Youngish, gifted and black: Kamala Harris
Joe Biden’s choice of running mate is simultaneously groundbreaking and conventional, and reveals much about the state of the Democratic party. In China, a surprise court ruling draws attention to the...
13 Aug 202020min
Therein Lai’s a tale: Hong Kong’s revealing arrests
The dramatic arrest of Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy newspaper owner, reveals just how enthusiastically Beijing’s new security law will be deployed to quash any dissent. A reservoir is filling behind an ...
12 Aug 202022min
Buy now, save later: financing vaccine candidates
As clinical trials progress, policymakers must determine how heavily to fund the pre-emptive manufacture of candidate vaccines, and how to distribute the successful ones. Given Britain’s bungled pande...
11 Aug 202022min
Bytes and pieces: America’s Chinese-tech attack
First it was Bytedance’s app TikTok, now it’s Tencent’s WeChat: the Trump administration’s fervour to ban or dismantle wildly popular Chinese apps is increasing. In these straitened times, employees n...
10 Aug 202021min
That history should not repeat: Hiroshima’s storytellers
Survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are now in their eighties. A new generation is learning to tell their tales, in hopes of preventing more atomic tragedies. Belarus’s president of 26 ye...
7 Aug 202022min
A broken system, a broken city: Beirut
Some 300,000 people are homeless after an explosion of unthinkable size. The culprit appears to be sheer negligence, brought on by a broken system of governance. The Economist’s data team has updated ...
6 Aug 202022min
One nation, under gods? India’s divisive temple
Consecration at Ayodhya, the country’s most contested holy site, is another tick box in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist agenda. Is India’s foundational secularism at risk? The pandemi...
5 Aug 202020min
Going old Turkey: a regional power spreads
Since the Arab spring the country has vastly expanded its military and diplomatic efforts—filling an evident power vacuum and harking back to the days of the Ottoman Empire. Tanzania’s economy was rec...
4 Aug 202019min
