World News Insights: Opinion Articles

When I got the invitation from the French ambassador for a black-tie gala called “Améthyste,” I wondered what that name meant. Was it a promotional party for a French jewelry company or maybe a new perfume? I didn’t go to the Thursday fête, because I’m studying for a master’s at Columbia…

A year after President Biden’s election, we’re beginning to see the contours of his foreign policy: He has something for everyone. For balance-of-power realists, he has countered China by working much more closely with “the Quad” — India, Australia, Japan and the United States — and creating a new…

On this day, November 22nd, the Lebanese commemorate their independence from France in 1943. It is the last commemoration of Michel Aoun’s term, and this year also marks the end of the first hundred years since the establishment of Greater Lebanon was announced in 1920. It is perhaps the worst…

The atmosphere was gloomy inside the hall of the remote hotel. Melancholy autumn erased the freshness of features, while the majestic trees took off their royal cloak. Leaves piled up like memories of a violated republic. When they accompanied him to the meeting room, his anxiety mounted. He saw in…

Now that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sacrificed his poorly designed makeover of India’s farms at the altar of electoral math, there will perhaps be no fresh attempt at reform for a decade. That’s a shame for urbanization. Agriculture in the second-most-populous nation suffers from many…

There’s been a lot of discussion, since the Facebook Files were leaked, about how to repair the social media platform. A lot of this talk centers on how algorithms manipulate the feeds, and how we users are profiled and fed exactly the content that arouses us to fits of hatred, conspiracy…

The rise of inflation, supply chain shortages, a surge in illegal border crossings, the persistence of Covid, mayhem in Afghanistan and the uproar over “critical race theory” — all of these developments, individually and collectively, have taken their toll on President Biden and Democratic…

It’s shocking to see. Children huddle over precariously built bonfires and parents hold babies to their chests while soldiers, behind thickets of razor wire, look on impassively. But the images from the Belarus-Poland border, however harrowing, shouldn’t be surprising: This is what the European…

In their search for a way out that ameliorates residents’ current conditions, many Lebanese have leaned towards comparing their bitter reality with what they endured in the 1980s. Few of them are “optimistic” about the prospect of the disastrous state of affairs ending in the way it had at the time…

The bargain bonanza that is Black Friday has begun. Only there are fewer special offers this year, and those that are being advertised aren’t quite so eye-catching. You can blame the global supply chain meltdown for the dearth of doorbusters. Even when toys and TVs start flowing through trade…

The exoneration of two men wrongly convicted of helping to murder Malcolm X is good news for the cause of justice. But it raises the question of why, until Netflix aired the series “Who Killed Malcolm X?” earlier this year, hardly anybody but a handful of scholars and biographers paid attention to…

When Russia launched a missile from earth that destroyed an old Soviet satellite on Monday, the explosion created thousands of pieces of debris — a virtual cloud of bullets — that will spread through near-earth orbit or fall to the ground. This is a serious risk to astronauts, telecommunications…