DO A COUNTRY'S inhabitants get happier as it gets richer? Most governments seem to believe so, given their relentless focus on increasing GDP year by year. Reliable, long-term evidence linking wealth and happiness is, however, lacking. And…
DECISION DAY became dither day. Rather than hold the expected “meaningful vote” on Boris Johnson's proposed Brexit deal, on October 19th Britain's House of Commons—sitting on a Saturday for the first time in 37…
THE TREATY OF SEVRES, signed in 1920, carved the carcass of the Ottoman Empire into a number of nation states, including a “Kurdish State of the Kurds…east of the Euphrates, south of the southern boundary of Armenia as it may be…
BRIGHT-BLUE letters greet women at Trellis, an egg-freezing studio in New York. “It's up to each of us to invent our own future,” they enjoin. No baby pictures here, of the sort that adorn joyless waiting rooms at traditional…
THE QUEEN glittered. Flunkeys wore regalia that made them look like Christmas crackers. The leader of the House of Lords stood bearing the “cap of maintenance”, which looks a bit like a Santa hat, on a stick. The state opening of…
