Last fall, eight months into the new world disorder created by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy produced a long report on trends in global public opinion before and after the outbreak of the war. Not surprisingly, the data…

Joe Biden’s path to renomination by the Democratic Party, a journey reportedly likely to begin officially sometime next week, will represent a triumph of one seeming implausibility over another. From the beginning of Biden’s presidency, every serious conversation about his re-election has…

At the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war, we stand in the same position relative to the initial invasion as America stood in 1985 relative to the 1965 arrival of our first combat troops in Vietnam. This makes it a useful moment to compare the two conflicts and their effects, and to consider —…

Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book, “Superintelligence,” a crucial text for the community of worriers about the risks of artificial intelligence, begins with a fable: A tribe of sparrows, weary of a marginal existence, becomes convinced that everything would be better if they could only have an owl to help…

In the responses to a recent death-of-the-humanities dirge, a long reported piece by Nathan Heller for The New Yorker on the decline of the English major, you could see an illustration of its thesis: The story’s most depressing anecdotes were plucked out and swapped around on social media by people…

When the Ukrainian military made rapid advances in its autumn campaign, the fears of Russian nuclear retaliation were connected to a longstanding American interpretation of Russian strategic theory: “escalate to de-escalate,” the idea of using a limited nuclear strike to raise the stakes of…