The next frontier: When thoughts control machines

The polarising express

Blue-state Republicans could become almost as rare as white southern Democrats

Not great, again

Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row

Hell’s laundry list

What Congress forgot to do

Tax replanning

How states may try to circumvent Republicans’ tax reform

Use it or lose it

Should voters who don’t vote stay on voter rolls?

California inhales

The Golden State’s new pot laws are almost comically progressive

More fallout from Odebrecht

Peru’s presidential hostage

Prospectors, barons and suits

Multinationals move in to Colombia’s emerald mountains

Renaming and shaming

On Canadian maps, indigenous names are replacing European ones

Escalators to heaven

Evangelicalism is spreading among the Chinese of South-East Asia

Quail, cotton and contumacy

Pakistan still suffers from feudalism

Snoringly boring

Many Japanese resent paying for their boring public broadcaster

Caught in the web

The Philippines is a global hub for child pornography

Banyan

2018 will not be any quieter than 2017 on the Korean peninsula

Virtual panic

China’s great firewall is rising

Tusks, skins and waste recycling

For the natural world, China’s rise may not be so worrisome

When frustration boils over

Iran is in turmoil but the clerics and their allies remain entrenched

Qat-wrenching

The drug that is starving Yemen

A long fight ahead

The army is gaining the upper hand in Yemen’s civil war

Cometh the hour, cometh the ban

A clutch of challengers could shake up Egypt’s presidential race

Gambia’s former dictator has become a farmer

The victims of Yahya Jammeh want him to face trial

The undemocratic Republic of Congo

Joseph Kabila has ruled DRC for another unconstitutional year

Kickoff to governance

Champion footballer George Weah wins Liberia’s presidential election

Their generation

Young Italians are fed up with the traditional political parties

Local difficulties

Spain grapples with a new Catalonian problem

Cardboard Kremlin

Alexei Navalny is excluded from Russia’s presidential poll

Body positive

A campaign against “grossophobie” in France

Firing on all cylinders

Turkey’s economy is one of the world’s fastest-growing

A thinning front line

The NHS’s latest problem: a shortage of GPs

Off the rails

Why commuters are deserting trains in south-east England

Bagehot

Three predictions for British politics in 2018

Departure gates of hell

Which are the world’s worst airports?

Thought experiments

How brains and machines can be made to work together

Headache

Reading the brain from the outside

Inside intelligence

The best way of looking at the brain is from within

Translation required

Turning brain signals into useful information

Brain scan

Eberhard Fetz

Grey matter, red tape

In search of serendipity

Diary of a sniper

South Korea’s antitrust tsar has a good shot at taming the chaebol

Blocked transfer

China’s Ant Financial is obliged to abandon an American acquisition

Snow-washing

Canada frets about anonymously owned firms

The tower of Benioff

Masterful salesmanship has pushed Salesforce to ever-greater heights

Schumpeter

2018 will be the year that big, incumbent companies take on big tech

Painting the map green

As China gets tough on pollution, will its economy suffer?

Buttonwood

After a bumper 2017, will 2018 be kind to the financial markets?

Sukuk and see

A bond dispute threatens the future of Islamic finance

Deferred gratification

America’s bank profits take a hit from tax reform

Day zero

Europe’s sprawling new financial law enters into force

Free exchange

Many happy returns: new data reveal long-term investment trends

The search for MH370

A fantastical ship has set out to seek Malaysian Airlines flight 370

The Richard Casement internship

Digital assistants

Sometimes, computer programs seem too human for their own good

Hunting space junk

A new satellite will test ways to capture space debris

History of physics

Enrico Fermi, father of the nuclear age

Quantitative eating

The economists’ diet

Three years and score

The benefits of a university education

The kudos of Kodo

The arcane world of Japan’s taiko drummers

American fiction

Chloe Benjamin is a novelist to watch

Johnson

Where do new words come from?

O mio nonno caro

Simonetta Puccini died on December 16th