Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
Boris Johnson, the British prime minister who fancies himself a reincarnation of Winston Churchill, who talks of wars and battle plans and war rooms, and who has been pictured wearing something akin to a boiler suit, presides over studied inaction when it comes to the country’s coronavirus...
If I were the European Union, I’d be wiping my hands, sighing in relief and slamming the door after the United Kingdom’s long-delayed departure. Britain had been a noisy, pushy houseguest for 47 years, and it was only growing ruder. It spent the last three years hanging out in the foyer,...
In early 2017, Europe’s far-right parliamentary bloc met in Koblenz, Germany, to plot its political future. The meeting of the bloc’s leaders — which included Marine le Pen from France, Matteo Salvini from Italy and Geert Wilders from the Netherlands — took place shortly after the...
The week began with a tragic patch of fog in California, continued with the smoke-and-mirrors diplomacy of Donald Trump and Jared Kushner in the Middle East, and is ending with Boris Johnson kicking off his nation’s great adventure into the mists of the future, the great unknown. What’s the...
The year 2020 has started in the West as the year of maximum suspense. The various dramas of 2019 had built to a crescendo that seemed unrivaled in the sheer number of open questions with no obvious answer history had thrown into the arena. Everyone was aware of the conflicts and debates that...
As the shock of the UK general election fades, many questions will take time to be answered. Not that the reelection of the Conservative Party led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson was a shock, but the size of his majority in Parliament was one that no Labour Party strategist had foreseen....
I dutifully got a shot this winter to inoculate myself against four different flu viruses. By exposing myself to weakened strains of these diseases, and preemptively suffering some mild flu symptoms, I can ward off the more serious consequences of a full-on infection and do my part to help stop...
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has given Jeremy Corbyn a good old-fashioned thumping. The Conservatives won 365 seats out of 650 in Parliament, gaining 47. They smashed the “red wall” of solid Labour seats in northern England. The Johnson-led Conservatives achieved the highest vote swing...
Dominic Cummings, the UK’s answer to Steve Bannon, unveils the essential truth behind British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s victory in the general election. It’s all about the misplaced prestige of traditional education, which has no place in modern society. Education is not only overrated,...
The vast majority of voters got it right. They knew that Thursday’s election could only produce a meaningless result, and they acted in consequence. Although unambiguous, the result answers no questions, but opens up new ones. To anyone with an understanding of historical processes, the idea...
The outcome of the election in the United Kingdom is just one more piece of evidence of a pernicious trend that has increasingly infested liberal democracies — extreme polarization. While it will take some time to get a complete picture of what happened, one thing is clear: The result of the...
