Subterms
Complaints about American decline have been commonplace since at least the Vietnam War era. In the late 1980s, declinism experienced an upsurge with the publication of “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers,” by Paul Kennedy, which warned of the dangers of imperial overstretch. Even America’s putative victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War […] More
As the COVID-19 crisis is gradually slowing down, the world is bracing itself for a very likely second wave of the pandemic. While the shortcomings of the global response and the preparedness of individual countries will be open for debate and analysis for a long time to come, attempting to forecast what architecture the international […] More
In the United States, common narratives circulated by the radical right and right-wing extremists about the coronavirus pandemic include racist, anti-Asian stories of the virus’ origination, xenophobic calls to close all borders as well as “liberation” protests that argue that government shutdowns are meant to strip people of their rights and freedoms. Gender, a common […] More
We may not like what President Donald Trump is saying about the World Health Organization (WHO), China and the world at large. In fact, we do not like it at all, but Trump has a point, and acknowledging it would empower us to address him in earnest, with honesty and efficiency. The world is led […] More
Amy Cooper worked at my firm when I was a paralegal. She was a cohort member in my PhD program, a professor whose class I took, a professor in the department I taught in and on the faculty I interviewed with for a job. Amy Cooper is a character type. She votes democratically, lives in […] More
Across America, people are coming out in hordes to protest the death of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the knee of a white policeman, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Chauvin choked Floyd with his vicious stranglehold, pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck for an interminable eight minutes and 46 seconds, even as Floyd […] More
“If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, young, gifted, and black in America, you would choose right now,” Barack Obama told a graduating class at Howard University in Washington DC four years ago, drawing attention to Hansberry’s 1996 collection of plays, interviews and letters that bore a […] More
India has an abysmally low percentage of people with access to decent health care. About 300 million Indian citizens live below the poverty line and, for them, medicine is prohibitively expensive. For decades, serious medical conditions have pushed families into poverty and destitution. From 2000 to 2015, the annual national health-care expenditure averaged around 4.00% […] More
