The horrible housing blunder: Why the obsession with home ownership is so harmful

The world intrudes

The Democrats’ debate in Iowa covers foreign policy at last

Baby steps

America’s pensions system is now less of a mess

City critters

Unpacking the rise of urban coyotes

Weapon of choice

Old export regulations get a new use

Well documented

America’s guest-worker boom

Lexington

The Senate’s coming test

Gourdean knot

Jovenel Moïse tries to govern Haiti without a parliament

Out of left field

Baseball-mad Andrés Manuel López Obrador throws money at the game

Bello

Argentina’s new government gets to grips with the economy

Bring me a nightmare

Asia’s hunger for sand is harmful to farming and the environment

Banyan

What next for Taiwan after Tsai Ing-wen’s emphatic victory?

Pen, sword and scales

Criticism of the army or government lands many Burmese in court

A major modern general

India’s armed forces get their biggest shake-up in decades

Going south

South Korea’s president curbs the power of prosecutors

Hope for myopes

Most 12- to 14- year-olds in China are short-sighted

The year of the rat-fink

Some people in China help the party police the internet

The digital divide

Different views of AI fuel distrust between China and America

We’re hiring a new China correspondent

Regime on edge

Iran’s leaders risk being overwhelmed by crises they created

What comes after Qaboos?

The new sultan of Oman hopes to lead as well as the last one

It’s all in your head

Ethiopia embraces the power of positive thinking

Follow the bottle

How to get beer around Congo, a country with hardly any roads

Guess why?

Putin proposes a rewrite of Russia’s constitution

The angel of the north

Italy’s second city shows up the rest of the country

A small Afghanistan

France weighs up its thankless mission fighting jihadists in Africa

L’industrie, c’est eux

Europe is rediscovering its penchant for statist intervention

Colonic irritation

The hopeless struggle to make German gender-neutral

Charlemagne

For Europe, geopolitics starts at home

Anglo-American relations

Johnson, Trump and the future of the Atlantic alliance

Turkish delight

Why Turkish barbers are taking over Britain’s high streets

Northern Ireland

How Ulster Scots and the Irish language got Northern Ireland’s government back

What’s going wrong here?

Britain’s 20,000 new cops won’t get the justice ministry celebrating

Airlines

Keeping Flybe aloft

Soft target

How the Conservatives won the social media campaign

Tax and benefits

Greggs and the vegan sausage roll bonus

Bagehot

Harry, Meghan and Marx

Crunch time

Globally, roads are deadlier than HIV or murder

You might as well do the white line

Painting lines on roads saves lives

Housing

Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems

A history

How housing became the world’s biggest asset class

Supply

Politicians are finally doing something about housing shortages

Housing finance

A decade on from the housing crash, new risks are emerging

Better off renting?

Owner-occupation is not always a better deal than renting

Home ownership

Home ownership is in decline

Housing for the poor

Governments are rethinking the provision of public housing

The future

What is the future of the rich world’s housing markets?

Sources and acknowledgments

A tour of the Magic Mountain

Can the World Economic Forum keep its mojo?

Cheap shots

EQRX wants to make high-end medicines less costly

Bartleby

The wider effects of America’s opioid epidemic

Driving nowhere fast

Aston Martin is stuck in neutral

Schumpeter

Big Oil has a do-or-die decade ahead because of climate change

Not just a first-world problem

Emerging economies are experiencing a prolonged productivity slowdown

Buttonwood

What the semiconductor industry tells us about the world economy

Crude calculus

Oil markets shrug off tension in the Middle East

Green giant

BlackRock says it wants to do more for the climate

Between the lines

The new US-China trade deal marks an uneasy truce

Free exchange

Economists explore the consequences of steering technological progress

Missile technology

Iran’s attack on Iraq shows how precise missiles have become

Emerging diseases

A new human coronavirus has appeared in China

Biological robots

A research team builds robots from living cells

Palaeontology

What really killed the dinosaurs?

Pictures at an exhibition

As violence spreads across Mali, artists in the capital resist

Original sin

How to fix the design flaws in American democracy

The second world war

The heroic women partisans of Turin

Beneath the waves

Loneliness and longing in Beijing

Johnson

Who do they think they are?

Crackdown

Smoking-gun evidence emerges for racial bias in American courts

Defender of the right

Obituary: Sir Roger Scruton died on January 12th