Oct 28th 2023

America’s test

The world this week

Leaders

The stakes in Gaza

American power: indispensable or ineffective?

How Joe Biden manages the war between Israel and Hamas will define America’s global role

How to destroy an economy—and get away with it

Argentina’s election result is the worst of all possible outcomes

Sergio Massa, the economy minister, will now go head-to-head with Javier Milei

Think, then act

Governments must not rush into policing AI

A summit in Britain will focus on “extreme” risks. But no one knows what they look like

Just about managing

How to be a better boss

Tips from “Boss Class”, our new podcast

The green transition

Sodium batteries offer an alternative to tricky lithium

Lithium is relatively scarce and mostly refined in China. Sodium is neither

Letters

On Israel and Gaza

Letters to the editor

By Invitation

Global disorder

Mikhail Khodorkovsky says that support for Israel should not come at the expense of Ukraine

Briefing

Dread and disagreement

Why Israel’s invasion of Gaza has been delayed

Bibi and his generals are divided

Biden’s bandwidth

The overstretched superpower

America could face wars in the Middle East, Ukraine and Taiwan

Escalation in the Middle East

Why Saudi Arabia and the UAE want to keep links with Israel

Are the Abraham accords over?

The scavenger power

Iran’s ayatollahs play the Middle East’s most dangerous game

They want to escalate without triggering full-blown war

The day after

Can the Palestinian Authority control Gaza if Hamas is ousted?

It may be lucky to keep control of the West Bank by the end of this war

Asia

Strait talk

Taiwan’s opposition parties are struggling to unite

Present perfect

What gift would you give Narendra Modi?

Back to the future

Nawaz Sharif returns to Pakistan, again

Intrigue at court

Jokowi is building a political dynasty

Banyan

South Korean politics is one big row about history

Warabistan

Meet the Japanese Kurds

China

Treading gingerly

Why China and India are watching the Dalai Lama closely

In the dark

Rumours swirl after China’s defence minister, Li Shangfu, is sacked

Chaguan

How China sees Gaza

United States

Speak now

America’s House of Representatives finally has a speaker

Losing their religion

The Republican Party no longer believes America is the essential nation

Birds of New York

How to make NYC work better for its winged inhabitants

Oh my gourd

The economics of pumpkin patches

Lexington

Mitt Romney is the fixed point revealing the Republicans’ slide

Middle East & Africa

An interview with the president

Senegal’s president asks if democracy can work in Africa’s coup-belt

Pesticidal farmers

Nigeria is awash with dangerous pesticides

A king who stoops not to conquer

History will complicate King Charles’s visit to Kenya

The Americas

The enduring power of Peronism

Argentina’s presidential election delivers a surprise result

Paraguay’s population puzzle

Over a million Paraguayans disappear in the latest census

How to lose friends and irritate people

Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s left-wing president, is floundering

Europe

An Ataturk complex

Instead of undoing Ataturk’s legacy, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has claimed it

Seabed skulduggery

Who is sabotaging underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea?

Much at stake

The French debate the future of steak frites

What have you got left?

Ukraine’s allies are scrambling to bolster its air defences

The same old Balkan tinderbox

A mysterious attack in northern Kosovo rattles everyone

Charlemagne

What markets are trying to tell Europe—and why it should listen

Britain

Magic town

The most typical place in Britain is Basildon

Still knotty

Is the Windsor framework in Northern Ireland working?

Fight for the power

Britain must overhaul the way it approves infrastructure

The ghosts at the feast

Liz Truss and Jeremy Corbyn still haunt British politics

Not that by the by

Do by-election results in Britain matter?

Family division

Britain’s family-court system is overwhelmed

Bagehot

The rise and fall of class dysphoria in Britain

Business

The impossible job

Pity the modern manager—burnt-out, distracted and overloaded

Bartleby

Would you rather be a manager or a leader?

Of evils and evals

The world wants to regulate AI, but does not quite know how

Blackened

Why China is restricting exports of graphite

A year in the life of Meta

How Mark Zuckerberg escaped a metaverse-sized hole

Business oasis

The mood at Davos in the desert is one of anxiety

Schumpeter

Lessons from frugal businesses minting money in India

Finance & economics

Under the microscope

How health-care costs stopped rising

Fleet-footed

America would struggle to break Iran’s oil-smuggling complex

Buttonwood

Investors are returning to hedge funds. That may be unwise

Making a statement

Xi Jinping steps up his attempt to rescue China’s economy

Trade nightmares

America and the EU demonstrate protectionism’s ratchet effect

Consumerzzzzzzzzz

Welcome to the age of the hermit consumer

Free exchange

Israel’s war economy is working—for the time being

Science & technology

A battery ReNaissance

Firms are exploring sodium batteries as an alternative to lithium

Two seats, no pilot

China approves the world’s first flying taxi

Listening to the jungle

AI can catalogue a forest’s inhabitants simply by listening

Culture

Art hubs and snubs

The arts in Paris are booming—and trying to nip at London’s heels

The long (over)haul

One of Berlin’s star attractions is closing for 14 years

A true-life African murder mystery

CIA plots, coups and a gold-capped molar in Congo

(Back) home on the range

Ken Burns chronicles the sad fate of the American buffalo

The architecture of death

Drug lords’ tombs are monuments to opulence

In a spin

How superstars and heritage acts hijacked the vinyl revival

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Obituary

An eye over Gaza