Polycrisis and Persistence: On Hegemonic Decline, Technological Disruption, and the Dangerous In-Between

Introduction The newsletters from Monocle, The Economist, The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, Newsweek, Semafor, ARTNews, Rest of World, and Goldman Sachs spanning the week of January 29 to February 4, 2026, present a fragmented yet deeply interconnected portrait of a world navigating what Adam Tooze has famously termed the "polycrisis"—a knot of economic, social, and geopolitical stressors that reinforce one another (Tooze, 2021). From the urbanist experiments in Luxembourg to the violent ...