Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
It is terrible to be sick, and more terrible to be sick and alone. Ten years ago, my mother’s hospice unit was in quarantine for E. coli. In her last week of life, none of her friends were allowed to visit. Now everyone gets to taste that isolation in what may be the most widespread and...
A week ago, it would have been unthinkable. Now it’s materialized — a world without sports. The calendar still shows Wimbledon, the Tokyo Olympics, a world heavyweight title fight and the Tour de France, among others. But these events are under threat. Already, the NBA has canceled games in...
Tracing the ever-rising death toll of the COVID-19 outbreak to the exotic meat on sale at a wet market in Wuhan, China, probably feels a bit surreal. If anything, it serves as a sobering reminder of how, in our globalized, interconnected lives, a plate of dubiously sourced food can rapidly lead to...
The COVID-19 pandemic has begun to deconstruct and remodel the accepted behaviors of our culture as nations across the globe endeavor to artificially redefine everyday rules of their social life. For the first time since perhaps the arrival of the Black Death in 14th-century Europe, an entire...
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has a prodigious output and, indeed, it takes a prodigious effort to keep up with it. No sooner had I completed reading the latest trio of her books than a new one was signaled, many of the recent works being based on her delivery of prestigious guest lectures...
A sudden controversy has exploded in the Netherlands. In March, the Dutch department store HEMA began selling a traditional Dutch pastry under the name chocoladebal (chocolate ball) instead of moorkop (referring to the head of a dark-skinned person). HEMA followed in the footsteps of a small baker...
Jazz is a musical art form that cultivates complex and highly disciplined improvisational skills. In its brief history — hardly more than a century — jazz has always floated between being perceived as a style of popular, crowd-pleasing music or as a sophisticated art form produced by...
I’ve changed my mind. Loneliness isn’t so much an epidemic as an anti-epidemic. Just now, COVID-19, a regular coronavirus, is spreading like a regular epidemic. So far only tens of thousands are affected, not tens of millions, but already public health is a top priority. Stopping viral...
African literature has attracted immense international interest in recent years, and a number of “Afropolitan” icons and rising stars have won acclaim from critics and literary festivals. Yet most reading lists released by major newspapers and journals are still disproportionately...
“The trenchocracy is the aristocracy of the trenches,” declared Benito Mussolini on the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia in December 1917. Reflecting on the new type of man emerging from the war, he went on: “What an immense moral force is contained in the patriotic spirit of those who come...
According to current estimates, more than 3 billion people worldwide are routine users of social media. And if you’re one of those billions, then you know good and well that social media is used for far more than posting cat videos or wishing happy birthday to your long-lost college...
