The world this week

Politics
Business
KAL’s cartoon
This week’s covers
Leaders


Riding high
The lessons from America’s astonishing economic record
The world’s biggest economy is leaving its peers ever further in the dust

Non-alignment
Can the West win over the rest?
In a more transactional world the price of influence is going up

Europe, China and America
Emmanuel Macron’s blunder over Taiwan
The French leader has made a dangerous situation worse

Addiction
Oregon botches the decriminalisation of drugs
It failed to prepare the ground

Big science
The Human Genome Project transformed biology
Yet for genomics to become a part of everyday medicine, the hard work is still ahead

Letters

On China and Ukraine, George Orwell, science and religion, video games, “Barbie”, height
Letters to the editor
By Invitation


Russia and Ukraine
Jonathan Powell on preparations for peace-making in Ukraine
The Pentagon leaks
Intelligence leaks are an opportunity as well as a threat, says Thomas Rid
Briefing


From strength to strength
America’s economic outperformance is a marvel to behold
But the country could still undercut its own success
Asia


Putting the Indo into Indo-Pacific
Rivalry between America and China has spread to the Indian Ocean
Boba life
Chinese bubble tea chains go viral in South-East Asia
Kishida in the clear
Japan’s prime minister has recovered from a rough patch
Banyan
Narendra Modi is rewriting Indian history
China


Knives out
Communist Party members must study Xi Jinping’s thinking
What passes for justice
China throws the book at two prominent human-rights lawyers
Moderate exercises
What to make of China’s military drills around Taiwan
United States


The slides that came in from the cold
A leak of files is one of America’s worst intelligence breaches in a decade
The Oregon experiment
Oregon’s drug decriminalisation has had a troubled start
Perverse political maths
Why Tim Scott is such a long shot for the Republican nomination
Mifepristone muddle
A federal judge in Texas rules against a popular abortion medication
Third-rail thriller
America’s entitlement programmes are rapidly approaching insolvency
Lexington
The real questions raised by Clarence Thomas’s latest scandal

Middle East & Africa


Israel and the Palestinians
The Palestinian Authority is being eclipsed by radical militants
Of militants and money-changers
Egypt’s army seems to want to make pasta as well as war
Missing people
Many thousands of Africans have disappeared in conflict
All right for some
Why Africa is one of the most unequal continents in the world
The Americas


Back in the big league
Brazil’s foreign policy is hyperactive, ambitious and naive
Losing its sheen
Uruguay is losing its reputation as Latin America’s success story
Total chaos
An ambitious plan for “total peace” in Colombia is faltering
Europe


A changing continent
The woman at the heart of Europe
The ground beneath his feet
Recovery from Turkey’s earthquake will take years
Not waterproof
A winter drought grips southern Europe
Charlemagne
How Europe is spluttering its way to better air quality
Britain


Tax brakes
Britain’s tax take is getting bigger but not better
Talk talk
Private therapy in Britain is booming and largely unregulated
Vertical limits
Can high-rise buildings solve London’s housing problems?
Weight of history
How intrepid Victorian surveyors mapped the length and breadth of Britain
Bagehot
Rishi Sunak, a very Tory kind of technocrat
International


The new non-aligned
How to survive a superpower split
Business


Welcome to the green swamp
America’s $800bn climate splurge is feeding a new lobbying ecosystem
Nickel and dimes
Indonesia’s nickel boom tests Western green sensibilities
ByteDance the night away
ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent, reports a record profit
Yes, they can (and box, and package)
Inflation has yet to dent big food’s earnings
To build or to buy?
The tug-of-war between Glencore and Teck
Bartleby
How to be a superstar on Zoom
Schumpeter
Samsung should be wary of Intel-like complacency
Finance & economics


Sovereign-stealth funds
Welcome to a new era of petrodollar power
28 years later
After decades of stagnation, wages in Japan are finally rising
Grievance culture
Where did woke ideas start to spread?
The big squeeze
Life is getting tough for borrowers. Where will the pain be felt?
High-stake cards
More and more Americans are gaming the deposit-insurance system
Buttonwood
What luxury stocks say about the new cold war
Free exchange
How the state could take control of the banking system
Science & technology


The Human Genome Project
How the Human Genome Project revolutionised biology
Culture


Walking on water
Bangladesh’s riverine villages are benefiting from clever design
Bugs in the system
The role of bacteria and viruses in world history
Home Entertainment
Sarah Bernhardt was the first modern celebrity
Horror on the high seas
A thrilling account of a shipwreck in the Pacific in 1741
Common denominators
Paying attention to numbers can open up meaning in books
Johnson
A new language textbook in Mexico has caused a brouhaha
Economic & financial indicators

Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Graphic detail


Food and climate change
A different way to measure the climate impact of food
The Economist explains


The Economist explains
Why so many Russian tanks fall prey to Ukrainian mines
The Economist explains
How to measure poverty
Obituary


Germany’s conscience
Traute Lafrenz showed that resistance to the Nazis was possible