The world this week

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


Fertility technology
Making babymaking better
IVF is failing most women. But new research holds out hope for the future

Too darn hot
How cities can respond to extreme heat
Officials from Beijing to Phoenix are grappling with unbearable temperatures

Economic optimism
The world economy is still in danger
Falling inflation is good news. But it is too early to hail a “soft landing”

A Himalayan thaw
What the China-India detente means for the West
The Asian giants are learning to live with each other

Chained gangs
What the world’s budding autocrats are learning from El Salvador
President Nayib Bukele is gutting democracy and being applauded for it

Sanctions and reparations
Should Ukraine get Russia’s frozen reserves?
How to make Russia pay for the war while upholding international law

Letters

On deep-sea mining, water regulation in Britain, the Italian left, working from home
Letters to the editor
By Invitation


The Wagner Group
George Clooney and John Prendergast on how the West can kill the Wagner virus
Spain’s election
Alberto Núñez Feijóo on why he deserves to lead Spain
Spain’s election
As Spain prepares to vote, its Socialist prime minister sets out the case for continuity
Briefing


Turning a corner
Could America’s economy escape recession?
The route to a soft landing is narrow
Asia


Asia’s battery battlefield
A battery supply chain that excludes China looks impossible
Bloodless revolution
Singapore is the world leader in selling cultivated meat
Crossing the line
An American soldier has deserted to North Korea
Banyan
Why are politics in West Bengal so violent?
China


A for effort, Xi for control
Can academic joint ventures between China and the West survive?
Data and the disease
A clue to China’s true covid-19 death toll
The wind of change
Germany’s new strategy for dealings with China
What would the party say?
How China trains its journalists to report “correctly”
Chaguan
China’s foreign minister goes missing
United States


The sizzling Sunbelt
Americans are moving to places besieged by extreme heat
Reproductive politics
The FDA approves the first-ever non-prescription birth-control pill
Big-donor populism
Ron DeSantis is relying on big donors and his super PAC
Slow puncture
What America’s bike-share schemes tell you about venture capital
A new Mexican-American war
How Mexico has become the “enemy” of America’s Republicans
Lexington
The case for a third-party campaign in 2024 is actuarial, not ideological

Middle East & Africa


Not all hot air
Why Africa is poised to become a big player in energy markets
Just give me a reason
Israel’s constitutional chaos is far from over
Tickling smuggled ivories
How well-connected Iranians import their goodies
The Americas


Terminator Salvador
Nayib Bukele shows how to dismantle a democracy and stay popular
What Latin America thinks
Young Latin Americans are unusually open to autocrats
Europe


Kremlin black box
Post-mutiny Moscow descends into factional murk
Waiting for the afterglow
Zaporizhia braces itself for Russian nuclear tricks
France’s Zeitenwende
France’s Zeitenwende
Come and take them
Why the EU will not seize Russian state assets to rebuild Ukraine
Chebureki beat pierogi
How Ukrainians affect Poland
Charlemagne
A spat in Brussels pits an open vision of Europe against an insular one
Britain


Universities’ funding
Muddled policies are harming British universities
Inflation dips
British inflation may not be as sticky as thought
Charge sheet
A big battery investment is good news for British carmaking
Back to the future
Sir Tony Blair mesmerises the Labour Party, again
Britain and China
Whoever runs Britain will struggle to get tough on China
Bagehot
The rise of the self-pitying MP
International


Asia’s biggest beasts
What if China and India became friends?
Technology Quarterly


The most personal technology
In vitro fertilisation is struggling to keep up with demand
If at first you don’t succeed…
IVF remains largely a numbers game
Selling hope
The fertility sector is booming
Our bodies, ourselves
Not all types of families can access IVF
Eggs from elsewhere
Some women need eggs from others, or from their younger selves
Eggs from scratch
New ways of making babies are on the horizon
Conception, reconceived
Lack of basic research has hampered assisted reproduction
Between the lines
Video: Why we know so little about human reproduction
In vitro fertilisation
Sources and acknowledgments
Business


A new model
Tesla’s surprising new route to EV domination
Bartleby
Workplace advice from our agony uncle
Last-chance saloon
Can a Czech billionaire rescue Casino?
Shooter to win
The winners and losers from the $69bn Microsoft-Activision mega-deal
A new big cheese
Startups are producing real dairy without a cow in sight
India’s rickshaw wars
A battle of rickshaw apps shows the promise of India’s digital stack
Schumpeter
Hollywood’s blockbuster strike may become a flop
Finance & economics


Machine dreams
Your employer is (probably) unprepared for artificial intelligence
A feel-bad recovery
How much trouble is China’s economy in?
Buttonwood
The dollar’s dip will not become a sustained decline
Balancing act
Big tech’s dominance is straining the logic of passive investing
What crisis?
America’s big banks are in rude health—with one exception
FedLate
Instant payments finally reach America with FedNow
Science & technology


Turning up the heat
Are the current heatwaves evidence that climate change is speeding up?
The Scrap Kings
Scrapyards adopt new high-tech ways to dismantle cars
When mammals attack
A spectacular new fossil shows a mammal making a meal of a dinosaur
Culture


Bombs and a bombshell
Realism with “Oppenheimer”, or escapism with “Barbie”?
The heat also rises
Extreme temperatures separate “the cool and the damned”
Opposites that never meet
A new novel imagines life in Andy Warhol’s studio
Hi, spy
Calder Walton’s “Spies” is a riveting history of espionage
At the sharp end
“The Retrievals”, a tale of agony and addiction, makes listeners squirm
Johnson
AI is making it possible to clone voices
Economic & financial indicators

Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Graphic detail


Crescent of fire
Data from satellites suggest violence has surged in much of Sudan
The Economist explains


The Economist explains
What happens when extreme weather hits several places at once?
The Economist explains
Why developing the world’s first malaria vaccine has taken so long
Obituary


When angels laugh
Milan Kundera believed that truth lay in endless questioning