Oct 14th 2021

The energy shock

The world this week

Leaders

Getting to zero

The first big energy shock of the green era

There are grave problems with the transition to clean energy power

Cheques and imbalance

Is the world economy entering a wage-price spiral?

Both wage growth and inflation are unusually high

The coronavirus

Millions of lives depend on how the pandemic ends

The world can see the end of the covid-19 emergency, but some daunting tasks lie ahead

Reluctant regulators

Who should police the web?

Politicians should not offload the responsibility onto others

Building back best

Latin America could become an alternative to China

But only if the protectionist policies of the region’s politicians don’t get in the way

Letters

The London Stock Exchange, philanthropy, religion, urinating cows, Brazil, “like”

Letters to the editor

Briefing

What lies ahead

How the world learns to live with covid-19

From pandemic to epidemic

United States

Anatomy of a scandal

Opinion on the use of puberty blockers in America is turning

The keeper

One policy accounts for a lot of the decarbonisation in Joe Biden’s climate plans

Left march

Military bases swung hard away from Republicans in 2020

Money talks

A prominent academic resigns after benefactors try to exert influence over her curriculum

Lexington

Dave Chappelle for gender realism

The Americas

Post-pandemic pick up

Latin America’s economies have an opportunity to grow

Bello

Guillermo Lasso’s battle against populism in Ecuador

Asia

Seeing like a state

India’s high-tech governance risks leaving behind its poorest citizens

Duterte II: the sequel

Rodrigo Duterte may pass on his job to his daughter

Tin-pot dynasty

Turkmenistan’s horse-loving dictator is grooming his son

No more Mr Rice Guy

A rush to farm organically has plunged Sri Lanka’s economy into crisis

Banyan

South Korea’s ruling party bets on an anti-establishment figure

China

Protracted war

How long can China’s zero-covid policy last?

Chaguan

How Xi Jinping’s China differs from Mao’s

Middle East & Africa

The final countdown

A new crisis between America and Iran looms

Vote first, fight later

Iraq’s dismal election prompts militias to threaten violence

The far-fetched pavilions

At the Dubai expo, no one is eager to talk about reality

Thomas Sankara’s ghost

Burkina Faso opens trial for the assassination of Sankara

Ja to change

The meaning of South Africa’s most popular magazine

Europe

Uncomfortable truths

It is tempting to blame foreigners for Europe’s gas crisis

Viennese walks

Sebastian Kurz is forced out of the Austrian chancellery—again

France’s wannabe Trump

Eric Zemmour, the anti-immigrant radical who could supplant Marine Le Pen

Charlemagne

Poland is a problem for the EU precisely because it will not leave

Britain

Two plus two make four

Academic freedom in British universities is under threat

Master and commander

British defence strategy is undergoing a naval tilt

Back to the past

The Northern Ireland protocol is up for discussion. Again

All talk and no trouser

Why Stormont has dithered endlessly on corporation tax

Demography and destiny

In Britain, childlessness seems likely to return to 1920s levels

How red is my valley?

Mark Drakeford wants to shake up Welsh politics

International

Blockheads

Governments are finding new ways to squash free expression online

An interview with Dmitry Muratov

A Russian editor says he won the Nobel because his slain colleagues could not

Business

Playing for time

Don’t expect big oil to fix the energy crunch

An undersea change

The booming business of knitting together the world’s electricity grids

Girls uninterrupted

Femtech firms are at last enjoying an investment boom

The longest layover

Why does Tata Group want Air India back?

Bartleby

How to run better meetings

Schumpeter

How Adobe became Silicon Valley’s quiet reinventor

Finance & economics

The pandemic bonus

Wages are surging across the rich world

Hard bargains

Germany’s workers are in the strongest position in 30 years

The International Monetary Bank

The IMF decides to keep its boss

Rental resurgence

Another upward force on American inflation: the housing boom

The shell games go on

A new study finds that dirty money remains easy to hide

Xi’s premium

Chinese companies suffer an intense cash crunch in offshore bond markets

Plastic policemen

Credit-card firms are becoming reluctant regulators of the web

Buttonwood

How to think about the unstoppable rise of index funds

Free exchange

The Nobel prize in economics celebrates an empirical revolution

Science & technology

An embassy to the Trojans

A probe intended to study the Trojan asteroids takes off

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test

The launch of an exploration of Earth’s defences

Position-specific isotope analysis

How to tell biological from non-biological molecules

Snakes alive!

Why there are so many species of serpent

Fishing for allergens

A novel technique can discover new allergens

Books & arts

Technology, business and society

Two new books explore the impact of accelerating technology

Spy fiction

A posthumous novel from John le Carré

Evolution

Humans have altered other species as well as the environment

Dante andante

A “Divine Comedy” ballet, 700 years after Dante’s death

Johnson

Why you have an accent in a foreign language

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Graphic detail

The last frontier

The pivotal state for making America’s Senate more proportional is Alaska

Obituary

Bombmaker