A summer festival in Moscow has echoes of Berlin in the early 1940s. The number of Russian casualties in Ukraine is thought to have passed 1m this month, and Vladimir Putin’s grip on his own citizens grows ever tighter. But the celebration offers a parallel universe: of entertainment, consumption and comfort. How long can the Russian capital sustain competing realities?

Elsewhere, we examine a curious dichotomy in the rarefied world of highly paid software engineers in Silicon Valley. For the lucky few—machine-learning whizzes—the rewards are becoming stratospheric. But their achievements in AI are taking work from less fortunate software developers. The superstars’ boom is their bust.