Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
Mao Zedong once stated that “Women hold up half the sky.” This has been particularly true over the past months with COVID-19 wreaking havoc across the globe. In fact, it is legitimate to claim that during the pandemic, women have held up significantly more than their share of the sky. Anyone...
Global events, such as announcements that an effective COVID-19 vaccine could be available before the year’s end or the outcome of the US election, have raised hopes that the schism between science and populist ideology may become a thing of the past. That, in our view, is somewhat naïve....
Just when you thought you might breathe a sigh of relief in America with the victorious Biden administration on its way, it turns out that over 73 million people voted for Trump, the loser. That is truly difficult to comprehend for most of us who did not. Worse yet, since the national response...
A new report from the International Monetary Fund says that COVID-19 will increase income inequality in emerging markets and developing countries, “further widening the gap between rich and poor” and increasing the urgency for “investment in retraining and reskilling programs can...
In Cambodia, more than 2 million of the country’s 10-million-strong adult workforce hold a microcredit loan. Each of those loans comes to an average of $3,320, or twice the per capita GDP of the country. While microcredit was once considered a useful tool, without a national social assistance...
On Monday, November 9, BioNTech, a biotech company owned by a Turkish-German couple, Dr. Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, together with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer shared some promising news in the wake of the intense race toward eradicating COVID-19. The preliminary but potentially conclusive...
Despite incidents of gender-based violence spiraling in Mexico since the introduction of COVID-19 lockdown measures in April 2020, the Mexican government slashed funding to women’s services in August as part of an emergency decree that redirected money to programs it deemed a...
Toronto’s Gerrard Street is known for its lively small neighborhood businesses. The east end of the street in particular is famous for being home to one of the largest South Asian marketplaces in North America. It is there that I recently saw a series of posters advertising the new “Borat...
It was instructive that probably the most consequential event in the life of the Indian Republic merited nothing more than three pro-forma single-sentence references to “epidemics and pandemics” in the recently-adopted National Education Policy 2020. The policy must have been discussed and...
The decision of who will follow Angela Merkel to become Germany’s next chancellor is still up in the air. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party conference to elect a new leader has been postponed until January next year. Merkel’s approval ratings have...
Germany is a federation, and so are Belgium, Spain and Austria. Switzerland is a confederation — something of a federation plus. Federations consist of relatively autonomous entities, like states in the US, states and territories in Australia, provinces in Canada, Länder in Germany and Austria,...
