I tried searching for one a few months ago when my Economist subscription was expiring. Unfortunately, not even a single one comes close.

The Atlantic is often advertised as the other high-quality publication. The target audience, however, is overwhelmingly the US. Economist makes me feel like other countries exist, and there is enough going on outside the US.

On the ideological front, I fell into this trap of finding a periodical with little bias towards the political left or the political right. While Economist touts itself to be centre, it would be naive to take them at face value as they clearly are centre-left. The silver lining is that they are far better than others who make absolutely no efforts to quell their suppress their ideological biases (e.g. New York Times).

I call this a trap because I've since realized that it is virtually impossible to expect a "truly" unbiased publication. As long as I feel that I am not falling into an echo chamber, I am fine with biases. Politically charged articles generally have more than one perspectives.

One would be hard-pressed to find a single publication as diverse as the Economist. I think this is primarily a historical artifact - they just have had a significant first-mover advantage (I think) and have accumulated a solid bunch of human capital. I'm slowly inclining towards subscribing to more niche publications instead.

Financial Times is a reasonable contender, though far more costlier.

> Economist makes me feel like other countries exist, and there is enough going on outside the US.

I think it helps that the Economist is not headquartered in the US, but in the UK.

(The Financial Times has its headquarters in the UK too.)

> they clearly are centre-left

They’re Liberal, not Left.

I’d say they’re liberal in the European sense, not the American sense

I've personally found the Atlantic to be essentially a pseudointellectual Buzzfeed. Same clickbaity titles and bullshit, just with a high-brow spin.

The Economist is quite simply the best news magazine in existence. Imperfect but the least bad. Foreign Affairs is entirely an entirely different publication made of collections of topical essays on foreign policy

It's not a competitor to the Economist, but for general scientific topics including some health information Scientific American would be a step up in depth and coverage, while not being as dense as real journals or Science, Nature, etc.