Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
We didn’t suspect it at the time, but the 2016 Rio Olympics may have been the last ever summer games. There were clues. Until 2015, most of us hadn’t even heard of the Zika virus. First identified in 1947, it is transmitted by mosquitoes, typically causing asymptomatic or mild infection but...
Joe Biden was not elected for his positions on foreign policy and national security. Few US presidential candidates are. In his debates with outgoing President Donald Trump prior to the election, those issues were hardly discussed. So, the success or failure of the Biden presidency will not be...
According to the GLOBSEC Trends 2020 report, across Central and Eastern Europe, 34% believe that COVID-19 is a hoax designed to manipulate populations. With hundreds of deaths around the world occurring as a result of disinformation related to the coronavirus, the pandemic has demonstrated the...
Mao Zedong once stated that “Women hold up half the sky.” This has been particularly true over the past months with COVID-19 wreaking havoc across the globe. In fact, it is legitimate to claim that during the pandemic, women have held up significantly more than their share of the sky. Anyone...
In response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, there have been repeated calls to “trust the science.” The first definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary for the word “science” is “the state of knowing,” while the third definition is “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering...
For every reader who bothers to write to the author, there must be a hundred others. One reader, Paritosh, wrote to Fair Observer regarding one of my articles that invoked well-understood principles of neuroplasticity to explain how any learning system, child or artificial intelligence (AI) can be...
Global events, such as announcements that an effective COVID-19 vaccine could be available before the year’s end or the outcome of the US election, have raised hopes that the schism between science and populist ideology may become a thing of the past. That, in our view, is somewhat naïve....
On Monday, November 9, BioNTech, a biotech company owned by a Turkish-German couple, Dr. Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, together with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer shared some promising news in the wake of the intense race toward eradicating COVID-19. The preliminary but potentially conclusive...
Germany is a federation, and so are Belgium, Spain and Austria. Switzerland is a confederation — something of a federation plus. Federations consist of relatively autonomous entities, like states in the US, states and territories in Australia, provinces in Canada, Länder in Germany and Austria,...
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic and the associated lockdowns, it seemed like things would never wholly go back to how they were. We discovered that people could work efficiently from home without being monitored in the office. Students, some of whom had previously moved across the world...
If the current pandemic is a test of the global emergency response system, the international community is flunking big time. It has done just about everything wrong, from the failure to contain the coronavirus early on to the lack of effective coordination thereafter. As the predicted second wave...
