Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
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....
Student loan debt has deservedly become a major political issue in the US, with the total debt burden approaching the impressive figure of $1.6 trillion. The phenomenon has revealed many of the structural problems American society is now attempting to address, with little hope of a viable...
In 2016, India’s National Crime Records Bureau reported 338,954 incidents of violence against women, including 38,947 rapes, up from 309,546 in 2013. Forty percent of the victims were children. In the same year, only one-third of child sexual abuse cases brought to trial had resulted in...
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...
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...
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...
October 2 has been designated as the International Day of Non-Violence to coincide with the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. Non-violence is often misinterpreted as something passive, but it is a set of attitudes, actions or behaviors intended to persuade the other side to change its opinions,...
With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), the potential to integrate technology into the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is reaching new heights. According to Klaus Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum, 4IR is “blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and...
I know it’s been said many times and throughout history, but we do indeed live in interesting times. And it’s not just because the most unlikely person has become president of the most powerful nation, not because an unplanned and unreasoned proposition has won the vote for an exit from the...
World Peace Day, which is marked every year on September 21, has just passed. The chance to do some soul-searching with regards to the state of peace on our planet is as important as ever before. For all the relative calmness and progress of the second half of the 20th century and the early...
Driven by the rise of the far right and white nationalist movements, Islamophobia is on a rising tide, with widespread discrimination and record-high attacks on Muslims across the Western world. Norway recently avoided a tragedy when three Muslim men prevented a 21- year-old gunman from carrying...
