World News Insights: Opinion Articles

In May the literary critic Christian Lorentzen published a Substack newsletter about being bored. “Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring,” he wrote. Since I have been rather bored,…

Europe is getting back to business after its summer break — but this year feels like jumping into a cold shower. Just listen to Emmanuel Macron. The French President told his ministers during their first formal gathering last week that a new paradigm is on the horizon — it’s the end of abundance in…

It feels intuitively right that a reformulated booster vaccine aimed at the omicron BA.5 variant would vastly improve our protection against it as well as any offspring that might threaten us in the fall. But intuition doesn’t always agree with scientific data. It’s not intuitive at all to think…

If you expect your job to give your life meaning, you’re setting yourself up for failure. There was a time when a job was just an economic transaction: Someone paid you for your labor and that enabled you to live and support your family. But for a variety of reasons, many workers today expect more…

I was struck by a comment on the article I wrote last week: Biden...Summertime Santa Claus?, which discussed Washington potentially returning to the nuclear agreement. “If Biden plays Santa Claus in the summer, the US administration will certainly take its presents back before Christmas….” “Biden…

On 24 August, Ukraine celebrated its 31st anniversary of independence while fighting off an invasion by the country (even though under a different name and form then) from which it gained its independence from. On this independence day, Russia hit the train station in the city of Chaplyne in…

When Israeli forces invaded Beirut in June 1982, Vladimir Putin was still a young officer in the KGB empire that was run by Yuri Andropov. In the fall of that same year Andropov would be named master of the Kremlin. Also in 1982, Volodymyr Zelensky was still a boy of four, playing in a Russian…

On August 24 John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said an agreement with Iran about its nuclear program was closer than it had been in early August although there are still differences between the two sides. The Biden administration is being careful about its language…

The idea was to be permanently chastened by the Civil War, that the relief of emancipation and reunification would always be tempered by the shock of 600,000 corpses. And yet “civil war” has lately become one of those zeitgeist phrases that rattle around the internet, like “quiet quitting” or “Pete…

It’s a bad time to be a Japanese brand in China. Even a fake one. Miniso Group Holding Ltd., a Chinese retailer of cheap household goods with around 3,000 stores in the mainland, made it big off an aesthetic that could charitably be described as an homage to modern Japanese branding. While…

They’ve been around for thousands of years but they’re still tripping up foreign investors in China. Company chops are the carved seals that, when used with a red inkpad to stamp documents, confer legitimacy on corporate actions. Investors accustomed to the norms of Western business may think they…

The year 1982 is being recalled often in Lebanon today because it is the 40th anniversary of many things. That year, the clash of sentiments and ideas that were born with the emergence of the country itself was crowned. But it was also the year that launched a new race to part ways and stirred…