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Audiobooks are booming, thanks to streaming subscriptions

The most popular musicians on Spotify this week included plenty of familiar names, from Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars to Billie Eilish. But also riding high in the streaming platform’s charts were...

Has Sequoia Capital outgrown its business model?

THE FIRST thing that catches your eye when you enter the poshly serene headquarters of Sequoia Capital on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California, is a metre-wide cross-section of what appears...

TikTok wants Western consumers to shop like the Chinese

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On stupid rules and quick wins

Interrogate the internet about the most ridiculous rules people have experienced at work, and the stories roll in. The lab assistant instructed to label the expiry dates on all chemical samples, who...

Could seaweed replace plastic packaging?

In Victorian London, among the factories and warehouses of the city’s East End, Alexander Parkes developed the world’s first plastic (he inventively called it Parkesine). Notpla, a startup now based in the...

Will the trouble ever end for Volkswagen and its rivals?

Car dashboards have an array of indicators that illuminate to warn of trouble. If the boardrooms of Europe’s carmakers had similar systems they would be lit up like a Christmas market. Volkswagen...

Elon Musk’s xAI goes after OpenAI

An underappreciated force behind great technological change is intense—and petty—rivalry. In the “war of the currents” in the late 19th century, Thomas Edison electrocuted stray animals to discredit Nikola Tesla. A century...

How to behave in lifts: an office guide

Congratulations on joining our internship programme. For most of you this is your first experience of the workplace, and with that in mind we have prepared a guide to office etiquette. Other...

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