution” of 2004, Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” of 2003, and the entire pattern of nationalist-democratic revolutions in the region.

Putin’s counter-revolutionary stance is popular in Russia, Ramani says, because it has “historical legitimacy”—a broad resonance with Russians’s common sense of their country’s historical identity.

In the nineteenth century, Tsar Alexander I earned the moniker “Policeman of Europe” for combating revolutionary forces and mores. In the twentieth, the Soviet Union—far from exporting revolution—was a force of reaction through the Warsaw Pact: The Soviets crushed popular uprisings in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968. That counter-revolutionary tradition survived the fall of the U.S.S.R., too: During the constitutional crisis of 1993, Russia’s acting prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, warned that ongoing unrest in the streets would turn Russia into a “huge concentration camp.”

Of course, the counter-revolutionary tradition would be nothing without another of Russia’s traditions: the revolutionary tradition. That may be less visible in Russia at the moment, but Putin evidently doesn’t like seeing it among his neighbors.

—Gustav Jönsson

Weather report: Klåvudden Naturreservat, Hårga, Sweden. A breezy day among the Scots pines at the Klåvudden Naturreservat outside Hårga on August 12. A high temperature of 22.7^◦ C (73^◦F). Just out of frame: Lake Vättern, the sixth-largest lake in Europe.

The rise and fall of violent crime in America. What goes up doesn’t always come down. In the 1960s, the American murder rate shot up, ultimately doubling between 1960 and 1975—and stayed high throughout the 1980s. There’s no gravitational force keeping this rate from soaring; once it rises, it could keep rising. So, when the U.S. murder rate increased by 29 percent between 2019 and 2020, it was reasonable to fear an ongoing upward trend.

But that’s not what happened. The murder rate fell by 13 percent last year—and then by 26 percent in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023. Why? Today, Tracey Meares explores what we know, and still don't know, about it.

—Gustav Jönsson

111MHz: ‘Along the Banks of Rivers.’ From the mid-1990s, here’s Chicago’s Tortoise, off their album Millions Now Living Will Never Die. The track is languorous, with a twangy lead guitar over a hint of brushed snares and organ tones. There’s something outdoors-in-the-Old West to it—sounds for the waning days of summer up here in the Northern Hemisphere.

—Brendan Hasenstab

It’s the data, stupid. In a Washington, D.C., courtroom on August 5, District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google controlled a monopoly on internet search and had engaged in years of illegal acts to thwart competition. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Judge Mehta wrote in his 277-page ruling—emphasizing that the company had exploited its position to charge advertisers well above market rates to place ads against search results. Meanwhile, Google has an 89 percent share of the overall search market and a 95 percent share of the mobile search market in the U.S.—and a 92 percent and 95 percent share globally.

Mehta has given Google and the U.S. administration a deadline of early September to file their recommendations for remedies to the corporation’s search monopoly. He could choose to break Google up—forcing it to split up its search, advertising, and Android phone businesses, for instance—or, say, ban the kind of deals Google struck with Apple to make Google the default search engine on iPhones.

So what’s a judge to do?

Mehta gave little indication in his ruling. Some have compared the case to the government’s courtroom victory over Microsoft in 1999, when the U.S. successfully sued it for abusing the monopoly of its Windows operating system.

But this case is, in at least one important way, unprecedented: Windows was only one operating system among many; Google’s search engine provides vastly better results and dominates the market because it has so much vastly more of the most valuable commodity there is in the digital realm: data—server farms and server farms of data; orders of magnitude more data than any of its competitors.

All this data allows Google to guess better than anyone what people really want when they type in their search queries—and its value to Google illustrates its value across the economy in this digital era: The quantity and quality of data largely determine the capabilities—and profitability—of social media, news media, AI, and advertising today. Those with the best data on their audiences and products have a colossal advantage over their competitors.

In this light, Julia Angwin, a former technology reporter at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica—now the founder of the nonprofit publication The Markup, covering the effects of technology on contemporary society—suggests a framework for thinking about the question Judge Mehta is facing: If Google had to make its data available to competitors and potential competitors, Angwin says, it would be consistent with the way some telecommunications companies have to make their lines available to others—to enable effective competition among internet providers. And as long as Google doesn’t have to make that data available, she says, there’ll never be real competition in search—no matter what else a judge might impose.

—Michael Bluhm

New sway for the nationalist right in Europe. Across the continent in June and July, far-right parties kept doing better and better in major elections. In France, the United Kingdom—and throughout the European Union, in elections to the European Parliament—parties on the nationalist right won record results. Now, they have considerably more power to drive policy changes—foremost among them, tightening immigration and loosening climate-related regulation. What these parties don’t have—yet, at any rate—is control of any governments in London, Paris, or Brussels.

So what do their recent political wins mean for Europe? Today, Matthias Matthijs explores the implications—suggesting the significance may be less in what far-right politicians plan to do next and more in why people have voted for them in the first place.

—Michael Bluhm

111MHz: ‘Bonneville Park 4.’ Here we go in a contemporary classical direction with Devin Maxwell’s Timebending—with Christine Tavolacci, Eric Km Clark, and Katie Porter—and please be sure to take that album title seriously! Time bending is exactly what Maxwell, the composer, is doing. He features violins that seem focused on a harsh drone and then adds stressed-out flutes to the mix. The percussion underneath seems like a wink. And the layering, repetition, and gentle manipulations of these elements all come together—in a transcendent maelstrom.

—Brendan Hasenstab