Leaders
Bureaucracy unbound
The world is entering a new era of big government
How should classical liberals respond?
Barbarians at the garden gate
Hostility towards private equity’s push into property is misguided
Big investors are filling a gap in the market
The next Afghanistan
How not to lose the war on terror in Africa
To prevail against jihadists in the Sahel the West must learn from past mistakes
From role-model to cautionary tale
Chile’s voters are on the verge of a terrible mistake
Two extremists are leading in the polls for this week’s presidential election
The future of the internet
Don’t mock the metaverse
The metaverse is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed
Letters
On vaccine passports, maths, Western Sahara, climate change, Joe Biden, French acronyms
Letters to the editor
Briefing
A hard trend to buck
Governments are not going to stop getting bigger
Some factors which drive the process are eternal and some are getting stronger
Europe
Bleak is chic
France is doing well, but feeling miserable
Caucasian degeneration
Near death in jail, Georgia’s former president defies its current one
Permanent partition?
Putting Cyprus together may be impossible
Charlemagne
Last of the commies
Britain
Emergency care
The NHS faces a bleak winter
Social mobility
Britain’s inequalities are spelt out in its surnames
Middle East & Africa
Sahel in a handbasket
Why the war against jihadists in Mali is going badly
Spies against crime
The murder rate rises among Arab-Israelis
Bad smells everywhere
Tunisia gets violent over landfills
United States
Provoking questions
The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse shows America’s divide over guns
Where did it all go so right?
Puerto Rico, success story
Spending and voting
Will Democrats be rewarded for spending lots of money?
Lexington
Pete Buttigieg’s impossible job
The Americas
Chilly reception
Chile makes life harder for immigrants
A rose, but no uprising
Cuba’s government squelches a planned nationwide protest
Asia
The embrace of the motherland
Chinese propagandists court South-East Asia’s Chinese diaspora
Some cause for pride
Support for gay rights in Japan is gaining momentum
Hooked on handouts
The Indian government’s addiction to subsidies has dire effects
China
Soaking it up
To prevent floods, China is building “sponge cities”
The grey walls of China
Chinese officials help to cultivate a local graffiti scene
International
Business
The Party capitalists
China’s communist authorities are tightening their grip on the private sector
Royal purge
Shell mulls a breakup
Bartleby
The business phrasebook
Monet, Manet, Money
An auction at Sotheby’s raises $676m
The future of the internet
The video-game industry has metaverse ambitions, too
Chugging along
Times are good for American railways
Schumpeter
Walmart gets its bite back
We’re hiring
Wanted: a new senior business writer
Finance & economics
Material needs
China seeks to extend its clout in commodity markets
Houdini economics
Germany grapples with weird ways to dodge its debt brake
Land of the falling price
The case of Japan’s curiously quiescent inflation rate
Science & technology
Covid animal reservoirs
SARS-CoV-2 could be lurking in animal hidey-holes
ASATs and the ISS
A Russian anti-satellite missile test puts the ISS in peril
Culture
The less accused
Far-right ideas are gaining a renewed respectability in France
Artificial intelligence
Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt take on AI
Marking time
How the seven-day week came to rule the world
Brave new worlds
The travails and bold aims of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi
Economic & financial indicators
Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Graphic detail
An Immensa cock-up
Botched covid-19 test results in Britain led to thousands of extra cases
Obituary
Builder and dismantler