Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
The first thing to bear in mind when looking at the recent violent demonstrations that have occurred in Latin American countries like Chile, Ecuador, Haiti and Bolivia is to resist the spell of common myths about the region. Latin America is a vast territory composed of 20 countries, from Mexico...
On October 22, the presidents of Russia and Turkey, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, held a seven-hour summit in the resort town of Sochi to discuss Turkey’s incursion into northeastern Syria. Many experts and journalists are portraying the agreed deal as a success for Ankara and Moscow...
Two years ago, my wife and I went to a dog “salon” in a small French town on the other side of Geneva. The puppies were adorable, but even more were the kittens one breeder was exhibiting together with his puppies. Taking advantage of my obvious immediate infatuation with the tiny creatures,...
Neil Young was a famous rock musician in the 1970s, specializing in live performance and weird acoustic spaces, like the echo-filled iron sawdust burner I once camped in as a kid. In a recent interview for The New York Times Magazine, he claimed that digital compression technology — CD, MP3,...
It is already clear that the year 2019 in Poland will mark a record number of pride parades: 21 have already taken place and 6 further events are planned. The marches are organized not only in regional capitals but also locally, such as the march in Radomsko, a town of less than 50,000...
Look what Greta started and what she did to me! I took part in the recent climate-strike march in New York City, one of a quarter-million people (or maybe 60,000) who turned out there, along with 4 million others across all seven continents. Then I came home and promptly...
On July 30, a remarkable event took place in Colombo, Sri Lanka, when representatives of multiple religions — Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism — came together to express solidarity with the victims and survivors of the terrorist attacks that shook the island nation in...
Recently, the proclaimed “death” of the Iran nuclear deal has been presented as the reason behind the rapidly escalating tensions in the Strait of Hormuz and the basis for pessimistic speculations regarding an imminent war between Iran and the United States. Interestingly enough, hard-line...
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s foreign policy is largely based on its revolutionary anti-Western rhetoric and hostility toward the US and some of Washington’s close allies in the Middle East. Since 1979, Tehran has relied on local proxies in the region, such as Lebanese Hezbollah, as well as a...
Headlined “U.S. Seeks Other Ways to Stop Iran Shy of War,” the article was tucked away on page A9 of a recent New York Times. Still, it caught my attention. Here's the first paragraph: “American intelligence and military officers are working on additional clandestine plans to...
President Xi Jinping, the modern-day emperor of China, clearly has a deep sense of history. On September 8, 2013, he gave a speech at Nazarbayev University in Almaty at the invitation of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Xi quoted a Chinese saying — “ near neighbor is better...
