Leaders
The end of the house of Assad
How the new Syria might succeed or fail
Much will go wrong. But for now, celebrate a tyrant’s fall
Spanish lessons
What Spain can teach the rest of Europe
Our number-crunching suggests it was the best-performing rich economy in 2024
Artificial exuberance
America’s searing market rally brings new risks
Financial innovation is just as much to blame as the technological sort
Abandonment anxiety
Multilateral institutions are turning away from the poorest countries
Even bail-outs are getting expensive
Brain drain
Can you read as well as a ten-year-old?
Adults in rich countries are less literate than they were a decade ago. That requires attention
Letters
On nuclear weapons, Jordan Peterson, credit cards, John D. Rockefeller, our cover, behaving in lifts
Letters to the editor
By Invitation
Briefing
After Assad
Syria has exchanged a vile dictator for an uncertain future
It is not clear how stable or how benign the new regime will be
An unexpected juncture
The Assad regime’s fall voids many of the Middle East’s old certainties
What if Syria abandoned its hostility to the West and stopped menacing Israel?
Europe
Why buy the cow
The Polish restaurants that dare to be dairy
Uncertain reaction
Amid Russian bombing, Ukraine is planning more nuclear reactors
Britain
Fixing the foundations
Britain’s government has only half a plan to improve infrastructure
A clamour for clans
A search for roots is behind a surge in Scottish tourism
Peer pressure
Britain’s House of Lords purges itself
The foreign-aid fiddle
Britain’s aid budget is less generous than it looks
A novel award
And the prize for the oddest book title goes to…
An energy unicorn
The battles of Greg Jackson, Britain’s clean-energy disrupter
Middle East & Africa
Tremors of earthquakes to come
Protests have shut down Mozambique
Getting away with murder
Kenyan women are fed up with rampant sexual violence
Back in the dock
Binyamin Netanyahu is in court again in Israel
United States
Message in a bullet
Luigi Mangione’s manifesto reveals his hatred of insurance companies
Reading, Writing and Wrestling
Donald Trump threatened to smackdown the education department
The district attorney’s downfall
The Young Thug trial could be Fani Willis’s last big act
Lexington
Trump for Dummies
The Americas
European (g)ratification
Can an agreement with the EU resurrect Mercosur?
Energy (in)security
The Caribbean struggles to break its dependence on fossil fuels
Asia
The coup that crashed
South Korea’s unrepentant president is on the brink
Miracle or mirage?
Bangladesh’s economic progress may have been hyped
Rubbish story
How to clean up India’s filthy cities
China
China and America
MAGA with Chinese characteristics
Intruder alert!
Chinese hackers are deep inside America’s telecoms networks
Language lessons
Why China is losing interest in English
Too much drama
China cracks down on Karate-chopping cleaning ladies
International
Bridging the dairy divide
What has four stomachs and could change the world?
The Telegram
The Art of the Deal: global edition
Business
Prosperity uncommon
From Apple to Starbucks, Western firms’ China dreams are dying
All-In on Donald Trump
The PayPal Mafia is taking over America’s government
Trustbusting transformed
What Trump’s new antitrust enforcers mean for business
The next big thing
What do the gods of generative AI have in store for 2025?
Bartleby
The employee awards for 2024
Finance & economics
Top of the charts
Which economy did best in 2024?
Monetary kombat
The Federal Reserve takes on Trump—and stubborn inflation
Dream, baby, dream
How much oil can Trump pump?
Remedial classes required
Are adults forgetting how to read?
Free exchange
What a censored speech says about China’s economy
Science & technology
The Babel wish
Machine translation is almost a solved problem
Assistive intelligence
AI can bring back a person’s own voice
A thousand sails
Why China is building a Starlink system of its own
Culture
Full of sound and fury
The novel was a dominant art form last century
From the shelf to the couch
Does great literature translate into great television?
Twenty-sided dicing with death
How did “Dungeons & Dragons” win?
In tune with the times
The Economist’s pick of the best albums of 2024
The future of humanity
Was Henry Kissinger an AI “doomer”?
Singing from the same hymn sheet
The unholy alliance of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Kremlin
Economic & financial indicators
Indicators
Economic data, commodities and markets
The Economist explains
The Economist explains
Who are the main rebel groups in Syria?
Obituary
The hangman’s tale