Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
The disputed existence of the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia has come into focus again in the context of the ongoing diplomatic dispute between Russia and Georgia and the August anniversary of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Abkhazia remains at the heart of discussions because...
People around the world, including Americans, have argued that the world can get along without US leadership. Today, they may want to scan the global landscape. While acute crises and violent conflict may not seem imminent at the moment, the view isn’t a hopeful one. For Americans, naively...
“Adam und Evelyn,” a bittersweet German love story in the summer of 1989, captures both the promise and the peril of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Adam and Evelyn are an East German couple. Evelyn yearns to flee to the West. Adam is happy behind the Iron Curtain as a dressmaker. She leaves and...
When it was ratified in 1987, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) eliminated a category of weapons that was a major threat to Europe. One must remember how much of a step forward this event was during the Cold War. In the early 1980s, Europe was vulnerable to military...
For most Western Europeans, Sweden is nothing exceptional — a relatively small country, in terms of population, on the periphery of the continent. In the 1960s and 70s, Sweden was notorious for its sexual permissiveness. In Germany, for instance, in the 1970s, “erotic” movies had instant...
We have in our midst two political leaders who possess remarkably similar characteristics. This is not just in their demeanor, but also in how they share a political perspective on the world, and what it means for global politics as populism remains on the rise and division and discord are sewn as...
As the recent furor surrounding British comedian Jo Brand’s comments on the BBC Radio 4 Heresy program attest, there is very little clarity about what does — and, importantly, what does not — constitute hate speech. In what was clearly a joke, Brand asked why anyone would bother throwing a...
Analyzing the character of Britain’s new prime minister, Atul Singh, in a delightful Fair Observer article that can only be described as “fair and balanced” in ways that Fox News has never attempted, calls Boris Johnson “the most charismatic politician of his generation.” Given...
Contemporary romance novels are big business, and they empower women in a number of ways. In the United States alone, romance novels account for about one third of the fiction market, about the same as mystery and fantasies combined. The vast majority of romance writers are women, and so are their...
All eyes are focused these days on Boris Johnson, the new prime minister of the United Kingdom. But that’s not the most important news this month out of Britain. The Labor Party has finally come around to opposing the country’s exit from the European Union, though it’s possibly a case of...
Elected by the Conservative Party as everyone predicted to replace Theresa May as the UK’s prime minister, Boris Johnson’s victory speech reveals as much as it conceals about the future of Britain. Above all, it reveals much of what we already knew about what we might call Johnson’s “speech...
