Jul 22nd 2023

Making babymaking better: A special report on the future of fertility

The world this week

Leaders

Fertility technology

Making babymaking better

IVF is failing most women. But new research holds out hope for the future

Too darn hot

How cities can respond to extreme heat

Officials from Beijing to Phoenix are grappling with unbearable temperatures

Economic optimism

The world economy is still in danger

Falling inflation is good news. But it is too early to hail a “soft landing”

A Himalayan thaw

What the China-India detente means for the West

The Asian giants are learning to live with each other

Chained gangs

What the world’s budding autocrats are learning from El Salvador

President Nayib Bukele is gutting democracy and being applauded for it

Sanctions and reparations

Should Ukraine get Russia’s frozen reserves?

How to make Russia pay for the war while upholding international law

Letters

On deep-sea mining, water regulation in Britain, the Italian left, working from home

Letters to the editor

By Invitation

The Wagner Group

George Clooney and John Prendergast on how the West can kill the Wagner virus

Spain’s election

Alberto Núñez Feijóo on why he deserves to lead Spain

Spain’s election

As Spain prepares to vote, its Socialist prime minister sets out the case for continuity

Briefing

Turning a corner

Could America’s economy escape recession?

The route to a soft landing is narrow

Asia

Asia’s battery battlefield

A battery supply chain that excludes China looks impossible

Bloodless revolution

Singapore is the world leader in selling cultivated meat

Crossing the line

An American soldier has deserted to North Korea

Banyan

Why are politics in West Bengal so violent?

China

A for effort, Xi for control

Can academic joint ventures between China and the West survive?

Data and the disease

A clue to China’s true covid-19 death toll

The wind of change

Germany’s new strategy for dealings with China

What would the party say?

How China trains its journalists to report “correctly”

Chaguan

China’s foreign minister goes missing

United States

The sizzling Sunbelt

Americans are moving to places besieged by extreme heat

Reproductive politics

The FDA approves the first-ever non-prescription birth-control pill

Big-donor populism

Ron DeSantis is relying on big donors and his super PAC

Slow puncture

What America’s bike-share schemes tell you about venture capital

A new Mexican-American war

How Mexico has become the “enemy” of America’s Republicans

Lexington

The case for a third-party campaign in 2024 is actuarial, not ideological

Middle East & Africa

Not all hot air

Why Africa is poised to become a big player in energy markets

Just give me a reason

Israel’s constitutional chaos is far from over

Tickling smuggled ivories

How well-connected Iranians import their goodies

The Americas

Terminator Salvador

Nayib Bukele shows how to dismantle a democracy and stay popular

What Latin America thinks

Young Latin Americans are unusually open to autocrats

Europe

Kremlin black box

Post-mutiny Moscow descends into factional murk

Waiting for the afterglow

Zaporizhia braces itself for Russian nuclear tricks

France’s Zeitenwende

France’s foreign-policy revolution

Come and take them

Why the EU will not seize Russian state assets to rebuild Ukraine

Chebureki beat pierogi

How Ukrainian refugee entrepreneurs are changing Poland

Charlemagne

A spat in Brussels pits an open vision of Europe against an insular one

Britain

Universities’ funding

Muddled policies are harming British universities

Inflation dips

British inflation may not be as sticky as thought

Charge sheet

A big battery investment is good news for British carmaking

Back to the future

Sir Tony Blair mesmerises the Labour Party, again

Britain and China

Whoever runs Britain will struggle to get tough on China

Bagehot

The rise of the self-pitying MP

International

Asia’s biggest beasts

What if China and India became friends?

Technology Quarterly

The most personal technology

In vitro fertilisation is struggling to keep up with demand

If at first you don’t succeed…

IVF remains largely a numbers game

Selling hope

The fertility sector is booming

Our bodies, ourselves

Not all types of families can access IVF

Eggs from elsewhere

Some women need eggs from others, or from their younger selves

Eggs from scratch

New ways of making babies are on the horizon

Conception, reconceived

Lack of basic research has hampered assisted reproduction

Between the lines

Video: Why we know so little about human reproduction

In vitro fertilisation

Sources and acknowledgments

Business

A new model

Tesla’s surprising new route to EV domination

Bartleby

Workplace advice from our agony uncle

Last-chance saloon

Can a Czech billionaire rescue Casino?

Shooter to win

The winners and losers from the $69bn Microsoft-Activision mega-deal

A new big cheese

Startups are producing real dairy without a cow in sight

India’s rickshaw wars

A battle of rickshaw apps shows the promise of India’s digital stack

Schumpeter

Hollywood’s blockbuster strike may become a flop

Finance & economics

Machine dreams

Your employer is (probably) unprepared for artificial intelligence

A feel-bad recovery

How much trouble is China’s economy in?

Buttonwood

The dollar’s dip will not become a sustained decline

Balancing act

Big tech’s dominance is straining the logic of passive investing

What crisis?

America’s big banks are in rude health—with one exception

FedLate

Instant payments finally reach America with FedNow

Science & technology

Turning up the heat

Are heatwaves evidence that climate change is speeding up?

The Scrap Kings

Scrapyards adopt new high-tech ways to dismantle cars

When mammals attack

A spectacular new fossil shows a mammal making a meal of a dinosaur

Culture

Bombs and a bombshell

Realism with “Oppenheimer”, or escapism with “Barbie”?

The heat also rises

Extreme temperatures separate “the cool and the damned”

Opposites that never meet

A new novel imagines life in Andy Warhol’s studio

Hi, spy

Calder Walton’s “Spies” is a riveting history of espionage

At the sharp end

“The Retrievals”, a tale of agony and addiction, makes listeners squirm

Johnson

AI is making it possible to clone voices

Economic & financial indicators

Indicators

Economic data, commodities and markets

Graphic detail

Crescent of fire

Data from satellites suggest violence has surged in much of Sudan

The Economist explains

What happens when extreme weather hits several places at once?

The Economist explains

Why developing the world’s first malaria vaccine has taken so long

Obituary

When angels laugh