Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
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...
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...
Around 20 years into the new millennium, everything about our lives and surroundings is changing at an incredible pace. The ways we work, play, study, communicate, spend and earn are rapidly evolving to bear little resemblance to how we’ve lived through most of modern times, let alone history....
The Amazon is burning. This is what the end of the world looks like. Oh, and there’ll be more forests burn, more forests felled by chainsaws, more wetlands drained, more rivers dammed, more grasslands plowed, oceans further toxified and emptied of fish. And each of these is what the end of...
The United Kingdom has begun deploying what it calls reception baseline assessment for children entering primary school. It promises to “provide the basis for a new way of measuring the progress primary schools make with their pupils.” It sounds very rational, but according to a survey...
It is written that “Enannatum, ruler of Lagash,” slew “60 soldiers” from Umma. The battle between the two ancient city-states took place 4,500 years ago near where the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers come together in what is today Iraq. The matter in dispute? Water. More...
Malawi is one of the most impoverished nations on the planet. It is experiencing what officials describe as a “population explosion” in a society with inadequate resources. As of 2018, Malawi is the third poorest country in the world with a GDP per capita of only $342, according to the...
Over the last few weeks, the northwestern area of Idlib province in Syria has come under constant bombardment from regime forces and its allies. With a disturbing civilian casualty count mounting and a nation in upheaval after years of civil war, waning global attention is causing concern that one...
Imagine that your government could identify you and track your movements digitally, solely based on your physical appearance and perceived ethnicity or race. This is not the stuff of dystopian science fiction, but is happening now due to the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools....
