More egregiously, you praised the BJP for being “on a roll” by making too little of the disenfranchisement of the opposition’s base. Just weeks before the state elections, India’s Election Commission abruptly deleted over 9m voters from West Bengal’s electoral rolls. This orchestrated purge wiped out nearly 12% of the state’s total electorate. Independent analyses revealed that these deletions disproportionately targeted the poorest citizens, Dalits, and minority Muslims, communities that traditionally oppose the BJP. In battleground constituencies like Nandigram, reports indicate that up to 95% of the abruptly removed names belonged to Muslims. Winning an election by functionally erasing millions of marginalised and minority voters from the registry is not evidence of a political party “on a roll” but of democratic backsliding. Saket GokhaleFormer MP and national spokespersonAll India Trinamool CongressDelhi In academic and activist circles “gentrification” is a pejorative word (“The kids in America”, May 9th). However, we should celebrate the visible return of young affluent families to city centres; my research has found that wealthy families can be a net positive for urban neighbourhoods. For decades the greatest threats to our cities have been disinvestment and segregation. The arrival of “high-flex” families brings a stabilised tax base that funds public services, parks and infrastructure upon which all residents, regardless of income, depend. The visibility of white toddlers in fancy strollers should not be viewed merely as a sign of neighbourhood vitality, but as an opportunity for institutional renewal. The real test is whether these families invest in more than just their real estate. The goal is to see them commit to local public institutions, particularly schools. That is an essential first step towards the kind of durable urban integration we have long neglected. Kfir MordechayAssociate professor of education and policy studiesPepperdine UniversityMalibu, California
The Telegram (May 9th) compared Donald Trump to Caligula. As Caligula never started a war it would be more appropriate to compare Mr Trump to another Roman leader, Marcus Licinius Crassus. Crassus was a real-estate tycoon who made his fortune by buying the properties of those purged after a civil war. Frustrated that he had not received the credit he thought was his for having quelled Spartacus’s slave revolt, he was eager to gain glory through a victory against a “real” enemy. With the help of his buddies in the triumvirate, Caesar and Pompey, he got his chance in 53BC. Crassus was assigned to subdue Parthia, an empire that covered today’s Iraq and Iran. Ignoring advice from his generals, Crassus rushed headlong into the desert and the Parthian armoured cavalry, resulting in one of the largest defeats suffered by a Roman army. The Parthians cut off his head and poured molten gold into his mouth. DR PAUL VANDERBROECKGeneva The Telegram mentioned that the Aztecs “passively succumbed to a few hundred Spanish soldiers”. For some reason, even some academics cling to the idea that this was the case. However, the Tlaxcalans who fought for Hernán Cortés numbered about 3,000, and by the time the Spaniards embarked on the siege of Tenochtitlan, thousands more who opposed Montezuma, in addition to the Tlaxcalans, had joined the fighting.
The idea that Montezuma was passive is also a misinterpretation. The rules of engagement in war among the peoples in Central Mexico, and Mesoamerica in general, were very different from Spanish rules. Cortes didn’t understand Aztec protocol, and Montezuma must have been completely baffled by him. It’s rather more complicated than I outline here, but the conquest by a small number of Spanish soldiers is a myth. DR ELIZABETH GRAHAMEmeritus professor of Mesoamerican archaeologyUniversity College London Describing the battle between Scots and Gaelic in Scotland you leaned on a fringe claim that Gaelic attracts greater government support because it is “uncontaminated by Englishness” (“Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled”, May 2nd). In reality funding for Gaelic reflects decades of co-ordinated language activism since the 1970s and the existence of a developed institutional base. Gaelic speakers enjoy public broadcasting, a quango established by Labour in 2005, and around 90 schools offering Gaelic-medium education. Scots has no equivalents. Rather than a nationalistic motive, Gaelic’s prominence at an event to mark the Battle of Culloden is similarly prosaic. The commemoration is organised by the Gaelic Society of Inverness and has been for over a century. Nor was Gaelic “in effect banned” after the battle. The post-Culloden acts of proscription did not mention the language. Despite this support, Gaelic is hardly winning what the article erroneously termed a “battle”. “The Gaelic Crisis”, a determinative, if depressing, sociolinguistic survey in 2020, found its usage to be in freefall in its few remaining heartlands. By contrast, Scots still counts around 1.5m speakers. Liam Alastair CrouseIsle of South Uist, Outer Hebrides The deep-seated impulse to emphasise what distinguishes Scotland from England is a textbook example of what Sigmund Freud called the narcissism of minor differences. It may be an awfy shame, but I am afraid there is no cure. Dr John DohertyVienna
Being myself on the verge of retiring from the European civil service, I felt a deep connection to Charlemagne’s column on federalists’ nostalgia for a Europe that never was (May 9th). I especially enjoyed the analogy between the pioneers of European integration and the builders of medieval cathedrals. Indeed I count myself as one of the “still many in Brussels who get teary- eyed as they describe their humble role in…this continental peace project, as worthy of admiration in their eyes as any cathedral”. But alas, I can’t help thinking that my late father, himself an MEP, was right when he used to fume: “They promised us a cathedral and built a supermarket instead.” Roland DehousseBrussels This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//letters/2026/05/21/do-most-baristas-in-norway-have-a- masters-degree
The IPO wave will enshrine the AI gods’ control over the future Looming offerings by SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are potentially perilous experiments in corporate governance, writes Gill Whitehead May 21st 2026 After weeks of waiting with bated breath, investors finally have sight of the prospectus for the initial public offering of SpaceX. OpenAI and Anthropic could join Elon Musk’s firm in floating shares later this year. These IPOs will reveal that the race to control frontier AI is defined not only by their epochal vision and scale, but by the concentration of corporate control. All three firms have sought to govern cutting-edge technologies with custom- made rules, departing from contemporary corporate governance and its well- worn systems designed to thwart unfettered control by an individual through effective board oversight, risk-based incentive structures and robust succession plans.
Their logic is not without reason. The global financial crisis revealed that most failing banks actually met the criteria for good governance on paper. The recent backlash against heavy compliance costs and short-term market pressures—seen as a drag on innovation—has prompted a move towards founder-centric models. However, there are causes for concern. The speed and scale of experimentation in corporate governance is unprecedented. Moreover, given the high degree of uncertainty as to the nature of AI risks, the tools of regulation, legislation, ethics and governance will be needed to manage the impact of these companies. There are three notable departures from traditional frameworks. The first is the entrenchment of super-voting equity. Adopting the founder- control model pioneered by Alphabet and Meta, dual-class share structures bypass the “one share, one vote” principle. Founders retain voting control despite owning a minority of the equity, in effect silencing public investors. Provisions in SpaceX’s IPO filings cement a structure granting Mr Musk and other insiders shares with ten times the voting power of ordinary shares, securing him a clear voting majority. This will be combined with the use of SEC-permitted “controlled company” exemptions that forgo an independent board or compensation committee. The second departure involves jurisdiction-shopping and regulatory arbitrage. Because the scale of these listings is historic, American states and stock exchanges are jostling to secure them. States are competing by offering increasingly robust statutory protections to directors. Stock indices, meanwhile, have increasingly skewed their listing standards to accommodate tech giants. SpaceX is using this competition to its advantage. Following a Delaware court decision to void Mr Musk’s Tesla pay package on the grounds of weak board independence (later overturned), he moved SpaceX to Texas and its director-friendly Business Court, later merging xAI into the rocket firm. Furthermore, SpaceX plans to list on Nasdaq, which would enable it to benefit from the exchange’s new “fast entry” rule that allows newly listed large firms to enter the NASDAQ-100 after just 15 trading days, rather than three months. As a result, index funds are legally compelled to buy stock
almost immediately, further weakening the leverage of active fund managers to extract governance changes. The third departure is the use of hybrid structures. The anticipated IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic may yet enshrine their novel corporate architectures, designed to insulate their technical missions from standard venture-capital incentives. In October OpenAI completed its restructuring into a for-profit Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) in which the original non-profit foundation now has a 26% stake. Although the foundation retains the legal authority to appoint and remove the PBC directors (and thus the chief executive), the intentional significant overlap in foundation and PBC board members—many of whom were installed after the reinstatement of Sam Altman as chief executive—indicates that operational power lies increasingly with the CEO. Anthropic has made perhaps the most creative undertaking to enshrine its safety-first mission into its corporate governance. Its Long-Term Benefit Trust enables independent experts to elect a majority of directors over time. However, even under this model trustees serve only one-year terms and must consult the CEO on appointments. Crucially, a supermajority of shareholders retains the power to dissolve the trust without trustee consent. The trust provides an advisory guardrail, but the founders and their main backers (Amazon and Google) retain ultimate authority. There is much to admire in these experiments; corporate governance must always be evolving. But they are untested in situations with such high stakes for humanity. The irony is that as industries scramble to engineer digital AI guardrails, many of their corporate-governance equivalents have just been dismantled. The Musk v Altman trial spent weeks interrogating the trustworthiness of AI’s elite, only to be dismissed this week on procedural grounds. Yet it exposed a raw truth: these historic IPOs and the humanity-impacting potential of their technologies now rely on the precarious scaffolding of a few founders’ good intentions. Investors have noticed. Institutional groups, led by public pension funds, are lobbying for governance changes such as clauses to limit the length of time