Issue
Issue of May 9, 2026
Issue of May 9, 2026
Headlines
Chairmen of the bored
Briefing · Trump and Xi will struggle to strike a major economic deal
The Board of Trade becomes a gathering of the disengaged — chairmen who are bored, overseeing a board that bores everyone.
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Net Ackman value
Finance & Economics · Can Bill Ackman save the closed-end fund?
NAV — Net Asset Value — meets Bill Ackman, giving the finance acronym a personal possessive twist.
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Sub-par
international · America’s submarine dominance is under threat
America’s submarine fleet is literally below standard, and golf’s term for underperformance does double duty underwater.
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A farewell to arms?
Briefing · China is pushing Donald Trump for Taiwan concessions
Hemingway’s title repurposed precisely — Trump may literally be saying farewell to arms sales to Taiwan.
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Petrifying dishes
Leaders · The world must stop AI from empowering bioterrorists
Petri dishes are the lab vessels in question; petrifying is what the prospect of bioterrorism does to you — both meanings activated simultaneously.
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Et tu, Kash Patel?
international · America must hope Donald Trump is not a new Caligula
Caesar’s dying words meet Trump’s FBI director, deployed right as the column compares Trump to Caligula and his unqualified appointees.
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The Son also sets
Business · Only one of Berkshire Hathaway and SoftBank can survive
Masayoshi Son’s empire may be setting like the sun — Hemingway’s title twisted to fit a Japanese tycoon’s twilight.
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Ghost town in the shell
Finance & Economics · DeepSeek and Alibaba rescue China’s office landlords
The anime classic ‘Ghost in the Shell’ becomes ‘Ghost town in the shell’ — empty office towers haunting China’s skylines.
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Pining for the cold war
Leaders · The Trump-Xi summit will expose a dysfunctional duo
Pining as in yearning, and pine as in the tree — a rare case where the cold-war metaphor and the botanical pun meet in one word.
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Putting the boat in
international · America’s submarine dominance is under threat
‘Putting the boot in’ — to attack aggressively — becomes ‘putting the boat in’, since the whole article is about submarines going into the water.
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Ship show
international · America’s submarine dominance is under threat
‘Shit show’ barely disguised as naval analysis — the Economist’s most printable expletive substitute.
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Commission impossible
Europe · Inside the Brussels deep state
Mission: Impossible becomes the European Commission’s impossible mission to reclaim relevance from member states.
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Javier Milei’s nosedive
The Americas · Javier Milei is in serious trouble
Milei’s approval ratings are in freefall and his name contains ‘Milei’ — but ‘nosedive’ also captures the libertarian lion who flew too close to the sun.
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Buried in the text
For students of modern capitalism, the resulting book is, you might say, a Musk-read.
Culture · What is Elon Musk’s formula?
Must-read becomes Musk-read — the oldest trick in the Economist’s book, executed with appropriate self-satisfaction.
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This column is named after a tree, for Ficus sake.
Asia · The case against trees
The Banyan column invokes its own name as a fig-based expletive — for fig’s sake, naturally.
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American majors are awaiting his next moves with rising dread, baby, dread.
Business · Not all oil giants are prospering from the Iran war
A riff on ‘drill, baby, drill’ — the energy industry’s rallying cry inverted as oil executives now dread rather than drill.
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Lauder’s boss must remember that its problems are far from skin deep.
Business · Can a beauty mega-deal save Estée Lauder?
A beauty company’s problems being ‘far from skin deep’ inverts the cosmetics industry’s entire premise.
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may be best described as too much and never un oeuf
Letters · On funding British innovation, the Marquis de Morès, human rights, voter choice, the Victorians, bald men, eggs
Un oeuf = one egg = enough — a letter writer out-punning the Economist on its own egg coverage.
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Feckless ambiguity does not hold the same promise.
Briefing · China is pushing Donald Trump for Taiwan concessions
‘Strategic ambiguity’ was the policy; ‘feckless ambiguity’ is the diagnosis — a single adjective swap that says everything about Trump’s Taiwan drift.
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