Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
Climate change has become a global priority, but not for everyone. For some, it is a spoke in the wheel of economic interests — the splinter that sparks a dangerous political debate seeking to turn climate change into a myth. But if anything should summon global consensus, it is the fact that...
You’d be forgiven to think that the only issue for discussion and decision by the public in the UK election is Brexit. As far as Boris Johnson is concerned, it may well be the only issue he wants a mandate for. This may have been the reason he refused to take part in the world’s first TV...
A succession of social upheavals over the last decade has radically realigned political power throughout the world. As a result of these tectonic shifts, what had once been on the furthest fringes of the right has now moved toward the center while the left has been pushed to the margins....
When arguing that political parties cannot solve global issues such as climate change, nuclear proliferation and fiscal justice, and that we need a new global movement capable of pushing forward concrete solutions and harness the energies of the youth, we meet a few “deniers.” Critiques of...
This year was an unusually wet one for Mumbai, the commercial capital of India. Until mid-September, the city received rainfall of 2,366 mm, which is 26% more than the usual average of 1,800 mm. This is an ominous trend of extreme weather events, a phenomenon the frequency of which is rising...
Yoga gurus and cult leaders – I’ve seen a few. Four weeks ago, I unknowingly joined an alleged New-Age cult on the New Zealand coast, together with a giant kraken and some neatly dressed pensioners who would make any book club proud. They were among the 200 people of all ages preparing for a...
You may be a skeptic and deny that the Earth is not warming up because, depending on where you live, the effect may not be noticeable to you. But, hopefully, what you can't deny is the increasing number of weather-related disasters occurring around the world, which happens to be a really expensive...
In 2022, 33 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote the computer program HTML and gave us the World Wide Web, 5 billion of us will be connected to each other via the internet. This connectivity did not exist at the end of the First or the Second World Wars, but it does now. We have just formed...
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,...
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...
Shortly after the turn of the 20th century, American muckraker Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle,” a searing account of the savage working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. Such a mind-boggling exposé of exploited workers laboring amid rotten, contaminated and diseased meat,...
