Bill Gates had his first extended moment in history at the end of the 20th century. He regularly appeared as the richest, but also the nerdiest, man on earth. His rarely eclipsed top ranking lasted for at least two decades. Perhaps bored by the idea of holding wealth, he eventually decided to...
Donald Trump might have left the White House. His nefarious legacy, however, lingers on. A prominent case in point is the dramatic rise in the number of attacks on Asian Americans, ranging from verbal insults and harassment to physical assault to deadly acts of violence that has gone hand in hand...
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...
Everyone knows that Amazon is a successful, profitable, world-conquering and, therefore, obscenely rich company. It has made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. He keeps getting richer by the day. With his fortune, Bezos doesn’t need to be as careful with his cash, in contrast with normal...
A decade after the Arab Spring, Tunisians have made significant progress in the field of democratization with respect to the constitution and the guarantee of public and private freedoms. However, economic performance remains modest, and many of the demands of the Tunisian Revolution are still...
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...
A recent The Economist cover pictured the 46th US President Joe Biden in front of the White House with a cleaning mop. The lead, “Morning after in America,” projects that “The outlook for America looks grim, but that could quickly change.” The venerable publication proclaimed from its...
On October 22, 2020, the United States co-sponsored a Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family. However, despite its name, this declaration states that “in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning.” While it doesn’t...
In his inaugural address, President Joe Biden endlessly insisted on the idea of “unity.” He repeated the word nine times. In the various media’s account of the event, commentators endlessly repeated a different word, one that Biden himself cited when he said: “This is our historic moment...
In 2020, 24.3 million people, or 80% of the population in Yemen, were at risk of hunger and disease, with 14.4 million in acute need of assistance. A political solution is necessary to end the war and achieve lasting peace. This may take time. The international community must provide the...