Make Sense of the world
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When you see multimillionaires, with their yachts and luxury houses, you probably assume that they are supremely happy. However, you might be surprised to hear that this is not necessarily the case. In 2006, Princeton University psychologist, economist and author Daniel Kahneman and a team of...
Echoing the vision of super-billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Bao Weimin, a senior director at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, explained the logic behind China’s spectacular new foray into the space race. Its new mission aims at orbiting Mars for 687 days before...
On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom ordered many businesses statewide to shut down in response to the raging resurgence of COVID-19 in nearly all 50 US states. That same day, a friend of mine landed in San Francisco after having spent six months living in Japan. On his flight, a United...
The COVID-19 pandemic lays bare a global crisis of gender inequality. While women have achieved considerable success in their fight for equality, they continue to face violence, discrimination and exclusion globally. Women are now disproportionately bearing the costs of the pandemic, surfacing...
For months, as the COVID-19 disease was spreading and hundreds of thousands of people were dying across the world, accusations amplified by the media flew across borders in a global blame game. They raised three great destabilizing questions: Which nation was responsible for bringing COVID-19 into...
Six years ago, Sierra Leone was fighting Ebola, an infectious disease that devastated the country for almost two years. Today, like most countries around the world, the West African nation is in the midst of fighting another disease: COVID-19. The Ebola outbreak not only killed thousands of...
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, analysts have been opining about when a vaccine may be discovered and become widely available. Many suggest that it is simply a matter of time, given how many organizations around the world are busy racing to find a cure. But that assumption could well be...
In a previous article on Fair Observer, I describe an unusual new way of communicating the most important parts of “scientific truth” through potentially noisy, biased news media. The key innovation is to consider them together, all at once, as a kind of jigsaw-puzzle about scientific truth,...
There was a time when modern medicine was primitive. There were no antibiotics, so every infection took its own course, leading to decline in health. Hypertension and diabetes were largely untreatable. X-ray was new, and remedies had changed but little from medieval times. No one ever embarked on...
If the United States had quick-thinking and efficient leadership, the pandemic would have infected about 100,000 people and killed only a couple thousand. That’s the experience of South Korea, times seven to account for the difference in population. If the United States had overwhelmed but...
In East Asia, face masks are accessories akin to hats and scarves, a civilian, not a medical, accessory. People wear them for a variety of reasons: the smog, the cold, the sun, hay fever, unruly acne or to send a message usually transmitted via earbuds in North America: Don’t talk to me unless...
