Dec 16th 2023

The media and the message: Journalism and the 2024 presidential election

The world this week

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?

The Economist reads

What to read about Congo

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Obituary

Let’s talk about now