Opinion

  Despite Hillary Clinton’s recent slip in the polls, she has a big political opportunity, even though some of her advisers might regard it as a curse: She can run as the candidate who represents the “mainstream” leadership of both parties and knows how to fix our broken political system. In a year when anti-elitism has been a dominant theme ...

  Amid all the buzz about China’s hosting the G-20 summit in Hangzhou — all the accords, arguments and alleged snubs — another symbolically significant event was largely obscured. Last week, the World Bank issued bonds denominated in Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, in China’s interbank market. Beginning in October, the yuan will be included in the basket of currencies ...

E-books are not taking over the world! That seems pretty clear from a Pew Research Center survey released last week, which showed that the percentage of Americans who read digital books hasn’t risen since 2014. The survey didn’t show any real sign of a print resurgence either, though. Overall, the percentage of Americans consuming books in any form appears to ...

  In the two months since Britain voted to leave the European Union, its government has done little to clarify where this project is going. It would be wrong to expect a detailed plan, because the terms of exit and whatever arrangements follow must be negotiated. But surely a statement setting out priorities and basic principles wasn’t too much to ...

  Financial crises are becoming more frequent as markets and the rules that govern them grow ever more complex. New research suggests that this is no coincidence — and that a simpler system would be a lot more resilient. Forward-thinking officials have long argued that financial regulation needs to be simpler. In his much-quoted speech “The Dog and the Frisbee,” ...

  Quantum mechanics, Carl Sagan once observed, is so strange that “common sense is almost useless in approaching it.” Scientists still don’t understand exactly why matter behaves as it does at the quantum level. Yet they’re getting better at exploiting its peculiar dynamics — in ways that may soon upend the technology business. One of the most interesting applications is ...

  Brexit pressure is mounting on Theresa May and the British Prime Minister will have to cross the molehills before she hits the mountain ahead. While Japan has warned that its companies might walk out if they don’t get access to the single market in the UK, the US has shown its reluctance to enter into a trade deal with ...

  India’s just-released GDP figures show it’s still the world’s fastest-growing large economy. Over the past decade or so, those numbers have swooped and stuttered —from the boom years of the mid-2000s, when easy money and roaring demand pushed growth up to nearly double digits, to the hard stop at the time of the 2008 financial crisis, to the dramatic, ...

  Just about the only thing dumber than judicial elections is trying to regulate what judges can say when they’re running for office. Last year, the Supreme Court struggled with this problem in a case about judicial fundraising. Now an appeals court has struck down elements of Kentucky’s nonpartisan judicial election rules that try to regulate how judges can talk ...

  Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be more open than ever to a compromise with Japan that would end the two countries’ post-World War II territorial dispute. Both sides have been making tentative moves toward reconciliation since May, and a deal may finally be in the works after decades of false starts. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Putin ...