More stories

  • in

    India’s Tactical Victory on HCQ Misses the Bigger Picture

    Amid the debate surrounding COVID-19, the rhetoric around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in the United States and India is the best example of the populism of our times. Earlier on in the pandemic, anecdotal evidence from France led US President Donald Trump to proclaim that all the patients should try HCQ against the coronavirus. In a matter […] More

  • in

    Will COVID-19 Alter the Global Order?

    Fear, in the globalized sense of the word, had largely dissipated ever since the height of the Cold War, when the world stood by as the two superpowers stared each other down with nuclear weapons. Largely absent since the days of brinkmanship seen during the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world has […] More

  • in

    Texas Politician Dan Patrick Is No Longer Pro-Life

    Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has interviewed Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick twice since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Patrick, a Republican, wants the American people to understand a simple fact: that the economy is far more important than human life. He has affirmed once again his unequivocal belief: “There are more important things than […] More

  • in

    Can the Radical Right’s Reductionist Narrative Withstand Real-World Complexity?

    There is a general recognition that major problems and issues of our world — including understanding them and their causes and proposing remedies and coping strategies — are rarely simple in nature. Complexity theory and the long history of systems science, as exemplified by the work of such authorities as Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Talcott Parsons, Russ […] More

  • in

    The Social Media Pandemic

    Some people in the US seem surprised that a form of cultural chaos is spreading far more rapidly than the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19. It’s the predictable consequence of three convergent phenomena: American individualism, the confrontational forms of expression it takes through social media, and the belief that the freedoms listed in the Bill […] More

  • in

    Republican Lawmakers Are Taking China to Court

    In more halcyon days, back in 1964, at a time when most popular music in America was still about idealized romantic love, radio stations across the US broadcast the sonorous voice of Dean Martin intoning the lyrics of a song composed 20 years earlier: “You’re nobody till somebody loves you, So find yourself somebody to […] More

  • in

    As Always, Barack Obama Never Looks Back

    President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO) reacted last week to the news that a corruption investigation into Mexico’s nationalized petroleum industry, Pemex, had moved on to target his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto. Though aware of the attorney general’s investigation into another personality active during the previous regime — former Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya […] More