Dec 24th 2016

Christmas Double Issue

The world this week

Leaders

The future of liberalism

How to make sense of 2016

Liberals lost most of the arguments this year. They should not feel defeated so much as invigorated

The hypocrites’ club

Poor countries need to allow more immigration, too

The governments of poor countries are right to complain about the West’s restrictive immigration policies. But they are often guilty of the same

Breaching-point

Incentives need to change for firms to take cyber-security more seriously

Software developers and computer-makers do not necessarily suffer when their products go wrong

Smooth sailing, until it’s not

An obsession with stable growth leads to vulnerabilities in China

Risks lurk outside China’s borders and within it

The state of states

Our country of the year

Which country improved the most in 2016?

Letters

Letters to the Editor

On populism, flags, corporation tax, freedom of press, ketchup, super-consumers

United States

Celebration, Florida

What Disney’s city of the future, built to look like the past, says about the present

Tomorrowland

At Disney World, the future is already here

Ungovernable

Shenanigans in North Carolina set a lousy example for America’s broader politics

Lexington: Winning by breaking

Donald Trump’s most damaging legacy may be a lower-trust America

The Americas

Northern lights

Mexican attitudes to marijuana mellow

Ply me a river

Ebbs and flows in an unlikely marine superpower

No growth, no votes

Recession emboldens Argentina’s opposition

Asia

A peace prize, but no peace

Aung San Suu Kyi fails to calm Myanmar’s ethnic violence

Crying blasphemy in Jakarta

The persecution of a Christian mayor in Indonesia

China

Warning shot

China seizes an underwater drone and sends a signal to Donald Trump

Those who control the past...

What China claims to have invented

Middle East & Africa

If he stays there will be trouble

Congo’s president refuses to go

Trial by fire in Nigeria

Suspects are beaten and burned by “jungle justice” vigilantes

Donald’s daring diplomacy

Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem

Pits of hell

Assad’s torture dungeons

Europe

Attacks in Berlin

Killings at a Berlin Christmas market test Germany’s nerve

Assassination in an art gallery

An ambassador’s murder may push Russia and Turkey together

French politics

A court in France finds Christine Lagarde guilty of negligence

Winter of discontent

Protests grow against Poland’s nationalist government

Charlemagne

Why Europeans are reading Stefan Zweig again

Britain

Britain and the European Union

Six months after the Brexit referendum, where does Britain stand?

Planes, trains and political deals

A series of planned strikes over Christmas puts Britain’s trade unions back on the agenda

Jailhouse rocked

Britain’s prison-riot squad is being called out more often than ever

Bagehot

The parable of JD Wetherspoon

International

From south to south

The other kind of immigration

Local heroes

Where Malians move

Christmas Specials

Our tower

The Economist bids farewell to a formative home

Talo on the range

Finland’s reindeer herders get a lot more than meat from their work

Vienna

How Vienna produced ideas that shaped the West

Brentry

How Norman rule reshaped England

Prison tattoos

A statistical analysis of the art on convicts’ bodies

Postcard from Dandong

Politics and pity on the border of China and North Korea

Barack Obama

A reflection on Barack Obama’s presidency

India Pale Ales

A history of the authentically global beer

Cambridge economists

The art and science of economics at Cambridge

It’s a-me!

How Super Mario became a global cultural icon

The cad as correspondent

Flashman, the foreign correspondent’s role model

Black and white and read all over

The remarkable return of adult colouring books

Crossword

Clothespegs

A celebration of the oddly modern, oddly mystical clothespeg

Foreign fighters

Why an ordinary man went to fight Islamic State

Seqouiadendron Giganteum

Climbing the world’s biggest tree

Gay bars

Gay bars are under threat but not from the obvious attackers

The mischief of mice

The world’s favourite lab animal has been found wanting, but there are new twists in the mouse’s tale

Silence

The power and meaning of silence

Business

The digit era

Indian business prepares to tap into Aadhaar, a state-owned fingerprint-identification system

White-collar blues

In Japan, a new kind of business school is retraining jaded salarymen

Tisn’t the season

The Christmas spending bump flattens

In-store detecting

A new industry has sprung up selling “indoor-location” services to retailers

Schumpeter

Our Schumpeter columnist pens a dark farewell

Finance & economics

Low and lower

Japanese banks grapple with ultra-low interest rates

Buttonwood

What not to expect in 2017

The year of Brexit and Trump

2016 in charts

Free exchange

Thomas Schelling, economist and nuclear strategist, died on December 13th, aged 95

Science & technology

Eyes on the road

A breakthrough in miniaturising lidars for autonomous driving

Open, Sesame

A particle accelerator in the Middle East

Neuroscience

Scanning reveals what pregnancy does to a mother’s brain

Books & arts

How women rose to the top of American astronomy

Looking at the stars

Assassinating the mad monk

How Rasputin was killed

The many incarnations of cheese

Why humans love cheese

Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art

Sending its fabulous collection of Western modernism abroad

Economic & financial indicators

Interactive indicators

Output, prices and jobs

The Economist commodity-price index

Global investment-banking revenue

Trade, exchange rates, budget balances and interest rates

Markets

Obituary

The Whitechapel Bell Foundry