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The Esalen Institute, a storied hippie hotel in Big Sur, Calif., has reopened with a mission to help technologists who discover that “inside they’re hurting.”

This documentary from Jonathan Olshefski follows a North Philadelphia family through the Obama years.

Mr. Franken was a star on the sketch comedy show and then a talk-radio host before running for political office.

What is a porg, how did Leia become a general and what happened in the last movie?

Three couples denied marriage in Israel for various reasons were wed in a festive ceremony in New York.

Netflix’s award-winning series about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II covers war, sex and the difficulties of managing a royally messed up family.

He charms Martin Scorsese and thrills his co-stars, so isn’t it time you recognized that Mr. Cannavale isn’t “the guy you went to high school with”?

Once a star of “Saturday Night Live,” Al Franken took his liberal politics to Washington in 2008 when he narrowly won a Minnesota Senate seat. He said he would resign over allegations of sexual misconduct.

The San Francisco start-up has been at the center of the virtual currency boom. But like any young company, it is experiencing growing pains.

Scientists say it will be easier to understand hummingbirds in some cases if we use insights gained from the study of bees.

These are not necessarily the 10 best bottles of 2017, but they are the most memorable.

In a previously unpublished interview, the French rock star, who died this week, discussed his favorite musicians, fame and discovering Hendrix in a London club.

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) has already changed some activities, including parts of finance like fraud prevention, but not yet fund management and stock-picking. That seems odd: machine learning, a subset of AI that excels at finding patterns and making predictions using reams of data, looks like an ideal tool for the business. Yet well-established “quant” hedge funds in London or New York are often sniffy about its potential. In San Francisco, however, where machine learning is so much part of the furniture the term features unexplained on roadside billboards, a cluster of upstart hedge funds has sprung up in order to exploit these techniques.

These new hedgies are modest enough to concede some of their competitors’ points. Babak Hodjat, co-founder of Sentient Technologies, an AI startup with a hedge-fund arm, says that, left to their own devices, machine-learning techniques are prone to “overfit”, ie, to finding peculiar patterns in the specific data they are trained on that do not hold up...

Who believes in Nicolás?

ON NOVEMBER 30th, as oil tsars from the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia met in Vienna, Venezuela’s former oil minister, Eulogio del Pino, once one of their number, was seized by armed guards at dawn in Caracas, and taken to jail. His arrest was not publicly acknowledged in Vienna. His replacement, Manuel Quevedo, a general in the national guard, attended OPEC and was received with the usual deference.

Also unmentioned was how Venezuela, embroiled in a massive, messy debt default, is doing plenty of OPEC’s dirty work. Since November 2016, when OPEC first agreed with Russia to cut output to push up oil prices, Venezuela’s has fallen by 203,000 barrels a day (b/d), to 1.86m b/d in October. That is more than twice the cut it agreed with OPEC of 95,000 b/d.

If its production continues to fall—some analysts say it could be down to 1.6m b/d in 2018—it could either drive up oil prices...

LIKE the ghosts that haunted Ebenezer Scrooge, the scandals of years past—summoned up by angry shareholders—will not let companies rest. In Britain this year, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) paid £900m ($1.2bn) to settle a long-running investor lawsuit related to the bank’s behaviour at the time of the financial crisis of 2007-08. Also in Britain, Lloyds Banking Group faces litigation. And it is not just banks. Investors in Britain sued Tesco, a supermarket chain, for losses caused by an accounting scandal in 2014. In Germany and the Netherlands investors are seeking compensation from Volkswagen (VW), a carmaker, for failing to disclose its manipulation of diesel-emissions tests.

Securities litigation is on the rise in Europe for two main reasons. The first is that America is less hospitable than it was to such cases. Until 2010 harm suffered by foreign investors could be included in American lawsuits. That changed with a Supreme Court ruling on Morrison v National...

ANOTHER week, another record. The repeated surge of share prices on Wall Street is getting monotonous. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has passed another milestone—24,000—and the more statistically robust S&P 500 index is up by 17% so far this year. Emerging markets have performed even better, as have European shares in dollar terms (see chart).

Political worries about trade disputes, the potential for war with North Korea and the repeated upheavals in President Donald Trump’s White House: all have caused only temporary setbacks to investors’ confidence. No wonder the latest quarterly report of the Bank for International Settlements asked whether markets are complacent, noting that “according to traditional valuation gauges that take a long-term view, some stockmarkets did look frothy”, and pointing out that “some froth was also present in corporate-credit markets”.

The authors of the BIS report are not the only ones to worry that markets look expensive. The most recent survey...

“AFRICA must unite,” wrote Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, in 1963, lamenting that African countries sold raw materials to their former colonisers rather than trading among themselves. His pan-African dream never became reality. Even today, African countries still trade twice as much with Europe as they do with each other (see chart). But that spirit of unity now animates a push for a Continental Free-Trade Area (CFTA), involving all 55 countries in the region. Negotiations began in 2015, aimed at forming the CFTA by the end of this year. In contrast to the WTO, African trade talks are making progress.

At a meeting on December 1st and 2nd in Niamey, the capital of Niger, African trade ministers agreed on final tweaks to the text. Heads of state will probably sign it in March, once an accompanying protocol on goods has been concluded (agreement on services has already been reached). But trade barriers will not tumble overnight. The CFTA will come into force only when 15 countries have...

NOT all trade tension is made in America. China is suing the European Union at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Hearings began this week. China thinks it deserves treatment as a “market economy”. The EU, supported by America, disagrees. As they lock horns, each side sees the other as breaking a promise.

China’s entry into the WTO in 2001 was part of a grand bargain. In return for market access, it promised economic reform. The deal laid out unusually strict terms. Any members’ exports can face anti-dumping duties if sold too cheap. But China’s accession agreement allowed others to erect stronger defences, and assume that it was a non-market economy when calculating the “fair” duty—using third-country prices for comparison. In practice this meant higher tariffs.

China expected this treatment to be temporary and expire after 15 years. But as the deadline loomed and the share of imports covered by anti-dumping duties rose (see chart), the EU and America balked at the idea of giving up their trade defences. On December 4th the EU approved new rules to drop the label of “non-market economy”. But it will still apply third-country pricing on a case-by-case basis. Mei Xinyu of the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Co-operation, an official body, calls this “a trick that avoids calling China a non-market economy”.

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Happier families

FEW tasks in developing countries are as tricky—or as important—as convincing parents to keep their daughters in school longer. One way of doing so is to make contraceptives available, concludes a new working paper by Kimberly Singer Babiarz at Stanford University and four other researchers.

Conducted in Malaysia, the study used a happy coincidence of surveys going back decades and family-planning programmes rolled out in a way that made it possible to measure their effect. Starting in the 1960s, these programmes were introduced in some areas a few years earlier than in others. So researchers could compare what happened to girls in areas where contraceptives became available when they were very young with girls from the same cohorts in areas with no contraceptives.

The girls in places with contraceptives stayed in school six months longer, or about a year longer if they were born after the programmes began. Similar effects have been...

FOR many it is a reflex as unconscious as breathing. Hit a stumbling-block during an important task (like, say, writing a column)? The hand reaches for the phone and opens the social network of choice. A blur of time passes, and half an hour or more of what ought to have been productive effort is gone. A feeling of regret is quickly displaced by the urge to see what has happened on Twitter in the past 15 seconds. Some time after the deadline, the editor asks when exactly to expect the promised copy. Distraction is a constant these days; supplying it is the business model of some of the world’s most powerful firms. As economists search for explanations for sagging productivity, some are asking whether the inability to focus for longer than a minute is to blame.

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