coronavirus pandemic is creating perhaps the biggest crisis for Australia’s federal system since 1901, when six disparate British colonies in the so-called Great Southern Land united to win collective independence. The country has never been as divided as it is now.

State borders that were previously little more than photo opportunities are now fortified in a bid to keep out residents from Covid-hit places. Separated family members are defying police orders by hugging each other across the barricades, and some Australians have been denied the right to retrieve their children or visit dying relatives.

Even in the 19th century, workers were beginning to resent the grind of office life.

“You don’t know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief, day after day,” British essayist Charles Lamb wrote in a letter to poet William Wordsworth back in 1822, railing against his toil in the East India Company’s office in Leadenhall Street, London.

Eric Kunsman spots a red-crowned kiosk in front of the parking lot of a convenience store/smoke shop. It’s a pay phone, one he’d probably seen many times before but had never truly seen until now.

“Look at that!” he says. We pull over, and he pops the hatch on his Toyota SUV. “I can’t believe I missed this one.”

In a soccer game in Liverpool’s Goodison Park in 1988, player John Barnes stepped away from his position and used the back of his heel to kick away a banana that had been thrown toward him. Captured in an iconic photo, the moment encapsulated the racial abuse that Black soccer players then faced in the U.K.

More than 30 years later, the medium has changed, yet the racism persists: After England lost to Italy this July in the final of the UEFA European Championship, Black players for the British side

The ranks of C-suite trainees enrolled in today’s MBA programs are a microcosm of the challenges playing out across America’s corporate landscape. By and large they are still too male and lack the diversity to reflect the demographics of future business culture.

The historic national reckoning on race that was triggered by the killing of George Floyd has touched off a reexamination of corporate America from top to bottom. We created the Bloomberg Businessweek

On Milan’s long list of pandemic-era public initiatives, remodeling Piazza Sicilia is a strange one to get worked up about. The city built the tiny park in just a few weeks last autumn, at an estimated cost of €20,000 ($23,600). The strip of land had been a right-turn lane at the intersection of busy Via Sardegna and four residential streets, jammed every morning with honking commuters and every afternoon with parents double-parked to pick up their kids from school. Now, with cars forced to divert around the piazza, one of Milan’s myriad traffic nightmares has become a place where children play soccer, food delivery riders perch on their bikes awaiting calls, and residents of nearby apartment blocks face off at the pingpong table.

But people are worked up. Covid-era urban planning projects like Piazza Sicilia, intended to reduce traffic and provide more public space for residents locked at home during the pandemic, have become a flashpoint. In the runup to elections...

On Sept. 17, Sotheby’s premieres the first exhibition exclusively featuring Black jewelry designers, followed by a sale that runs in person and online until Oct. 10. The sale will be a watershed—and many would say long-overdue—moment for the industry, elevating 21 Black jewelry designers to a global stage for the first time. “Brilliant & Black: A Jewelry Renaissance” features 63 works, including both designers’ signature pieces and custom creations for the exhibition, that showcase their different styles and techniques.

The exhibition is the brainchild of Black jewelry author, editor, and stylist Melanie Grant, who was galvanized by the Black Lives Matter movement to find a way to make a difference in the jewelry world. Grant has worked at The Economist and its sister publication 1843 for 15 years and authored the coffee-table book Coveted: Art and Innovation in High Jewelry (2020).

The U.S. MBA is no more immune to the gender gap than the rest of corporate America. Even as women make up a majority of all college students and fill more than 6 out of every 10 seats in U.S. master’s degree programs, the number of aspiring female executives continues to lag in

Akzo Nobel NV, Europe’s biggest paint maker, for instance. At its Amsterdam headquarters, Chief Executive Officer Thierry Vanlancker has spent the past year watching his manufacturing head, David Prinselaar, flap his arms, madly gesticulate and seemingly talk to himself while “visiting” 124 plants by directing staff with high-definition augmented-reality headgear on factory floors. A task that meant crisscrossing the globe in a plane before is now done in a fraction of the time — and with no jet lag. For Vanlancker, there’s no going back.

The global economy is expected to undergo its fastest recovery in almost five decades this year, but deepening inequities between advanced and developing countries threaten to undermine this, the United Nations warned.

Following last year’s 3.5% contraction, world gross domestic product will likely surge 5.3% in 2021 due to “radical” policy interventions and a successful, if incomplete, vaccine rollout in advanced economies, the UN Conference on Trade and Development said in a report Wednesday. 

We wanted flying cars. Instead we got targeted ads, more surveillance, insurrectionists, and Peter Thiel. The inside story of how he gamed Trump, Silicon Valley’s biggest executives, and democracy itself to make billions, tax-freehttps://trib.al/cWxBGBB 

Jaeden Powell says she was hesitant to share her opinion with co-workers at her first job at a New York investment bank. As a young Black woman, she wasn’t sure where she fit in. “There weren’t a lot of people who looked like me in the room,” Powell says.

Now the 24-year-old is the first to occupy a spot aimed at students from underrepresented groups at

The meeting started with a thank-you. President-elect Donald Trump was planted at a long table on the 25th floor of his Manhattan tower. Trump sat dead center, per custom, and, also per custom, looked deeply satisfied with himself. He was joined by his usual coterie of lackeys and advisers and, for a change, the heads of the largest technology companies in the world.

“These are monster companies,” Trump declared, beaming at a

Over a Zoom call from sunny Los Angeles, Donald Shoup—sporting a big white beard, a brown cardigan sweater, and a marketer’s telephone headset—was yelling at me. “Oh, how terrible, you have to move your car, so they can sweep the road. I think that’s just awful,” he said, with audible italics. “To overcome the base desires of people like you”—people like me?—“you have to give the money back to the neighborhood.”

I’d made the mistake of griping to the bona fide king of parking reform that owning a car in New York City was annoying. Twice-weekly street sweeping forces a large group of people to fight for a small number of free curbside spots that they must then vacate frequently. It’s the rare game of musical chairs that requires insurance. And for most people, exorbitantly priced garages aren’t really an option. The free spaces are the only way to make owning a car in New York feel sustainable.

Stanford was ranked the top U.S. business school in the Bloomberg Businessweek 2021-22 Best B-Schools MBA ranking. A repeat winner, Stanford scored highest in compensation, networking, and entrepreneurship. Dartmouth’s Tuck school came in second, with Harvard third. For the first time, Bloomberg Businessweek's MBA ranking included a Diversity Index that measures U.S. schools on race, ethnicity, and gender in their classes.

Bloomberg Businessweek ranked 119 MBA programs around the world. IMD once again was tops in Europe, and CEIBS was a repeat winner in Asia-Pacific. Queen’s Smith school climbed to No. 1 in Canada. Three schools were ranked for the first time, and 102 schools in the ranking moved up or down.

Rankings were based on 19,955 surveys from students, alumni, and recruiters, as well as compensation and employment data from each school. For the first-ever Diversity Index, U.S. schools also provided data on race, ethnicity, and gender...

The meeting started with a thank-you. President-elect Donald Trump was planted at a long table on the 25th floor of his Manhattan tower. Trump sat dead center, per custom, and, also per custom, looked deeply satisfied with himself. He was joined by his usual coterie of lackeys and advisers and, for a change, the heads of the largest technology companies in the world.

“These are monster companies,” Trump declared, beaming at a

Zoom-call blunders can be hazardous to your career.

Nearly 1 in 4 executives have fired a staffer for slipping up during a video or audio conference, and most have levied some sort of disciplinary action for gaffes made in virtual meetings, a survey of 200 managers at large companies found. The survey, commissioned by Vyopta Inc., which helps companies manage their workplace collaboration and communication systems, also found that executives don’t fully trust a third of their staff to perform effectively when working remotely.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Londoners lost such standards as the Greenhouse in Mayfair and the Ledbury. But local chefs say that the places filling the void are the most exciting they’ve seen in years. 

“Post-lockdown, restaurant lovers in London and across the country have been rallying like never before to support their favorite places to eat and drink—which we always hoped would happen,” says

run aground in the Suez Canal. Factory shutdowns in Vietnam. Ports closed in China. It almost seems that not a day goes by without reports of another supply-chain snafu wrought by the pandemic, which dismantled just-in-time inventory systems that couldn’t cope with massive, simultaneous disruptions of supply and demand.

Companies have struggled to adapt, with some taking unusual steps.

The biggest minority in the U.S. is one of the most under-represented in Hollywood, a new study of the 1,300 highest grossing films over 13 years out Wednesday finds. 

Hispanic or Latino people are missing almost entirely from every aspect of movie making. In 2019, they made up just 5.9% of all characters in 100 top-hit movies, when they were included in films at all. Hispanic and Latino actors were entirely absent from over a third of the best performing movies that year, the analysis by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California finds. The group makes up more than 18% of the U.S. population,

It couldn’t be done during their lifetimes. But about 60 years after artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude first dreamed of it, their art project of wrapping Paris’s landmark Arc de Triomphe monument in cloth will be completed this weekend. 

Wrapping the Napoleonic-era arc in 25,000 square meters of silvery-blue polypropylene fabric -- recyclable and tethered with 3,000 meters of red rope -- cost 14 million euros ($16.6 million) and involved more than 1,000 people.