World News Insights: Opinion Articles

As Mediterranean countries look to chart a path forward in the wake of the multiple crises that have upended economies, accelerating regional integration becomes more critical than ever. Increased trade flows, two-way investments, and mobility across the Northern, Southern and Eastern…

Many rolled their eyes as they heard Prime Minister Najib Mikati claim that anyone shown to have been involved in the killing of Irish UNIFIL peacekeeper Sean Rooney would be punished! No one in Lebanon was surprised to see him angrily ask what has happened to the investigation days after the crime…

Everyone in my professional life — fellow faculty members, other writers — is up in arms about ChatGPT, the new artificial intelligence tool that can write like a human being. Tech is not supposed to be human. It is only ever supposed to be humanoid. But this chatbot can take multiple ideas and…

“The Whale,” Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, is one you hope, desperately, will be seen by an audience that has the necessary cultural literacy, the empathy, to watch the story and recognize that the onscreen portrayal of fatness bears little resemblance to the lived experiences of fat people. It…

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian’s speech at the second Baghdad conference in Jordan made clear to all the countries in the region, as well as those who engage with it, that Iran is dazed and confused. The foreign minister was giving his speech in French before giving it again…

“The relationship with the other” can perhaps sum up many of the problems we face in the era of identities. The earliest cultural response to this issue might be Aristotle’s. Indeed, the “master,” who wrote “The Poetics” 150 years after the era of Athenian tragedies, took the opposite position…

Vaccines can end pandemics. That’s why they are central to any plan to prepare for the next one. Developing countries are attuned to this need after many waited nearly a year for ample Covid-19 vaccine supplies as wealthy countries enjoyed an extended period of first dibs. Americans, for example…

Has the West woken up to the fact that Iran is a global problem rather than a regional problem limited to the Middle East? The international community’s misguided view of the Iranian project has led to this project being framed within the context of confessional competition between Sunnis and…

Plato mourned the invention of the alphabet, worried that the use of text would threaten traditional memory-based arts of rhetoric. In his “Dialogues,” arguing through the voice of Thamus, the Egyptian king of the gods, Plato claimed the use of this more modern technology would create …

The golden weeks are gone. Celebrations don’t last forever. They were beautiful and thrilling. We quarreled, argued and guessed right and wrong. Brilliant teams, not militias, engaged in this spotless war, which was fought with goals, not drones. It’s a war without coffins and armies. Boys…

The protests in Iran, now in their third month, are a historic battle pitting two powerful and irreconcilable forces: a predominantly young and modern population, proud of its 2,500-year-old civilization and desperate for change, versus an aging and isolated theocratic regime, committed to…

Whatever happens in the World Cup final this Sunday, Europe will remain the dominant power of global football. An Argentinean victory over France will not change the facts of economic globalization. The English Premier League alone usually turns over more money every season than the quadrennial…