There are, writes Sir Salman Rushdie, “three important characters” in “Knife”, a new memoir of his near-fatal stabbing in August 2022 and his arduous recovery. The first two are predictable: the author and his blade-wielding assailant. The third character…

THE FOOTBALLERS look realistic at first sight but, on closer inspection, something is wrong. Their faces are contorted, their limbs are bending in alarming directions, the ball is slightly egg-shaped. Strangest of all, running across one footballer’s left…

NOT MANY non-Russians know Russia as well as Oleksandr Lytvynenko. Ukraine’s new national security chief spent five formative years in Moscow as a cryptology cadet at the elite KGB Academy. More recently, as head of Ukraine’s foreign-intelligence service…

OUR LATEST newsletter for subscribers, Middle East Dispatch, launches on April 23rd. If you subscribe to The Economist you can sign up here. The Middle East is rarely out of the headlines. Today the focus is on the risks of an escalating conflict between…

Generation Z is taking over. In the rich world there are at least 250m people born between 1997 and 2012. About half are now in a job. In the average American workplace, the number of Gen Zers (sometimes also known as “Zoomers”) working full-time is about…

A vast cohort is coming of age. Globally, some 2bn people were born between 1997 and 2012, and so are part of “Generation Z”. In America and Britain this group makes up a fifth of the population, rivalling the share of baby-boomers; in India and Nigeria the…

Over the next six weeks nearly a billion Indians will cast their votes. If the polls are right, the general election will be a triumph for Narendra Modi, the prime minister. His Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) will secure another big majority; he will serve…

MANDATORY MILITARY service is under discussion once more in Europe. The reasons? The possibility of Ukraine’s defeat looms large, as does the threat of a future president Donald Trump abandoning nato. Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister, says that…

IT IS NO accident that Israel and Iran are on the precipice of war. It is the result of long-standing agendas devised by misguided policymakers on both sides.Start with Iran. For decades its declared hatred of Israel and determination to erase the country…

Cairo, a town at the southern tip of Illinois founded in the early 19th century, was given that name because it was expected to grow into a huge metropolis. Located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, it was the transport hub of a region…

Over the past two weeks Elon Musk, a serial entrepreneur, has been on a very public tirade against Alexandre de Moraes, one of the Brazilian Supreme Court’s 11 judges. The dispute is about X, a social-media company that Mr Musk owns. On April 6th X announced…

Hammer a tube called a spile into the bark of a maple tree and its translucent yellow sap will start flowing out; the tree has been tapped (pictured). This gloop drips from some 55m Canadian maple trees today, raw material for the tangy golden syrup which…

On April 5th Ecuadorian police scaled the walls of the Mexican embassy (pictured) in Quito, Ecuador’s capital. They stormed the building and seized Jorge Glas, Ecuador’s former vice-president. He had been granted asylum by Mexico just hours earlier. (Andrés…

Mr ZHANG HAS stared down death during his 90 years on Earth. He has been diagnosed with cancer twice. During his latest bout doctors gave him 18 months to live. “That was 16 years ago,” he recalls wryly. Trim, snowy-haired and energetic—the key is “no exercise”…

EVEN an ineffective act can be transformative. The Middle East spent the first half of this month waiting for Iran to retaliate for an Israeli air strike, on April 1st, which killed two generals at its embassy compound in Damascus. When it came, on the night…

Recycling electric-vehicle batteries is tricky. But they are full of critical minerals—lithium, cobalt and other commodities—that are vital to the green transition. At the moment most EV manufacturers in Britain crush old batteries into a material called…

Mr Darcy, it turns out, was undemanding. In “Pride and Prejudice” Jane Austen implies that he is a picky paramour, since he likes a beloved to have “fine eyes”, “a thorough knowledge of music” and a mind improved “by extensive reading”. But read actual Georgian…

For most of the year everyone from stockpickers and homebuyers to President Joe Biden has banked on the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates soon. Over the past two weeks those hopes have been dashed. Annual consumer price inflation in March, at 3.5%, was…

In AI-land, technologies move from remarkable to old hat at the speed of light. Only 18 months ago the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, launched an AI frenzy. Today its powers have become commonplace. Several firms (such as Anthropic, Google and Meta)…

BELLY DOWN in a muddy Dutch forest, Sabrina van den Goorbergh fires blanks from a Colt C7 assault rifle. The third-year medical student is taking part in the Dienjaar (service-year), a new programme that lets young Dutch sign up for a year-long trial in the…