Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
It is a recent tradition among occupants of the White House, as they head out of office, to play a few practical jokes on their successors. The Clinton administration jesters, for instance, removed all the Ws from White House keyboards before handing over the keys to George W. Bush’s transition...
The frontier between legitimate political analysis and fake news in the US has never been easy to draw. Politicians and polemicists have attempted to impose the idea that only established corporate networks can be trusted to steer clear of fake news. Content on topics they consciously neglect to...
The Abraham Accord is a grand title well in keeping with the Trump presidency’s taste for overstatement and misdirection. But the expectation that other Arab states would fall into line with the United Arab Emirates and quickly normalize relations with Israel has fallen well short of the mark....
Thirteen years ago, in summer 2007, I wrote a memo for the future president of the United States. The one who would take office in 2020. At the time, I had no idea who would win the 2008 presidential election, much less an election in the distant future. In summer 2007, Hillary Clinton was the...
The New Yorker features a lengthy biographical portrait of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden written by Evan Osnos. Clearly recognizing Biden’s positioning on the electoral spectrum, the title of the article takes the form of a question: “Can Biden’s Center Hold?” Though it...
Over the course of his 2016 campaign and his subsequent presidential term, Donald Trump has sought to exploit popular fears of foreigners and certain American ethnicities to his political advantage. His verbal attacks have been selective. Irish, Italian and Polish Americans, for example, have...
Almost every commentator in the media commended Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. At the core of his speech, Biden offered this thought, as if he was composing a humorless Devil’s Dictionary: “I have always believed you...
Michelle Obama’s husband, Barack, was president of the United States for eight years. In the eyes of many Americans and certainly the media, Michelle has aspired to and achieved a status of moralist-in-chief of the nation. Having focused on issues such as healthy eating habits to combat obesity...
There is an increasing din in America that this self-congratulatory cradle of democracy is not up to the primal task of planning and implementing a free and fair presidential election in a couple of months. So sullied are we by the institutional failure to hold Trump’s government...
In 2016, Alan Lichtman departed from conventional wisdom to predict a Donald Trump victory in that year’s presidential election. The political scientist was following something he called the “13 keys to the White House.” Using this relatively straightforward metric, Lichtman had correctly...
Ever since Dwight Eisenhower denounced the military-industrial complex in no uncertain terms, the intelligence community (IC) can be seen as the literal brain of an immense, tentacular but poorly-structured system of economic and political governance. The clandestine nature of its activities...
