World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Kids are expensive. Full stop. No matter your level of frugality, it’s certainly costlier to have kids than to opt to be child-free. And yet, there’s a particular kind of societal pushback in the US when you attempt to speak bluntly about the financial concerns of having children. The prevailing…

Whether it is brief or continues for an extended period, the world is undergoing an exceptional moment that can be summed up in a scene we will almost inevitably see: Moscow and Tehran drowning in crises of their own making. I do not remember ever seeing the ice-cold face Putin puts on in front…

You should reconsider the bank you use, at least for some of your savings. Chances are, if you’re a customer at one of the major retail banks, you’re leaving real money on the table. High-yield online savings accounts are finally starting to feel like they are in fact, high-yielding — or at…

“Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.” That was the blunt title of Gordon E. Moore’s essay on silicon chips published in Electronics magazine in April 1965. In the space of just three pages, the director of semiconductor R&D at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp. outlined one of…

Liz Truss, the new prime minister of Britain who may not be the prime minister for long, is by general agreement out of touch with reality. Her big gambit upon succeeding Boris Johnson, a mini-budget crowded with tax cuts, looks like a policy debacle, recklessly inflationary and fiscally…

Today, the world faces huge challenges from health threats that can impact people, animals and the environment. In the past, experts and policy-makers addressed these threats separately, depending on their field of specialization, but today we recognize that the health of these different entities…

Some dates instantly go down in history because of their nature, danger and number of victims. They go down in history because they forever alter the world. This is what happened. It is an end of an era in Ukraine, Russia, Europe and the world. It was an unprecedented scene indeed. Four barons…

When you’re telling stories about the economy, housing almost always looms large. It plays a huge role in the economy’s ups and downs: A burst housing bubble was the prime mover in the Great Recession of 2007-9, and the Federal Reserve’s leverage over the economy comes largely from the influence of…

In rural America, the shoulder-high corn is increasingly competing with a new cash crop: solar power. Acres of solar panels shine brightly in fields along interstates and rural byways, signaling a change in how America’s farming country generates income. The need for a happy marriage between these…

President Vladimir Putin signing the decree annexing the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, after having held internationally unrecognized referendums in those regions, raises an important question: Has Putin won? Has he achieved any victories at all? To answer this…

Imagine if Arab intellectuals, during the nationalist era in the fifties and sixties, had behaved as though the Palestinian Nakba did not concern them. Such behavior would have been considered a grave shortcoming in their nationalist qualities, if not collusion with the enemy of nationalism…

When a Tesla Inc. battery caught fire at an energy storage facility that helps power California last week, critics were quick to pounce. Michael Burry of “The Big Short” fame, who called the mid-2000s housing collapse correctly, hit out at the EV maker. Blaming Elon Musk’s firm for a bad battery…