Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
As last year’s British Social Attitudes survey indicates, 66% approve of same-sex couples, meaning about a third do not. Our newest research suggests that, with 95% of fans saying they favor openly gay players, football crowds are more welcoming of gay people than the rest of the UK population....
We didn’t suspect it at the time, but the 2016 Rio Olympics may have been the last ever summer games. There were clues. Until 2015, most of us hadn’t even heard of the Zika virus. First identified in 1947, it is transmitted by mosquitoes, typically causing asymptomatic or mild infection but...
Thanks to a pandemic, the first full season of professional basketball in the US opened in arenas empty of spectators. For the players and staff present, the ritual of playing the national anthem before every game began to appear even more artificial and hyperreal than usual. Mark Cuban, the owner...
On January 20, a star was born in Washington, DC, during the inauguration of the 46th president of the United States — a 78-year-old white man taking over from a 74-year-old sore loser. Before the swearing-in, an unknown 22-year-old black female strode up to the podium. She embodied the...
As Shoshana Zuboff has warned in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” the great tech giants have built a system people have become dependent on for their social relationships. But this “social” system has been built to...
Discerning eyes have known for quite a while that the Arab world is more than it appears in conventional photography. The old visual language of minarets and souks, of unassuming eyes set deep in dark faces, of conceptual or actual “unveilings” and of non-consensual or ambivalent colonial...
On January 7, the news media announced that Elon Musk had surpassed Jeff Bezos as “the richest person on Earth.” I have a personal interest in the story. Two of my neighbors just bought a Tesla, and this morning, on the highway between Geneva and Lausanne, an angry Tesla driver flashed me...
When I took my seat as a juror in The People v. Abraham Cucuta, a murder trial in Manhattan several years ago, the first question on my mind was, why the delay? Two young men were shot to death in a New York City Housing Authority project in East Harlem 10 years earlier. Why had it taken so long...
Science fiction once belonged to the genre of imaginative literature. Today’s media, fishing for intellectual thrills, have encouraged serious people with technological knowledge, industrial intentions and the money to back them to create our first “science factions.” Certain men of our...
The US has always proclaimed its dedication to freedom of expression as the founding virtue of its vaunted “exceptionalism.” Children learn in civics classes that the only brake on freedom of expression is the irresponsible, antisocial act of crying “fire” in a theater. In such a culture,...
Newly elected President Joe Biden promised in his inaugural address to focus on achieving national unity. It is a customary theme of new presidents who wish to assure those who voted against them that their interests will not be neglected. But given the current political and social atmosphere in...
