Leaders
How high will central banks go?
Interest rates may have to rise sharply to fight inflation
But the low-rate era is unlikely to come to a permanent end
Statistically significant
The Economist’s election modelling should cheer Emmanuel Macron
France’s president has a 79% chance of keeping his job
An icy chasm
Beijing’s Winter Olympics symbolise a world divided
The West has rightly concluded that buttering up China will not make it nicer
Free speech’s new frontier
What Spotify should learn from the Joe Rogan affair
The content-moderation wars have come to audio
Wrong man, wrong plan
The British government’s white paper on “levelling up” falls short
It fails to devolve enough power and money
Letters
On vaccine protests, the BBC, curling, quadratic voting, tipping
Letters to the editor
Briefing
Turning Japanese
Why the world is saving too much money for its own good
And why the pandemic is unlikely to change that
Europe
A four-in-five chance
Emmanuel Macron is highly likely to be re-elected as France’s president
Caucasian thaw
The Turkey-Armenia relationship is thawing
Charlemagne
Southern Europe is reforming itself
Britain
Digging deep
A quixotic plan to roll back EU law
HP v Autonomy
Mike Lynch has lost Britain’s biggest fraud case
To infinity and beyond
The government is promising to tackle the NHS backlog
Scrolling through
The laws are being removed from Parliament
The pandemic generation
Some British children have been changed by covid-19, probably for good
Middle East & Africa
Rise and shine
The president of Egypt does a U-turn on economic policy
Grains of wrath
How tensions in Ukraine could rile Egypt
Pushers and putschists
Guinea-Bissau sees off an attempted coup
A continuing horror
Child rape is far too common in some war-torn African countries
United States
“Freedom First”
Why Florida is lurching to the right
Preschool education
A new study finds preschool can be detrimental to children
Abortion by mail in America
A safe and simple abortion option becomes more readily available
Drought victim
The loneliness of the desert tortoise
Crypto and the far right
The charm of cryptocurrencies for white supremacists
The US census
America is stagnating—demographically, that is
The Americas
Aiding and abetting
Foreign aid has done little to help Haiti
A populist turn
Erin O’Toole is voted out as Canada’s Conservative leader
Asia
A nation of holdouts
Papua New Guinea’s vaccination rate is only 3.3%
New year fireworks
What is behind North Korea’s flurry of missile tests?
China
Virtual state of control
Building a metaverse with Chinese characteristics
Not home for the holidays
Chinese New Year is disrupted for a third year
International
Just keep us alive
Covid-19 has pushed governments to find new ways to help the poor
Business
We’re hiring
How America’s talent wars are reshaping business
Depopulation pressure
How German companies court employees
The hills are alive
China’s ski industry faces an avalanche of risks
Don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone
Spotify, Joe Rogan and the Wild West of online audio
Finance & economics
The urge to splurge
Why the impressive pace of investment growth looks likely to endure
A slippery patch
OPEC grapples with a precariously balanced oil market
The bill balloons
The global interest bill is about to jump
The tiger roars
Why India’s stockmarket is roaring
Free exchange
China may soon become a high-income country
Science & technology
Faster, higher, stronger
Why space is about to enter its nuclear age
Scientific publishing
Preprints on the coronavirus have been impressively reliable
Trypanophobics rejoice!
A new way to deliver delicate drugs, no jabbing required
Culture
The megaphone and the muzzle
A history of free expression charts its seesawing progress
The undiscovered country
“This Mortal Coil” is a surprisingly upbeat history of death
The house always wins
Wall Street was the real winner of the GameStop saga
World in a dish
Lucky new-year foods embody a benign view of good fortune
Playground culture
Covid-19 has given children new words and ideas to play with
Economic & financial indicators
Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
Graphic detail
Elysian stakes
How we forecast the French election
Obituary
To sea in a barrel