All Articles

Celebrities are increasingly fronting aid campaigns. But what role do they play in the development process? Is it right they gain direct access to the political bargaining table?

What are the implications of the U.S. Federal Court finding this week that Congress cannot force people to engage in a commercial activity, in this case buying an insurance policy?

In an interview that has caused a scandal in Belgium, Flemish nationalist Bart De Wever Told Spiegel why the nation has “no future.”

Most people want to have children. Societies that don’t accommodate this aspiration run the risk of losing faith in their own future and compromising their economic development.

When the decision-makers at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery decided to drop David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video “A Fire in My Belly” from their exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American […]

With the Senate voting 81-19 on an $858 billion deal to extend all the Bush tax cuts—as well as extend unemployment benefits and reduce the payroll tax—it’s hard to take […]

“Politics is like term papers,” says U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham. “You usually get serious right before the term paper is due. That’s the downside of democracy: without friction, there is […]

I was standing in the kitchen, half listening to the TV the other night while I warmed my dinner up when two black guys from Georgia appeared on CNN. The […]

So I’m a POSTMODERN CONSERVATIVE.  I’ll have a lot to say about what that means later.  But one of beginning to explain why conservatism needs to be postmodern–or free of […]

Can China continue to grow richer without wrecking the global environment? Will China’s carbon dioxide emissions overwhelm the world? China relies on coal for most of its energy.

Are the rise of right-wing parties and the increasing crackdowns on immigrants antithetical to European values?

Many countries felt shocked and cheated when FIFA chose Qatar to host the 2022 football World Cup. But it could usher in a new era for the sport and the region.

The coalition has been unable to communicate to the electorate that the individual student debt they are saddling young graduates with is fairly abstract.

State and corporate players are increasingly using astroturf campaigns that mimic spontaneous grassroots mobilisations, but are in reality organised.

Selling your organs is illegal in every country except Iran. But the WHO says the black market is massive. Can economists make the system more humane and efficient?

Afghans live in fear that the international community will abandon them. Although the Taliban is unpopular, normal Afghans are just trying to survive.

Time Magazine readers chose Julian Assange as Person of the Year so why did its editors go with the safer choice: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg?

Shame on Sweden; shame on Interpol; shame on Britain. And lasting shame, given this farcical hijacking of a sex crime law that is scarcely ever enforced…, on the United States.

Glamour magazine dubbed her “equal parts Mother Teresa and Rambo” in naming Somali Muslim Dr. Hawa Abdi “woman of the year.” She epitomizes courage and compassion.

It’s amazing what you can find in art when you really, really want to find it there. Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage claims that they’ve found evidence of a […]

The WikiLeaks drama is only the latest in over a century of new technologies heralding the demise of professional diplomacy—yet such rumors always prove to be greatly exaggerated. One defense […]

He didn’t look back. David Remnick’s recent thoughts on the Khodorjovsky trial, its parallels—and non-parallels—to an earlier Soviet prosecution (of poet Josef Brodsky) made us think about poets, diplomats, and […]

The anti-slavery researcher and advocate says that slavery and human trafficking are already becoming huge problems in China.

A whole generation of only children is coming of age in China, notes the NYU professor. What will their mentality mean for business, government, and foreign policy?

Epidemiological studies and public health awareness have drastically reduced the number of people who are struck down in their prime by deadly diseases.

So, as usual, the annual AGU meeting has been incredibly busy. When I first started attending the meeting, I was able to go to lots of talks and posters and […]

Even if science is able to teleport humans across large distances, would the teleported human really be the same person or just an exact replica? What would happen to the soul?

If you manage to find a match through an online dating site, that match is more likely to commit to meet if they have paid a fee for the service.

So I was a guest on the local Tea Party radio program yesterday.  I disagreed with the tea partisans about everything–mainly to provoke discussion but also because I’m not exactly their […]

At the New Yorker last week, science journalist Jonah Lehrer penned a conversation-starting feature on the so-called “decline effect,” the tendency across scientific fields for a new and exciting finding […]