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This summary covers The Economist’s May 31st, 2026 Finance & economics Buttonwood column listed in the contents as Giga-IPOs and published under the headline The incredible shrinking stockmarket.

A strong market with fewer public companies

The article argues that America’s stockmarket can look triumphant and diminished at the same time. Major indices are at record highs, but the public market itself is thinner than it used to be. The number of initial public offerings has fallen sharply from the pace of the 1990s, and the count of listed American companies has dropped from about 8,000 in 1996 to roughly 3,900 last year.

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The managerial problem behind AI anxiety

The article treats a badly phrased corporate comment as a useful case study in a broader management problem. Standard Chartered’s chief executive, Bill Winters, drew criticism after describing automation as replacing “lower-value human capital” with financial capital. The backlash was predictable, not because the bank was wrong to talk about automation, but because the language made people sound like assets to be sorted into valuable and disposable categories.

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A boom with a hollow center

The article argues that north-east Asia’s most advanced economies are enjoying a headline boom that hides a deeper industrial problem. Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan look strong because artificial intelligence has created huge demand for chips, servers, and the machinery and materials needed to make them. Taiwan’s economy is growing at a pace more typical of a fast-developing country than a rich one. South Korean corporate profits have surged. Japanese exporters are also doing better than the broader economy.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 31st, 2026 Science & technology Well Informed article listed in the contents as Electrolytes and published under the headline You probably don't need extra electrolytes.

Electrolyte drinks sell a simple promise: better hydration in a bottle. The article’s answer is more conditional. Electrolytes matter enormously to the body, but most healthy people already get enough of them from ordinary food and water. The drinks are useful in specific circumstances, not as an everyday upgrade to hydration.

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DEET is treated as the dependable baseline of mosquito defence, but the article highlights a more awkward fact: the insects are not just chemical machines. They can learn. If a mosquito encounters the smell of DEET at the same time as a successful meal, the repellent may stop being merely a warning signal and start becoming part of the route to food.

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When Company Becomes A Stressor

The article uses Antarctic wintering crews as a clean, harsh test of a problem that will matter far beyond polar science: what happens when people cannot get away from one another. Its answer is not the familiar workplace lesson that more social contact builds cohesion. In an isolated station, surrounded by darkness, danger, and monotony, contact itself can become part of the strain.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 30th, 2026 Science & technology article listed in the contents as Edible electronics and published under the headline Eat your electronics.

The article argues that ingestible electronics are moving from medical curiosity toward practical diagnostic tools. The basic idea sounds odd: patients swallow a tiny device, let it travel through the digestive system, and collect data from parts of the body that are otherwise awkward, invasive or expensive to inspect. But the technology is becoming more serious because the gut is not just a tube for food. It is a dense chemical environment shaped by microbes, inflammation, diet, disease and drugs. If doctors can read that environment in real time, they may be able to spot illness earlier and treat it more precisely.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 30th, 2026 Leaders article on military technology and the changing logic of war, published under the headline Smarter tech is making war a dumber choice and listed in the contents as The future of war.

The article argues that modern military technology has changed the bargain behind wars of choice. Leaders still imagine short, decisive campaigns in which superior forces impose their will. But recent wars suggest the opposite: sensors, drones, precision weapons and artificial intelligence are making battlefields more transparent, offensives harder and weaker defenders more dangerous. The result is not a clean replacement of old warfare with a new formula. It is a harsher environment in which attacking states can destroy more targets than ever while still failing to achieve their political goals.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 9th, 2026 Business article on airlines and jet-fuel shortages, published under the headline Fuming and listed in the contents as Airlines in crisis.

The article argues that the aviation industry is being forced to confront a supply shock that is both global and oddly specific. The near closure of the Strait of Hormuz has not only trapped crude oil in the Gulf; it has also constrained the movement of jet fuel and the crude used to make it. For airlines, that turns a geopolitical crisis into a direct operating problem. Aircraft may cross continents in hours, but the fuel that keeps them flying still depends on slow, fragile shipping routes and refinery networks.

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This summary covers The Economist’s May 9th, 2026 Leaders article on artificial intelligence and biological risk, published under the headline From cyber-security to biosecurity and listed in the contents as AI arms and alarms.

The article argues that artificial intelligence is moving from being a tool that can help people write, code and reason into something more consequential: a tool that may soon help people manipulate biology. The central warning is stark. If advanced AI systems can guide users through the design or construction of dangerous pathogens, then a technology built to democratize intelligence could also democratize destructive biological capability.