Politics & Economics

Ideological exclusion at the border seems anachronistic now, when all human knowledge is accessible online, video-conferencing software is installed on every laptop, and ideas and information can be shared...

There is an undeniable symmetry between surges in drug use in the US and the country’s covert operations overseas. The wars in Indochina gave the US heroin epidemics; Latin America, a plague of powder...

Assuming she remains prime minister after this month’s election, Takaichi Sanae will focus on the immediate economic challenges facing Japan: high taxes, inflation, low wages and the cost of living....

Years of austerity alongside the rise of an increasingly kleptocratic and predatory elite have steadily eroded the state’s capacity to respond to crises, while the language of ‘resistance’ has long...

As the journalist Dom Phillips came to see it, the deforestation of the Amazon was the work of a stupendously profitable interlocking network of corporate and political actors. ‘You don’t have to look...

In a country plagued by corruption, China’s national college entrance exam, the gaokao, is remarkably clean. ‘Open and competitive’ are the watchwords of democratic elections, but they are also...

Is America a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense...

The choice of narco-trafficking as the pretext is partly motivated by a desire to skirt even the feeble murmurs that pass for congressional scrutiny these days; Marco Rubio has stuck especially closely...

Normally, being revealed as a hypocrite is kryptonite for a politician running for office. But Harris doesn’t know what to do with Trump’s tricksy personality because it doesn’t fit the mould. Was...

China, which in the post-Cold War period was viewed as either lunch for American capital or an irredeemable dungeon, has acquired under Xi Jinping a third face in the West as a powerful threat to the American...

Only a terminally blithe technocrat could imagine that Reform will be punished for failing to grasp how the system works. The fact that, in most people’s experience, the system doesn’t work is the...

Netanyahu is trying to absolve himself of a guilt whose reality he denies. He wants to be declared innocent without being convicted of anything. He seems blithely unaware that the more one tries to repudiate...

Nvidia shares are the purest bet you can make on the impact of AI. The leading firms are lending money to one another in circular patterns, propping up turnover and valuations. Colossal amounts of money...

In 1966, as election day approached, Labour dispatched MPs and ministers to Hull, including Tony Benn, Tony Crosland, George Brown and James Callaghan. The newly appointed minister for transport, Barbara...

The ghost of the industrial revolution haunts Britain. The language of today’s politicians, of unlocking and unleashing the industrial heartlands, is the language of a seance promising communication...

What would politics be like in an age where one empire continued to hold sway over the ‘international community’, as it had done for three or four generations, but had to react to its power weakening...

Just as Big Oil has repeatedly failed to deliver on pledges to begin decarbonising, so too the promises of plastics companies have been hollow. This is not to suggest that consumers aren’t a big part...

Are we doomed to die out? We find ourselves at the only point in the history of the species when the rate of population growth has dramatically slowed and is about to go into reverse. So maybe there is...