Algeroth

What ISIS did that was new and different was declare a caliphate and actually establish one on real, physical territory. That was the heart of how Baghdadi distinguished ISIS from its predecessor organization, al-Qaeda; and that was the core of ISIS’s call to arms, which ultimately yielded thousands of foreign fighters and scores of deadly attacks worldwide. ISIS also created something other terrorist groups had only dreamed of cultivating: a sense of virtual community to which those who otherwise felt adrift and detached from their real communities were drawn. That’s part of why those who attacked their own communities in ISIS’s name shouldn’t be dubbed “lone wolves.” ISIS’s astonishing achievement was in making these vulnerable souls feel not alone, and instead like part of something bigger than themselves, no matter how far away.

Now the territorial manifestation of ISIS’s self-declared caliphate—the animating force behind that entire global community—is gone, thanks to years of work by a wide-ranging coalition and incredible sacrifices by military, diplomatic, intelligence-community, law-enforcement, and other professionals from across that coalition. Yet the global community ISIS forged is very much still in place. Indeed, ISIS has networks across the globe, and draws on those networks and the group’s prodigious output online to make a case to its followers that the fight is far from over—instead, it’s just entered a new phase.

That’s where Baghdadi’s reemergence fits in. The case for a post-caliphate ISIS is not an easy one for ISIS to make, given how heavily the group has emphasized its territorial control. So Baghdadi concluded that he’d surface and risk everything to present the argument himself. He eulogized those lost in the fight for Iraqi and Syrian territory. Then he pivoted to exulting in recent ISIS-linked attacks elsewhere, such as in Sri Lanka. Through it all, his message was: We’re still here, and we’re still fighting—and killing.

Ms Maréchal calls her brand of politics “conservative”. Which is telling, not least because the word is rarely used in France to define politics, and carries American echoes. Indeed, Benjamin Haddad, of the Atlantic Council in Washington, sees a parallel between the youngest Le Pen’s plans and the way American conservatives built institutions to mount a takeover of the Republican Party ahead of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. She is in contact, if irregularly, with Steve Bannon; and the former editor of the London edition of Breitbart News is on her school’s advisory board. The conservative label also reflects Ms Maréchal’s obsession with preserving French Catholic identity, in an attempt to put an acceptable face on what is often a toxic nativist discourse. If Ms Maréchal rails against French secularists, who chase nativity scenes from town halls at Christmas, her main gripe is mass Muslim immigration. “I don’t want France to become a land of Islam,” she says. The “great replacement” theory popularised by Renaud Camus, an essayist who warns that Europe will be demographically swamped, is “not absurd”, she adds, quoting a study suggesting that the “indigenous French” will be a minority by 2040. “Just like you,” she told her Washington audience, “we want our country back.”

Perhaps most striking, Ms Maréchal’s embrace of the word “conservative” reflects a political strategy that sets her apart from her aunt. Marine Le Pen is more exercised by unfettered capitalism and “savage globalisation” than by family values, in line with her courtship of the working-class former Communist vote in France’s rustbelt. Hers is a classic anti-elite populism—her slogan for elections to the European Parliament in May is “Let’s give power to the people”—and she wears the populist tag as a badge of pride.

Ms Maréchal, like her grandfather, is more attuned to the economic worries of small businesses and artisans. And her core project is the defence of a France of church spires, rural roots and family values, which taps into a seam of Catholic nationalism. Unlike her aunt, she marched against gay marriage. Naturally, she does this with a modern French twist: Ms Maréchal is separated from the father of her young daughter, and photos of her with a member of Italy’s Northern League have made the celebrity press. But Ms Maréchal’s aim is not, Italian-style, to unite the populist right and left; “I don’t call myself a populist,” she says. It is, rather, to merge the right and the far right, by allying the working-class vote with that of the “bourgeoisie enracinée” (rooted bourgeoisie).

Countless industries claim that big data and artificial intelligence (ai) will usher in new prosperity. The trend in oil and gas is nevertheless notable, partly because it is marked, partly because it comes late. For years, many companies remained focused on increasing reserves of oil, not extracting it cost-efficiently. Managers struggled to use data siloed in different parts of the company or in different parts of the world.

That is changing. Abundant shale oil has made the hunt for reserves less urgent than the need to protect profits. Shale also highlights the utility of new analytics, says Paul Goydan of bcg, a consultancy, as data gush from thousands of wells studded through Texas, North Dakota and other rich fields. Falling costs of sensors, storage and computing power have made digital investments even more attractive.

Early projects are starting to bring results. bp is combining real-time information from sensors with its own models and analytics to optimise output—it estimates such digital tools boosted oil production by more than 30,000 barrels per day last year. Yuri Sebregts, the chief technology officer for Shell, says it could take months for a geoscientist to map faults underground. Software can now sort through seismic data, performing the same task in a few hours for about $20.

As such efforts ramp up, energy firms are pairing in-house expertise with that of the tech industry. Microsoft has courted them the longest. In February ExxonMobil announced that its sprawling shale operations in the Permian basin, in Texas, would use Microsoft’s cloud, ai and other services. That may help ExxonMobil to drill and deploy staff more efficiently, and limit methane leaks. Amazon is trying to catch up. The size of its oil-and-gas team has tripled in recent years, and the company is working with energy giants such as Halliburton and Shell. In Houston it showed off data-storage kit that was continuously showered with water, to prove its mettle in inhospitable oilfields.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is a relative laggard, but hopes to change that. Last year Google Cloud hired Darryl Willis, a former bpexecutive, to lead a new energy group. He estimates that the industry is using 1-5% of available data. Alphabet has signed deals with Total of France, as well as Anadarko, an American oil company that is testing automated drilling and has an ai specialist on its board of directors.

Energy companies feel somewhat jittery about working with large tech firms—and not just because the Silicon Valley stars have outshone them. Automation raises the risk of hacking. Tech firms’ ballooning ambitions raise eyebrows. One questioner asked Mr Jassy if Amazon would itself start producing oil and gas. He said no, as the room giggled nervously.

It is not just the oilmen who are uneasy about the partnerships. Amazon, Microsoft and Google rely on clever young coders, who dislike working for controversial industries. “We are a partner and we follow the energy partner’s needs,” says Caglayan Arkan, who oversees Microsoft’s work with the energy sector. But in February Microsoft employees demanded that it cancel a contract to sell augmented-reality headsets to America’s military. Last year Google decided not to renew a contract with the Pentagon, after some staff argued the company should not be in the “business of war”. Tech workers may yet insist they not be in the business of fossil fuels either.

A new working paper* by Christopher Poliquin of the University of California, Los Angeles, examined the effect on wages at Brazilian firms that adopted broadband between 2000 and 2009. The average employee experienced a 2.3% cumulative gain in real wages, relative to workers at firms without broadband. But managers at the firm gained 8-9% while executive directors enjoyed an 18-19% boost. Mr Poliquin thinks that the internet allowed skilled workers to be much more productive than before.

His suggestion chimes with a previous study** of Norwegian companies which found that the arrival of broadband improved the relative position of skilled employees. That study found that the internet made it easier for them to do “non-routine abstract tasks” such as problem-solving, while allowing the company to automate routine tasks and replace unskilled workers.

What happens inside firms is only part of the story, however. Research*** published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics suggests that around two-thirds of the rise in inequality is the result of wage differentials between firms, rather than within them. Workers are being “sorted” into two groups; those who work for high-wage firms in sectors like technology and those who work for low-wage businesses in sectors like retailing. Outsourcing may also be playing a part, with large firms spinning off low-wage activities like cleaning and catering, thus constraining the level of in-firm inequality.

The pay gap may be related to education and training. A survey of oecdcountries in 2016 found that, on average, more than half of adults could, at best, carry out no more than the simplest digital tasks, such as writing an email. Only a third had the kind of “advanced cognitive skills” that would allow them to flourish.

However, this seems a little odd. On the one hand, a moral panic has swept nations over adults glued to smartphones and teenagers obsessed with digital games or online make-up tips from the Kardashian clan. At the same time, people are apparently unable to use digital technology to boost their careers.

This suggests that neither schools nor employers are striving hard enough to translate consumers’ familiarity with using technology for leisure into workers’ or students’ ability to use it in the office or classroom. More inventive ways of teaching skills, perhaps with virtual reality or video games, may be in order.

After eight years of civil war, Syria’s education system is a wreck. Nearly 3m school-age children, a third of the total, do not attend classes. That is, in part, because 40% of schools are unusable. Some have been damaged in the fighting; others are being used by armed groups or the displaced. The schools that still function are crammed and there are fewer teachers to run them—around 150,000 have fled or been killed. Unsurprisingly, students are way behind. Ten-year-olds in Syria read like five-year-olds in developed countries, says Save the Children, an aid agency. The literacy rate has plummeted.

The consequences are stark. Syrians lack the skills needed to rebuild their country or to escape the grinding poverty in which 80% of them live. The uneducated are easier prey for jihadists and militiamen offering money and a bit of power, or for Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which will gladly give them a spot in the army. Shattered schools are yet another reason for more affluent Syrians to leave the country—and for those who have fled to stay abroad. “We’ll see the catastrophic results over the next decade as children become adults,” says Riyad al-Najem of Hurras, a charity that supports over 350 schools in Syria.

Alireza qanbari has still not told his parents the truth about what he did when he left Afghanistan for Iran. The 23-year-old is happy for his father to believe he worked as a labourer. In fact, he fought with an Afghan militia recruited by Iran to help prop up the government in Syria’s civil war. With the war now dying down, Afghan fighters are starting to come home. Just as the West agonises about the return of radicalised émigrés, many in Afghanistan worry about what the former fighters will do—and where their loyalties lie.

At its height, the Fatemiyoun, as the Afghan militia was known, had as many as 20,000 fighters, largely from the Hazara ethnic minority. Most Hazaras are Shia Muslims, as are the ruling elite in both Iran and Syria. Long downtrodden, Hazaras were especially persecuted by the Sunni Muslims of the Taliban. More recently the Afghan branch of Islamic State has launched terror attacks on Hazara targets.

Mr Qanbari, which is not his real name, was desperate to escape stifling poverty in the countryside near Herat, close to Afghanistan’s border with Iran. So, like many of his peers, he crossed the frontier to find work. A Hazara friend of his in Iran disappeared, only to resurface nine months later in a military hospital. His friend revealed he had been wounded in Syria with the Fatemiyoun, which paid three times a labourer’s wage. Moreover, Iran was handing out prized residency permits to those who fought—a powerful incentive given that around 250,000 Afghans who lack the right papers are deported from Iran each year.

There were also historical reasons for the birth of the Fatemiyoun. Many Afghans had fought for their neighbour during the Iran-Iraq War, and ties between those veterans and the Iranian security apparatus endured. The founder of the Fatemiyoun, Alireza Tavasoli, was one such veteran.

While most recruits joined the Fatemiyoun for the money, they also received religious indoctrination, Mr Qanbari and others say. Young recruits were told they would be defending Shia shrines against Islamic State. After scant training, they were sent into some of the war’s worst fighting and suffered terrible casualties.

Although most Fatemiyoun veterans are thought to have remained in Iran, many have returned to Afghanistan. That is causing unease. During the most chaotic phase of Afghanistan’s civil war, in the 1990s, Iran backed militias as proxies, just as Pakistan backed the Taliban. The Fatemiyoun may play such a role in the future, Afghan intelligence officials fear. “It is a concern that when the national interests of the country that trained them are in danger, these people will go back and even act against our national interests,” says Sayed Azim Kabarzani, an mp from Herat. Fatemiyoun veterans say they feel they are under scrutiny by the authorities. They are reluctant to talk to journalists.

Yet Iran would struggle to mobilise the Fatemiyoun inside Afghanistan, says Said Reza Kazemi, an academic. There would also be great resistance among Afghan Shias to any sort of mobilisation against the Afghan state. Hazaras have benefited from the current political order and have no desire to turn against it. A more likely prospect, says Ahmad Shuja, who has interviewed dozens of Hazara leaders and veterans for a report for the United States Institute of Peace, is that if security in the Hazara areas worsens and residents feel abandoned, veterans will form self-defence forces. When Taliban fighters overran previously safe Hazara areas in central Afghanistan last year, Fatemiyoun veterans tried to hold them off, but were not well organised, intelligence officials say.

Mr Qanbari carries many scars from his years at the front. His mental health has suffered and he is prone to seizures. But he is also unemployed and short of money. With Iran having declared victory in Syria, the future of the Fatemiyoun is uncertain. In January America blacklisted it for its ties to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. But Mr Qanbari wonders if his best hope is to return to Iran and start lying to his parents again.

Hundreds of websites, blogs and satellite-tvchannels have been unblocked since Abiy Ahmed took office as prime minister in April last year. For the first time in 13 years there are no journalists in prison; no fewer than 23 publications and six privately owned satellite channels have been given licences by the Ethiopian Broadcasting Authority since July.

New provincial titles are emerging, too, including the first ever independent newspaper in Ethiopia’s troubled Somali region. Even state broadcasters are loosening up and giving airtime to opposition politicians. A new media bill is expected soon. It will probably soften criminal penalties for libel and lift some restrictions on private ownership that have crimped investment.

This is not the first blossoming of free media. The eprdf liberalised the press after it snatched power from a Marxist junta known as the Derg in 1991. More than 200 newspapers and 87 magazines were launched between 1992 and 1997. That did not last. Since 2001, 120 newspapers and 297 magazines received licences—but 261 of them were cancelled. At least 60 journalists fled the country between 2010 and 2015.

Repression is one challenge for Ethiopia’s would-be press barons; a tough business environment is another. The average lifespan of an Ethiopian newspaper is nine months, reckons Endalk Chala, an academic who has studied the trade. Addis Zeybe, which was launched in October, stopped after only four issues. Advertisers “don’t want to be associated with media that is critical of the government”, says its founder, Abel Wabella.

New titles face especially long odds. The state owns the main printing press, which can pulp issues the government does not like and which increased prices by almost 50% in December. “It’s a death blow,” says Eskinder. Abiy has spoken of the importance to democracy of a vibrant press, but state media still dominate, says Tsedale Lemma, the editor of Addis Standard, a feisty local which suspended print operations in 2016 citing censorship.

As disaster-relief experts wondered how quickly to train local people to provide mental-health care, they realised that, for the most part, non-specialists might be able to do the job. “We used to assume that people need professional counselling,” says Julian Eaton of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a veteran in post-disaster care. But it turned out this was not so. Rates of mental-health problems usually doubled after a calamity. But few people needed a psychiatrist. Most got better with simple, appropriate help that anyone could provide. Known as “psychological first aid”, it is something that can be taught in a matter of hours.

This training is now standard fare in the first days after a disaster. Teachers, pastors, barbers and taxi-drivers are taught to notice people in distress, to provide the right kind of emotional support, and to avoid common mistakes such as pressing sufferers to recount stressful events.

In Western countries a psychotherapist’s qualification usually takes several years of training, on top of a university degree. Dixon Chibanda, a psychiatrist in Zimbabwe, showed that lay people can be trained in a couple of weeks to do some parts of the job. In 2005 in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, the bulldozing of slums that voted for the opposition left 700,000 people homeless. Many were also viciously beaten by the police. At the time, the whole country had five psychiatrists for its 13m people. So Dr Chibanda decided to train elderly women already known for some kind of community work in aspects of cognitive-behavioural therapy, a Western staple that involves teaching people to spot the real-world situations that set off their anxieties, and suggesting concrete steps to deal with those situations. He dispatched these amateur counsellors to “friendship benches” installed in health centres’ courtyards. There, they talked to people troubled by kufungisisa (“thinking too much”), the local expression for depression and anxiety.

A study in 2014-15 found that after six months only 13-14% of people seen by the grandmothers still had symptoms of depression or anxiety, compared with about half of those who received the standard treatment, in which a nurse talked to them and prescribed medication. The friendship-bench model has been replicated in Malawi (which added elderly men as counsellors) and Tanzania. In 2016 it was picked up by New York City’s health department.

The idea of using non-specialists is spreading in Europe, too. Italy is testing guidelines for mild perinatal depression that, so far, have been used only in poor countries such as Pakistan to train village paramedics with at best a secondary education. Italy is trying the approach with midwives, who would provide some of the perinatal-depression care now reserved for psychiatrists. “We had to adapt the manual,” says Antonio Lora from the Lombardy region’s health department, which is running the trial. That included deleting the parts where the midwife tells the woman not to worry if the baby is a girl and how to ask her husband for permission to go out.

Such models are not without drawbacks. Trainees are taught a set of structured sessions, to use for everyone. Some may simply parrot the phrases in the manual, says Mr Ventevogel. Where psychiatrists are too few, patchy supervision of new trainees can fail to weed out problems that lead to poor quality.

England is a test case for standardised talk-therapy. It has rapidly expanded access to it by training thousands of new therapists to provide a uniform bundle of sessions. James Binnie of London South Bank University worries that the programme is a “therapy factory” which ignores the variety of personal and social issues that shape each person’s psychological problems. Psychotherapy, he says, is a relationship, so cannot be reduced to separate “active ingredients”. David Goldbloom of the University of Toronto sees things differently. He says that standardising talk-therapy ensures that patients get the care they are supposed to get—just as they would with any form of medical treatment. “The alternative is a bit of a Wild West,” he says.

Concerns about amateur shrinks resemble those raised in the past over other types of health care, such as training community health workers (or “barefoot doctors”) to provide basic prenatal care, treat malaria or diagnose pneumonia. They may not be as good as doctors, but training armies of them has been crucial to the steep reductions in maternal and child mortality in Ethiopia, Rwanda and many other poor countries in the past decade. In England’s programme, half the people seen for depression and anxiety recover (though of course some would have done so anyway).

The West used to assume that it could count on maintaining its technological superiority. Today that looks complacent. The Aspen Strategy Group, in a recent book, “Technology and National Security: Maintaining America’s Edge”, sees a “transformative era” ahead which could threaten America’s position as the world’s strongest military power. The Pentagon’s National Defence Strategy, published last year (the first for a decade), notes that many vital new technologies come from the commercial sector and are available to rivals, eroding the “conventional overmatch” that America has grown accustomed to. Russia innovated in the field of hybrid warfare to devastating effect in Ukraine, blurring the line between peace and war. China has ambitions to be a world-beater in artificial intelligence, big data and quantum computing, all of which will have major military uses.

Such technologies promise to compress the time available to deal with a crisis, which can put a 29-country alliance at a disadvantage. NATO’s need for consensus is often seen as its Achilles heel. Advances in hypersonic weapons, moving at more than five times the speed of sound, will shorten response times further. Military types are fond of talking about responding at the “speed of relevance”; that speed will get ever faster.

Technology is also opening up whole new dimensions for warfare. One is space. Some of the alliance’s larger members—America, France, Britain—are thinking hard about it. President Trump recently launched a new space force. Oddly, act does not yet have a mandate to tackle it, but cyberspace is now one of its core areas. In 2016 NATO agreed that a cyber-attack could trigger an Article 5 response. It has recognised cyber as a separate domain for warfare, alongside land, sea and air. Last year it established an operations centre for cyber at Mons.

So far NATO has concentrated on cyber-defence. It is reckoned to have done a good job at protecting its own installations from cyber-attack. But many of the broader networks on which communications among the allies depend, as well as national military facilities, are more vulnerable. The alliance has not developed collective offensive capabilities in cyber (those remain national, like intelligence), though it is said to be contemplating them.

At act, work on a cyber-doctrine should be approved within a year or so. As in other areas, interoperability is at the core, be it for defending networks, ensuring situational awareness or carrying out plans. By the end of 2019 NATO should be able to start conducting cyber-operations. Even so, the whole cyber area remains a huge task for the alliance which it has only just started to tackle.

Reaching 70 is an extraordinary achievement for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Most alliances die young. External threats change; national interests diverge; costs become too burdensome. Russia’s pact with Nazi Germany survived for only two years. None of the seven coalitions of the Napoleonic wars lasted more than five years. A study in 2010 by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, counted 63 major military alliances over the previous five centuries, of which just ten lived beyond 40; the average lifespan of collective-defence alliances was 15 years.

“NATO is the strongest, most successful alliance in history”, says Jens Stoltenberg, the organisation’s secretary-general, “because we have been able to change.” It has expanded from 12 members at its birth to 29—soon to be 30 when North Macedonia joins, its dispute with Greece over its name now settled. Of the eight countries that made up its erstwhile rival, the Warsaw Pact, seven have become part of NATO, as have three former Soviet republics. The eighth one, the Soviet Union itself, has ceased to exist.

For its first four decades NATO was busy deterring the Soviet threat. Its role was to keep “the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down”, as its first secretary-general, Lord Ismay, put it. But after communism collapsed, the alliance did not proclaim victory and shut up shop; instead it reinvented itself, helping to stabilise the new democracies of eastern Europe.

Realising that it needed to go “out of area or out of business”, it then embarked on a period of far-flung crisis-management, from the Balkans (with interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo) to the Horn of Africa (where an anti-piracy mission ran from 2009 to 2016) and Afghanistan (where it still leads some 16,000 troops in Operation Resolute Support). NATO founders would have been stunned by such mission creep—as well as by the circumstances in which Article 5 of its treaty, which says that an armed attack against one member will be considered an attack against them all, was put to use. The only time the allies invoked this pledge was on September 12th 2001, the day after al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on America.

After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 the alliance moved swiftly back to its core business of deterrence against its eastern neighbour. Now for the first time it is having to juggle invigorated collective defence and crisis management simultaneously. At 70, it is hardly settling for an easy life.

Errenzhuan requires arduous training. It involves duets, typically between a man and a woman, that are often delivered in seven- or ten-character rhyming lines. The dance is usually in folk style, as is the performers’ dress (though modern touches are permissible). In the north-east, where errenzhuan has many fans, some proudly call it the world’s hardest form of comedy.

It is certainly among the most notorious in China for its bawdiness. A common routine is called “The 18 Touches”. One variant of this involves a female performer cracking lewd jokes while stroking the genitals of her male counterpart (with his trousers on). In 2004 Zhao Benshan, the godfather of errenzhuan and China’s first billionaire comedian, said erren zhuan without smut was not erren zhuan at all.

President Xi Jinping is no fan of lewd comedy. In 2014, in a speech on the role of the arts, Mr Xi said some artists were spewing out “cultural garbage”. He demanded that creative works serve the Communist Party and not “provoke the ecstasy of the senses”. It may be no coincidence that Mr Zhao has not appeared on national television’s Chinese New Year gala since Mr Xi assumed power in 2012. He had once been a regular (in cleaned-up form) on the hugely popular show. Last year Mr Zhao was booted out of the advisory body to China’s parliament. His flamboyant lifestyle may also have contributed to his fall from grace.

Mr Zhao is now leading a campaign to bowdlerise errenzhuan. In his chain of theatres he puts on only family fare. Dirty jokes and swearing are all but banned. Other venues have followed suit. Television stations only invite the cleanest erren zhuan performers. Ms He, the head teacher, says she does not teach her students any dirty lines or gestures. A Changchun resident says this trend may explain why attendance at errenzhuan theatres is falling.

But head to public parks in the north-east and you will find the art form refreshingly unchanged. Errenzhuan entertainers often make extra money with impromptu, open-air gigs. On a recent afternoon in Changchun’s Labour Park, an animated crowd surrounds an errenzhuan duo. Egged on by the audience, the pair engage in profanity-laced banter and sway their hips suggestively. After the show the crowd disperses, but quickly forms again around another act nearby. It involves a male performer reaching up his female partner’s dress. The woman smiles at him seductively, then slaps his face. The park’s security guards, whose job might be supposed to include putting a stop to such displays, appear happy to watch.

The first time Mr Duterte aired the idea of a name change, in February, he diminished the chances of it ever becoming reality by suggesting a new name associated with Ferdinand Marcos, a former dictator: Maharlika. Mr Duterte explained: “Marcos, he is really right. He wanted to change the name to Maharlika, the Republic of Maharlika, because Maharlika is a Malay word.” Mr Marcos thought the word meant “nobility”, and said it had been the name of a guerrilla group he claimed to have led to resist Japanese occupation during the second world war.

Most historians, however, believe that Mr Marcos invented the guerrilla group, or wildly exaggerated its exploits, in order to cast himself as a war hero. Many academics also dispute the assertion that Maharlika means nobility, saying it refers to a lower class in the ancient hierarchy. Moreover, the word does not seem to be Malay at all, but rather derived from Sanskrit. The consensus seems to be that it means “man of ability”, although a persistent minority translate it as “big phallus”. In 2016 an online petition urged Mr Duterte to rename the Philippines the Republic of Maharlika. Of the country’s 105m citizens, just seven signed up.

The United States was born out of rebellion against imperial power. Yet it then amassed more of an empire than is commonly realised, including by Americans. Indeed the country’s history, according to Daniel Immerwahr’s lively new book, is a history of empire.

This history is a drama in three acts. The first describes the amassing of “logo” America through westward expansion and the displacement of Native Americans. The story of the land-hungry country’s manifest destiny is well known but well told by Mr Immerwahr.

Next, in act two, comes the annexing of other territories. In the 19th century a craze for guano for use as fertiliser leads to the occupation of dozens of uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and Pacific. Alaska is purchased. Military victories bring in the northern part of Mexico and then Spain’s overseas empire, including the Philippines, Puerto Rico, thousands of islands and 8.5m people, though at great cost. By one calculation, the fight for the Philippines claims more lives than the American civil war. With hostilities stretching from 1899 to 1913, it is America’s longest conflict save for the one that is still raging in Afghanistan today. The killing in the Philippines in the second world war is the most destructive event ever on American soil.

At the end of that war the Greater United States contains some 135m people outside the mainland, more than the 132m living in the core country itself. However, except for a brief period of enthusiasm for empire around the turn of the 20th century, the country’s imperial reach is played down by its politicians. Unlike London, Washington is not festooned with grand offices to run the colonies.

And then, in act three, something remarkable happens: America gives up territory. The population of American lands beyond the core states shrinks from 51% of the total in 1945 to 2% in 1960 (after Hawaii and Alaska join the union). These days, all the overseas territories add up to an area smaller than Connecticut.

Why the retreat? Projecting power no longer requires going to the trouble of holding large amounts of land, often against the will of the local population. Instead, globalisation replaces colonisation. Thanks to aviation, logistical mastery and other world-shrinking innovations, America can substitute technology for territory.

Not that holding territory is wholly irrelevant, even now. The superpower has roughly 800 overseas bases (compared with some 30 held by others in total); in Mr Immerwahr’s vivid formulation, its empire is now a “pointillist” one. The United States did not abandon empire, but “reshuffled its imperial portfolio, divesting itself of large colonies and investing in military bases, tiny specks of semi-sovereignty strewn around the globe”.

Foreign journalists pay more heed to the Académie française than do the French themselves. It is an endless source of articles like those in recent weeks saying that the Académie will finally “allow” the feminisation of job titles. The sexism of masculine titles such as le président, le premier ministre and le docteur has troubled the country for decades. Traditionally, these had no feminine forms. On February 28th the Académie gave its blessing to feminine variants: la présidente, la première ministre and la docteure.

This is all to the good, but it is a mistake to think of the Académie as “allowing” anything. Founded in 1634, it is certainly venerable. Its members, of whom there are only 40, are called les immortels; even some of France’s greatest literary luminaries have been denied entry to the club. Academicians wear special green-embroidered jackets and swords, and meet in the palatial rooms of the Institut de France.

Swords they may have, but no power. As long ago as 1998 the government recognised those feminine job titles, and decreed that they be taught in schools. At the time the Académie strongly objected—and was ignored. Its work is strictly advisory; even then, it is not always the best source of counsel. Its dictionary—in theory the outfit’s premier product—is not considered France’s finest. The membership’s average age is in the 70s; only five of the members are women.

That the Académie is at best aspirational—a source of guidance people might say they want but often cheerfully ignore—is better understood by the French than by outsiders. France Culture, a radio station, called the recent change of mind on gendered titles “a mea culpa rather than a revolution”. The Académie was behind the times, as even its own ruling acknowledged: its job is to observe “good usage” as already practised, and to recognise the language’s evolution, not to steer it.

The king presides over one of the world’s most peculiar monarchies, established at independence in 1957. Malaysia is a federation made up of 13 states. The titular head of the government in nine of them is a sultan (democratically appointed chief ministers actually run the show). The nine sultans choose one of their own to serve a five-year term as king whenever the job becomes vacant. In practice, the nine states take it in turns. The king’s job is largely ceremonial, although he can delay legislation and refuse a prime minister’s request to dissolve parliament.

No reason was given for the abdication, but many suspect the king’s love life had raised too many eyebrows. In 2008, when still crown prince of Kelantan, the most conservative and devoutly Islamic state in the country, he had divorced his wife, a Muslim princess from neighbouring Thailand. In 2016 he became the first king to ascend to the throne unmarried. Then, in November, he took a two-month leave of absence following medical treatment. During that period the 49-year-old snuck off to Russia and married Oksana Voevodina, a 25-year-old former Miss Moscow.

The wedding poses an “existential question” for the monarchy, says Francis Hutchinson of iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, a think-tank in Singapore. Sultans are supposed to be defenders of the culture and religion of the country’s ethnic-Malay majority. Older and rural Malays in particular hold sultans in high esteem and see them as a cultural anchor. One view holds that in a state without a sultan, society becomes nihilistic. Modern royals are thus expected to behave with a certain decorum—although many of their forebears married glamorous young foreigners. At any rate, King Muhammad’s conduct must have jarred with some. The other sultans are thought to have issued an ultimatum, forcing him to quit.

The election of a new monarch, scheduled for January 24th, may cause a further hiccup. The next in line under the system of rotation is the sultan of Pahang, who served as king once before, 40 years ago. He is elderly and in ill health, however. His family is reported to be contemplating getting him to abdicate, to allow his son to become sultan and then king in short order. Typical: you wait 60 years for an abdication, and then two come along at once.