Dec 9th 2023

How peace is possible

The world this week

The World Ahead

The World Ahead 2024

Leaders

Compassion and its consequences

How to stop over-medicalising mental health

What the world could learn from Britain’s flawed approach

The war in Gaza

Israel and Palestine: How peace is possible

A peace process can go wrong in many ways, but a real possibility exists that it could go right

The race for second place

A messy contest is coming to a head behind Donald Trump

Our poll tracker sheds light on that competition. It may yet matter

Gensler v Griffin

Bashing hedge funds that trade Treasuries could cost taxpayers money

Why fears about the “basis trade” are overblown

Power trip

Green protectionism will slow the energy transition

Expanding renewable-power capacity is becoming ever harder

The learning power of PISA

Covid-19 was a disaster for the world’s schoolchildren

The costs of wasting brainpower are huge

Letters

On solar geoengineering, carbon accounting, Britain’s Treasury, meetings, Dutch, public toilets

Letters to the editor

By Invitation

Internet safety

End-to-end encryption protects everyone, says the head of WhatsApp

Internet dangers

An online-safety expert argues that end-to-end encryption endangers children

Briefing

Solution or delusion?

Despite the war in Gaza, talk of a two-state solution persists

For there to be any hope, both Israelis and Palestinians need new leaders

Asia

Cow-belt elections

Narendra Modi’s party sweeps in north and central India

Kill list

Will US-Indian relations be hurt by India’s assassination scheme?

Available on Zoom

The new geishas

Campus politics

Foreign students are pouring back into Australia

Rusty buckets

North Korea is getting new ships

Banyan

Rohingya refugees return to the sea

China

Eyeing Russia’s backyard

Could China, Russia’s “no-limits” friend, help rebuild Ukraine?

More and more like the mainland

Why Agnes Chow fled Hong Kong and isn’t likely to return

Goodbye to an old friend

Henry Kissinger, a statesman beyond reproach, in China at least

Chaguan

China and the EU risk a trade war

United States

Call of the wild

How the culture wars came for grizzly bears

Cameo man

Who will fill the expelled George Santos’s seat?

Young opinions

One in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth

A Don-horse race

Our tracker of voters’ intentions shows the contest behind Trump

Fuhgeddaboudit!

New Jersey introduced a smart voting reform—then let it lapse

Science and the city

American life-sciences firms are moving labs downtown

Lexington

Charlie Peters, the man who tried to save Washington

Middle East & Africa

The final battle looms

Israel is pushing into southern Gaza as the clock ticks down

Red Sea peril

Why Yemen’s Houthis are attacking ships in the Red Sea

Money troubles

Israel is strangling the West Bank’s economy

Israel’s irrelevant prime minister

Binyamin Netanyahu is at the mercy of his hardline coalition partners

Free money on trial

Giving the poor a wodge of cash is better than dripping it out

Let me be Kenyan

Kenya is belatedly granting citizenship to groups once deemed foreign

The Americas

Making Venezuela great again?

Venezuela’s autocrat, Nicolás Maduro, threatens to annex Guyana

Their man in Havana

America has had a Cuban agent in its midst for 42 years

General purpose

Latin America’s armed forces have increasing clout

Europe

The southern exception

Southern Europe’s employment boom is not strong enough

Prospects of hope

A mining project revives a dying Bosnian town

Patrolling Baltic airspace

French fighter jets join the Baltic mission

Poking the bear

Armenia is turning against its erstwhile guardian, Russia

War child

“Grief camps” help Ukrainian children face the loss of parents

Charlemagne

In Europe, green policies rule while green politicians struggle

Britain

Time to rethink

Britain’s mental-health crisis is a tale of unintended consequences

Immigrants and the economy

How Britain plans to cut immigration

Off track

Britain’s marathon rail strikes may be nearing an end

The covid-19 inquiry

Boris Johnson: star turn at Britain’s covid inquiry

Bagehot

Inside the Spectocracy

International

PISA tests

The pandemic’s toll on schooling emerges in awful new exam results

Business

Unsustainable developments

The renewables business faces a make-or-break moment

Step on the gas

Big oil agrees to slash methane emissions

Partying like it’s 2023

Europe’s technology startups are doing just fine

Mad man v mad men

Elon Musk’s X is especially vulnerable to an ad boycott

A corporate whodunnit

The case of China’s vanishing chairmen

Bartleby

Why Monday is the most misunderstood day

Schumpeter

Elon Musk’s messiah complex may bring him down

Finance & economics

The 5% question

Will China leave behind its economic woes in 2024?

Tax and pretend

Will a fiscal mess thwart Japan’s nascent economic growth?

Making friends

How to sell free trade to green types

Buttonwood

Why it might be time to buy banks

Fixing finance

Is the world’s most important asset market broken?

Caught short

Who made millions trading the October 7th attacks?

Free exchange

At last, a convincing explanation for America’s drug-death crisis

Science & technology

It does what it says on the tin

The Extremely Large Telescope will transform astronomy

Meep-meep. Boom!

A startup called Anduril has unveiled a reusable missile

Culture

Shelf help

The best books of 2023, as chosen by The Economist

Write on

Books by The Economist’s journalists in 2023

Johnson

Our word of the year for 2023

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

The Economist explains

What is antisemitism—and why do differences in interpretation matter?

Obituary

A cowgirl on the bench