In a famous essay, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin borrowed a distinction from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” “There exists,” wrote Berlin, “a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to … a single,…

Maybe you stayed safe in the plague year. Most of us have. But did you stay sane? A growing body of research shows that the damage to our health caused by COVID-19 went far beyond the disease itself. In addition to multiple physiological conditions that have claimed lives because people eschewed…

After the disease, the debt. After the plague, the pile of IOUs. It is a veritable mountain — a reminder that the original public debt in medieval Venice went by the name monte. According to the International Monetary Fund’s October Fiscal Monitor, the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns…

In “Shuggie Bain,” Douglas Stuart’s award-winning and harrowing depiction of alcoholism, sectarianism and deprivation in post-industrial Scotland, money is always scarce and often dirty. Deserted by her second husband and unable to hold down a job, Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, relies on her twice-a…

A little French word that used to play a big role in global politics is poised for a comeback: detente. The word was first used as a diplomatic term in the early 1900s, for example when the French ambassador in Berlin attempted — in vain as it proved — to improve his country’s strained relationship…

Successful Democratic candidates for the presidency of the United States invariably campaign with promises of domestic largesse and moral uplift. They nearly always end up taking their country to war. Can Joe Biden be a rare exception to that rule, if he succeeds in defeating Donald Trump on…

It’s hard to get past the initial sheer inanity of TikTok. I spent half an hour trying to make sense of the endless feed of video snippets of ordinary people doing daft things with their dogs or in their kitchens or in the gym. I figured out the viral memes of the moment: animals dancing to Tono…

“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November. The observation in itself was not wholly startling. It had seemed obvious to me since early last year that a new Cold War —…

America is on the road. But is it on the road to economic recovery or a pandemic relapse? Fans of “On the Road” — Jack Kerouac’s 1957 classic of beatnik literature — will recall that its giddy, low-punctuation style is sometimes a little hard to follow. The same might be said of the data…