Feb 3rd 2024

The end of the social network

The world this week

Leaders

The war between Israel and Hamas

How to end the Middle East’s agony

War is spreading across the region. There is an alternative

Online media

The end of the social network

As Facebook turns 20, social apps are being transformed

Financial crisis in Cairo

Egypt doesn’t deserve a bail-out, but should get one

The Middle East cannot afford the collapse of its most populous country

A charter for change

The evidence in favour of charter schools in America has strengthened

Meanwhile, both parties have run away from them

Beating retreat

How to fix British defence

It needs more money and more people, but also reform

Letters

On Europe’s single market, Israel and genocide, the death penalty, shipping sanctions, lawn bowls

Letters to the editor

Briefing

Not posting, but watching

As Facebook turns 20, politics is out; impersonal video feeds are in

Social media are more popular than ever, but social networks are dying

Asia

On the rocks

Japan’s ruling party is in crisis

Dancing to victory

TikTok is a key battleground in Indonesia’s election

Counting cattle

The Hindu right’s pro-cow policies are terrible for India’s cows

Bihar blues

India’s opposition bloc disintegrates

Banyan

Asia’s commercial heft helps keep Russia’s war economy going

Clean bowled

Imran Khan is convicted. Pakistan’s generals are content

China

Operation Sit Tight

Is China a winner from the Red Sea attacks?

One is not enough

Hong Kong gets a second draconian security law

Salvation lies within

Watching “The Shawshank Redemption” on stage in China

Chaguan

Hard times for China’s micro-industrialists

United States

Political orphans

Charter schools do things that all Democrats say they support

Fear and voting in Las Vegas

How Nevada’s Republicans made their primary irrelevant

The Lake tape

A leaked recording shakes up the Republican Party in Arizona

Lactose laws

Dunkin’ faces a moo-ving class-action suit from the lactose intolerant

Grab him by the purse

Donald Trump is ordered to pay for his bullying

The insecure security secretary

Why not impeach everyone?

Lexington

How to overcome the biggest obstacle to electric vehicles

Middle East & Africa

Gaza and its reverberations

America’s shuttle diplomacy to wind down the war in Gaza

Egypt’s economic woes

The war in Gaza is exacerbating Egypt’s economic collapse

The United Nations and Gaza

Did UN workers participate in the October 7th attacks?

Hunger returns

Northern Ethiopia is again sliding into starvation

Disunity in west Africa

Three countries hit by coups are leaving west Africa’s main bloc

The Americas

Autocratic tactics

Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s dictator, thumbs his nose at Joe Biden

All eyes on Five Eyes

Did spies from China, India and Russia meddle in Canada’s elections?

5,000 tax rates and counting

Can Lula fix Brazil’s fiscal mess?

Europe

A tame candidate turns a little wild

Meet Boris Nadezhdin, Vladimir Putin’s brave challenger

Still sovereign

Meet the Knights of Malta

F-16s, by any means

Sweden clears a Turkish hurdle to NATO accession

The war on the waves

Russia is losing the battle for the Black Sea

Charlemagne

Europe’s grumpy farmers are a symptom of wider malaise

Trouble at the top

The feud between Ukraine’s president and army chief boils over

Britain

Losing muscle

Britain’s armed forces are stretched perilously thin

Ever closer?

Labour wants to make Brexit work better. What does the EU think?

The power comes back on

Northern Ireland gets its government back

As prescribed

The pharmacist will see you now

The charge is sputtering

EV sales in Britain are disappointing expectations

Bagehot

The search for Conservative Party unity

International

Combat in orbit

War in space is no longer science fiction

Technology Quarterly

The foundations of the cloud

Users of the internet need not think about its physical underpinnings

Towers of glass and steel

Advances in physical storage and retrieval made the cloud possible

The edge of tomorrow

The internet got better and faster by moving data closer to users

The internet and climate change

Data centres improved greatly in energy efficiency as they grew massively larger

Politics

The physical borders of the digital world

Starlink

Satellites offer an important alternative to the wired internet

Securing the cloud’s future

The internet is integrated into virtually every aspect of life

The physical internet

Sources and acknowledgments

Business

After the iPhone

Apple’s Vision Pro headset ushers in a new era of personal technology

The AI-chip race

Could AMD break Nvidia’s chokehold on chips?

Pseudo-heir apparent

Many family firms lack heirs. Unrelated help is at hand

High rollers

Rolls-Royce goes electric—in style

Bartleby

Jürgen Klopp and the importance of energy

Schumpeter

How much should TikTok fear a resurgent Donald Trump?

Gas gaffe

Joe Biden’s limits on LNG exports won’t help the climate

Finance & economics

The octogenarian radical

What four more years of Joe Biden would mean for America’s economy

Buttonwood

Bitcoin ETFs are off to a bad start. Will things improve?

Game changing

China’s leaders are flailing as markets drop

Never grand

Evergrande’s liquidation is a new low in China’s property crisis

Prices and wages

Your pay is still going up too fast

Free exchange

Biden’s chances of re-election are better than they appear

Science & technology

Embodying the future

Why prosthetic limbs need not look like real ones

Medicine and dementia

Alzheimer’s disease may, rarely, be transmitted by medical treatment

Hazy figuring

AI could accelerate scientific fraud as well as progress

Bloodhounds of the sea

Why some whales can smell in stereo

Culture

Write on

Authors are collaborating with AI—and each other

So long, Hong Kong

A row over the Hong Kong Heritage Museum is a window on China

Bad sport

The violence of “Power Slap” is part of its allure

Secrecy and sketchiness in art

The Sotheby’s trial revealed the art market’s unsavoury practices

Dance like nobody’s watching

Martha Graham’s life tracked the jumps and dips of modern dance

Back Story

A new “Mr & Mrs Smith” is about more than action, money and sex

The Economist reads

The Economist reads

What are (some of) the best comic novels?

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

The Economist explains

The Economist explains

Did an Israeli hospital raid breach the laws of war?

The Economist explains

What on earth is happening in Poland?

Obituary

The short-tempered klavier