This is just the beginning. More refined versions of daraxonrasib will be developed, as will competitor drugs from other companies. There is even hope these drugs might help an entirely different group of cancer patients: children with neuroblastoma, where a different mutation disables a gene that normally acts as a brake on RAS. Tackling one cancer has, potentially, revealed a master switch that enables new treatments for millions of people. Daraxonrasib deserves its standing ovations. ■ After a free, evidence-based guide to health and wellness? Sign up to our weekly Well Informed newsletter. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//science-and-technology/2026/06/12/a-new-drug-targets- one-of-cancers-master-switches
Barack Obama has built a monument to himself What the largest-ever shareholder judgment reveals about Russia Why Westerners are falling for love scams Adults are going back to summer camp Harry Styles and other megastars now expect you to come to them Harlan Coben, Netflix’s new darling, has a mystery you can solve
Barack Obama has built a monument to himself He is just the latest president to do so June 18th 2026 THE OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CENTRE towers over Chicago’s South Side like a Brutalist ziggurat (see picture). Eight storeys of concrete covered in granite loom over other granite buildings on a granite plaza: grey, grey and more grey. The new monument has a Soviet science-fiction look: 1980s Moscow meets Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune”. In fact, it is a tribute to America’s 44th president. Opening to the public on June 19th after years of construction and a cost of around $850m, it boasts the dubious distinction of being the most expensive presidential library in history. Presidential libraries have a public function: to preserve the former leader’s papers, which are deemed state property. But they also have a more personal one: to let presidents present their achievements, justify their actions and tell
their life story without quibbles from opposition politicians, pesky journalists or protesters. They are a peculiar institution, and the opening of Barack Obama’s illuminates why they are so controversial. Many countries preserve presidential material in state archives, and some notable 21st-century leaders can claim museums and monuments in their honour, such as the recent heads of Nigeria and South Africa. But America blends these two functions, with private donors paying for much of the construction through presidential “foundations”, and a government agency, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), caring for the records. Only America enshrines into law the right to a library for its head of state, highlighting how the country has granted the head of the executive branch, supposedly one of three equal branches of government, a somewhat regal aura. The institution dates back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. Until then presidents traditionally donated their papers, which were seen as their personal property, to the Library of Congress. In practice many records were simply “scattered to the winds”, says Mark Updegrove, who runs Lyndon Johnson’s library at the University of Texas. The Presidential Libraries Act of 1955 authorised the federal government to preserve presidential papers and to “accept gifts or bequests of money” for their maintenance. Another law in 1978 made presidents’ papers the property of the government. (Though Donald Trump’s Office of Legal Counsel has argued that this act was unconstitutional—he wants to keep control over his papers—no court has yet agreed.) Annually the federal government pays around $100m to maintain all the libraries. But the cost of building them has been rising monumentally (see chart). The Obama Presidential Centre is exceptional in several ways. It boasts of being the first “fully digital presidential library”: Mr Obama’s papers will be available to everyone online. The centre is also not subject to government oversight in the usual way. While NARA will maintain the digital archives and some physical papers and artefacts off-site, Mr Obama’s foundation will fund and manage the entire complex, running it like a private museum.
Valerie Jarrett, Mr Obama’s longtime adviser and the foundation’s chief executive, insists that this will help it preserve its “independence”, which may be code for defending against Mr Trump trying to tamper with its budget. (Mr Trump is the only living president, current or former, not invited to the dedication ceremony on June 18th.) But without any oversight from NARA, it also gives Mr Obama more latitude to shape the sort of legacy- building exhibitions that are mounted. This tension between mythmaking and historical fact has played out in presidential libraries many times before. Richard Nixon helped curate his library’s original Watergate exhibition, which was later replaced with one that was more critical, after NARA took over the library and hired a professional director. Omissions are just as common as rosy portrayals: Ronald Reagan’s library initially failed to mention the Iran-Contra affair, a scandal of his presidency, and Johnson’s library largely avoided Vietnam for decades. Unsurprisingly, Mr Obama’s does not mention the record number of immigrants he deported. Instead, libraries go heavy on the pomp. Reagan’s presents a decommissioned Air Force One, along with his limousines and a helicopter. Johnson’s features a life-size talking puppet of the president telling hokey jokes. Roosevelt’s preserves the cosy private study where he received
visitors. Many of them, including Mr Obama’s and Mr Trump’s proposed library on a prime lot in Miami, offer visitors replicas of the Oval Office. The overall impression is hagiography, though that can change after the presidents’ deaths. Exhibits at Roosevelt’s, for instance, now feature his mistresses and uncomfortable questions about why he was so reluctant to accept Jewish refugees. Mr Obama’s, befitting the man himself, is focused on culture as well as politics (Mr Obama releases annual lists of his favourite films, books and songs). Its grand interior feels like a contemporary-art museum, wreathed in dark wood and accented by bright paintings. A tour guide is quick to point out that Mr Obama chose the museum’s soundtrack, as well as the books on display in the “president’s reading room” in the on-site public library. The huge price-tag reflects its deluxe amenities. The events and athletic facilities span around 60,000 square feet (5,500 square metres) and include a professional-size basketball court and practice areas. For the extensive grounds Michelle Obama insisted on designing a steep “sledding hill” for visitors, because she never had one when she was growing up nearby. Vegetable gardens, which also took root in Mr Obama’s White House, sprawl over the roof of the library. Mr Obama’s fans will love the museum; his detractors will doubtless see it as they viewed his presidency: slick, facile and overproduced. The inverse is true of George W. Bush’s centre in Dallas. But take away the partisanship, and both museums represent the same deeply human impulse to get the last word and try to shape how future generations will view them. Presidential libraries are only going to become more complicated affairs. With digital correspondence being sent across a growing array of apps, the boundary of what counts as personal and professional will be contested (as any cabinet member who has misused a Signal chat can attest). And if future presidents opt for the Obama model, with foundations running the spaces apart from government oversight of records, it will make for more partisan and puffy exhibitions. Will the nearly $1bn projects continue? It seems an odd use of resources for a supposedly down-to-earth civil servant. But fewer presidents are pretending to be that any more. ■
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What the largest-ever shareholder judgment reveals about Russia If you want to see Vladimir Putin’s soul, study the fate of Yukos, an oil company June 18th 2026 WITH All Russia’s warmongering, repression and corruption, it is easy to forget how the West was once so enamoured of Vladimir Putin. In 2001 George W. Bush declared the then-newish Russian president “trustworthy”, having looked into his eyes and got a “sense of his soul”. The first signs that Mr Putin was nothing of the sort came long before the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and subsequent full-scale invasion of Ukraine. An early indication of his consolidation of power and authoritarian turn was the seizure and dismemberment of Yukos, an oil company.
The Kremlin’s move against the firm and imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, its boss, highlighted the power struggle between Mr Putin and his siloviki cronies—former spooks and military men—and the oligarchs who had hoovered up much of the economy in the “voucher” privatisations of the early 1990s. In 2003, after Mr Khodorkovsky—then Russia’s richest man—began funding opposition parties and hinted at a run for the presidency, Yukos was hit with a series of tax-related charges. Mr Khodorkovsky was thrown into a labour camp. The company was broken up and the bits sold to siloviki-linked firms at knock-down prices. The sometimes nerdy but always fascinating core of “Suing the Kremlin” is the two-decade-long legal saga that the expropriation spawned, which Martin Sixsmith rightly says will be studied by generations of lawyers. He is well placed to tell the tale: a former Moscow correspondent for the BBC, the author has written several other books about Mr Putin’s Russia, including a page-turner on the poisoning in London of a dissident, Alexander Litvinenko, in 2006. After several fruitless years trying to settle the tax claims, Yukos’s former shareholders fought back. Their unlikely champion was a cheery, phlegmatic London-based tax lawyer, Tim Osborne. Taking on the Kremlin, Mr Osborne might have seemed out of his depth. But he approached the challenge with vim and—given the fate of many past Putin antagonists—courage, winning favourable rulings for the shareholders’ company, GML, at the European Court of Human Rights, the Swiss supreme court and elsewhere. But GML needed a knockout blow. With help from Shearman & Sterling, an American law firm, Mr Osborne came up with the idea to launch an arbitration case accusing Russia of breaching a cross-border energy- investment treaty by trampling on shareholders’ rights. The result was a stunning win at an international tribunal: an award of $50bn, 20 times the previous record for such a case. After several more legal twists and turns, Russia’s appeals were finally exhausted in October 2025, allowing GML to go after Russian assets to cover the award. So far, Russia has paid nothing. Little beyond some trademarks for vodka brands has been seized. But as Mr Sixsmith argues convincingly, the victory has been more than pyrrhic. With a clever strategy and hard work, a small