The world this week

Politics
Business
KAL’s cartoon
This week’s covers
The World Ahead


The World Ahead
The World Ahead 2024

Leaders


Adrift
Rishi Sunak’s strategic genius
The Rwanda policy is bad. But the Conservatives are the real problem

The media and the message
Can you have a healthy democracy without a common set of facts?
America’s presidential election is a test of that proposition

Wobbly in Tehran
Iran’s regime is weaker than it looks, and therefore more pliable
America should deter it from escalating the Gaza war, but also engage with it

The Powell pivot
The Fed gives in to the clamour for looser money
Its doveish policymaking looks premature—and leaves Europe’s central banks in an awkward spot

Metropolished
London’s resilience is a lesson to policymakers everywhere
The virtues of services, scale and immigration are on full display

Green shoots
In a first, COP28 targets the root cause of climate change
Now to turn diplomacy into action
Letters

On funding research, the United Arab Emirates, Kissinger, Argentina, Joe Biden, cocaine
Letters to the editor
By Invitation


Artificial intelligence
AI’s big rift is like a religious schism, says Henry Farrell
Humanitarian needs
David Miliband sees a new global geography of crisis
Briefing


Invincible city
Brexit? Hah! Lockdowns? Shrug! Can nothing stop London?
It has been bouncing back for 2,000 years and counting
Asia


Japan and ASEAN
Japan is a cuddlier friend to South-East Asia than America or China
Pooch raj
Indians are going gooey over dogs
Kashmir
India’s top court upholds the central government’s grab at Kashmir
Bangladesh’s election
Sheikh Hasina’s party is set to be re-elected in January
Banyan
Hsiao Bi-khim is Taiwan’s cat warrior
China


A big wager on the future
Macau, China’s sin city, wants to be more like Las Vegas
High-risk pregnancies
The dangers of carrying a child for someone else in China
Lost in translation
The world continues to garble the name and title of Xi Jinping
Chaguan
China’s cities compete for kids

United States


Right nation
Donald Trump is the conservative media
The partisan press
How American journalism lets down readers and voters
Measuring media ideology
American journalism sounds much more Democratic than Republican
University presidents skewered
American universities face a reckoning over antisemitism
Jack Smith, Trump and SCOTUS
The Supreme Court will decide how quickly Donald Trump is prosecuted
Biden-gnomics
Regulatory changes hint at what might be in store in a second Biden term
First bins, now congestion charging
Why New York wants to be more like London
Middle East & Africa


Taming Tehran
Iran rethinks its role as a regional troublemaker
Cobalt and chaos
Congo’s crucial election may be heading for disaster
The end of the beginning
Israel’s current large-scale operation is the last one in Gaza
The Americas


Will he, won’t he?
Could Mark Carney lead Canada?
The whirr of the chainsaw
Javier Milei implements shock therapy in Argentina
Dissing Miss Universe
Nicaragua’s dictator goes after Miss Universe
Europe


Return to the rule of law
Donald Tusk must undo years of populist subversion in Poland
Return to sanity
Turkey’s economy has improved, but its foreign policy is still messy
Unfair play
Spain’s institutions are groaning under partisan pressure
Gangsters of glasnost
The crime drama Russia and Ukraine want to ban
Charlemagne
Stolpersteine grieve for victims of the Nazis, one at a time
Britain


A flight from reality
How a Rwandan gambit consumed the Conservative Party
Expelliarmus!
The magical thinking behind Britain’s Rwanda bill
Health tourism
Wes Streeting, a Labour frontbencher, visits Singapore
Grand designs
Britain needs more houses. Does the industry want to build them?
Pedicabonomics
London’s riotous pedicabs are about to be regulated
First, take one live goose…
How to kill a goose quickly
Bagehot
Cheer up, Sir Keir! It might never happen
International


COP28 concludes
Climate talks at last lead to a deal on cutting fossil-fuel use
1843 magazine


Journalism
When the New York Times lost its way
Business


Where did all the commercials go?
Welcome to the ad-free internet
Un-appy returns
What Google’s antitrust defeat means for the app economy
Season’s grumblings
German business is fed up with a government in disarray
Toko-Tok
Will TikTok’s GoTo gambit save its Indonesian business?
Bartleby
How to master the art of delegation
Schumpeter
Boneheaded anti-immigration politicians are throttling globalisation
Finance & economics


Financial flows
How to sneak billions of dollars out of China
A surplus of anomalies
Is China understating its own export success?
Buttonwood
The mystery of Britain’s dirt-cheap stockmarket
Sticking to his guns
Vladimir Putin is running Russia’s economy dangerously hot
Road trader
Why stockpickers should get out more
Recession response
Europe’s economy is in a bad way. Policymakers need to react
Free exchange
How to put boosters under India’s economy
Science & technology


The chicken of tomorrow
Will lab-grown meat ever make it onto supermarket shelves?
Seismology (Taylor’s version)
The excitement of 70,000 Swifties can shake the Earth
Future of chipmaking
Jensen Huang says Moore’s law is dead. Not quite yet
Culture


The alt-write
Conservatives are trying to disrupt Hollywood, with some success
Hollywood and politics
When Charlie Chaplin was cancelled
A hymn for all seasons
“Amazing Grace” is a 200-year-old song with a surprising history
Pandemic fiction
Some thought covid would change literature. It has not
Good to hear
The best albums of 2023, as chosen by The Economist
Economic history
Is the age of Milton Friedman over?
Economic & financial indicators

Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Obituary


Let’s talk about now
Benjamin Zephaniah stayed angry all his life