Press

The Brazilian presidential election is the most important outside the United States in 2026. This is the view of Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu. "Brazil is very important to Latin America. In fact, if the Bolsonaro family returns to power, it will be the same as the US, which decided on a second term for Donald Trump in 2024," said Acemoglu.

There are many reasons put forward for the decline in optimism and faith in centrist politics. But Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu puts it simply. "We started taking democracy for granted." Mr. Acemoglu has tried to provide both an analysis and some prescriptions in a recent book, "What Happened to Liberal Democracy?" In it, he outlines "two broad lines of failure" over the last half-century, which have led to widespread alienation and anti-establishment sentiment.

Moving from managing a team to leading leaders is a change in both scope and attitude. There's a reflex that is easy to miss. It shows up not when you volunteer an answer, but when someone else asks you for one. Senior lecturer Elsbeth Johnson found that the real block usually isn't a skills gap. It's an inability to say "no." Leaders keep absorbing requests for help because turning them down feels like a failure to be useful.

Anthropic is hiring a smaller share of junior technical staff, while AI agents' working hours now outnumber its employees' six to one, according to a report by professor Nathan Wilmers and co-authors. "The share of junior-level employees in technical departments at Anthropic slipped from 21% to 14% since early 2025," the report stated. The findings were based on internal data and employee interviews.

"AI has made it more important for the CIO to be able to exercise influence and give advice," said principal research scientist George Westerman. "Now you have a major technology that every C-suite person is wondering about and feels they need to use, and, given its transformative nature throughout the organization, this is where the skills of a CIO who is a strategic partner can be really useful."

Corporate labs' retreat led basic research to become much more reliant on government-backed efforts. In the view of private-science advocates, that is lamentable. A study of 100,000 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant applications by Pierre Azoulay and co-author found that projects that took out-of-consensus approaches were less likely to have their funding renewed.