The $650bn binge: Fear and greed in the entertainment industry

Teflon Don

Democrats want impeachment hearings to change opinions on Donald Trump

Clean slates, rich states

Why states are rushing to seal tens of millions of old criminal records

Inverse psychology

America’s yield curve is no longer inverted

Come in, Sand Point

Extreme broadcasting in Alaska

History in the Mississippi Delta

Memories of Emmett Till

Lexington

The strange love-in between Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Rainbow resignation

Evo Morales leaves Bolivia dangerously divided

When “sí” means “we’ll see”

Why planning weddings in Mexico is hard

Ram rod

The Supreme Court hands India’s biggest communal flashpoint to Hindus

Self-reinforcing bias

Japan’s electoral map favours the ruling party

The opposition twitches

Cambodia eases up on one dissident to distract attention from another

Spring flames

Unprecedented Australian bushfires stoke a debate about climate change

Nat guilty

Monks in Myanmar have a new target

Banyan

Why no one can afford to call off peace talks in Afghanistan

No shelter for some

Homelessness has become a problem in China’s cities

Towards the brink

Confrontation in Hong Kong is turning ever uglier

Chaguan

The West is now surer that China is not about to liberalise

A kaleidoscope of possibilities

The politics surrounding an assassination and its aftermath in Gaza

A Sala-fifth column

The battle for Tripoli could be decided by the Madkhalis

Stony ground

Brazil and Japan plotted a farming revolution in Mozambique

The resource curse

How west Africa’s gold rush is funding jihadists

Grubs up

Why eating bugs is so popular in Congo

Are the black zero’s days numbered?

Why Germany sticks to strict budget rules despite a slowdown

An electio-shock

Pedro Sánchez again falls short of a majority in Spain’s election

Compensation culture

Ireland’s insurance premiums have rocketed

Old wine in new bottles

Leonardo da Vinci’s personal vineyard has been re-created

Charlemagne

Reading the cards

Spin doctors

The Tories want to be the party of the NHS. Will voters buy it?

Swing seats

Labour is going backwards in Reading West, a target seat

Tactical voting

Nigel Farage’s Christmas present to Boris Johnson

Britain’s new political generation

Meet Parliament’s class of 2019

Speakers’ Corner

The best quotes from the third week of Britain’s election campaign

Hey big spenders

Labour and the Tories plan to borrow billions. But can they spend it?

Giving it some welly

Floods hit marginal constituencies in England

Bagehot

The Party of Davos is the biggest loser in Britain’s election

We all want to change the world

Economics, demography and social media only partly explain the protests roiling so many countries today

A crying shame

Banned in warfare, tear-gas is the default response to controlling protests

Migration

To make the world richer, let people move

Skilled migrants

How migration makes the world brainier

Low-skilled migrants

When a worker migrates, a family benefits

The backlash

Why the arguments against immigration are so popular

Domestic migration

Why people should leave the countryside

Voting with your feet

Why voting with your feet is more effective than a ballot

Acknowledgments

Out with the proxies

Proxy advisers come under fire

Bartleby

Don’t show, tell

When I’m 84

Octogenarians are shaking up Italian business

Ascending scale

A huge lift business is up for sale

Internet shopping frenzies

One for the money

Schumpeter

Ocado wages a grocery war against Amazon, Walmart and Alibaba

State of denial

America’s public-sector pension schemes are trillions of dollars short

OPEC’s waning power

Tighter production targets have failed to lift the price of oil

Parked trade policy

The Trump administration is trying to reforge carmakers’ supply chains

Buttonwood

The case for a falling dollar

Sentimental journey

The improved mood in financial markets

Fake it till you break it

Some Chinese firms turn out to have lied about their state pedigree

The reckoning continues

Stiff sentences for bank fraud capture Italy’s sour public mood

A life’s rich tapestry

How Jim Simons became the most successful investor of all time

Free exchange

Cost-benefit analyses offend against the notion that life is priceless

Additive manufacturing

Giant 3D printers for making boats, bridges, buildings and rockets

Conservation

How to forge rhinoceros horn

High-tech rugby

Sensors, data and the self-policing rugby match

A night at the museum

Some building works threaten Turkish antiquities. Others save them

So it goes

A Kurt Vonnegut museum opens in Indianapolis

Diamond geezers

The glittering rise of the Cartiers

A severe contest

Has The Economist made history, as well as reporting it?

Johnson

How to talk about unspeakable things

Playlists and politics

Why Obama-Trump swing voters like heavy metal

Indonesian mass murderer

Obituary: Anwar Congo died on October 25th

Economic data, commodities and markets