World News Insights: Opinion Articles

Nothing in my life fills me with shame more than the fact that I have never visited Iraq! This is a cause of sadness, pain, regret and unrivalled sense of loss; and why not, if Iraq was part of me and my family’s history even before I was born. Impressed by Iraq (where he lived for 10 years)…

This summer, on a lark, I took a course on poetry geared toward Christian leaders. Twelve of us met over Zoom to read poems and discuss the intersection of our faith, vocations and poetry. We compared George Herbert’s “Prayer” to Christian Wiman’s “Prayer.” We discussed Langston Hughes’s “Island…

My girlfriend and I wasted no time this spring. As soon as the Moderna vaccination fever left our bodies in May, we gleefully quadruple-booked every empty weekend left on the calendar. The itinerary swelled beyond precedent. Weddings, birthdays, family reunions and no-occasion rooftop hangs…

President Biden’s job approval rating is on the downslope. As of Friday morning he was at 45.8 percent approval and 48.5 percent disapproval — from a high of 54 percent approval, 41 percent disapproval at the end of his first 100 days. There is a laundry list of reasons for this. Not only is the…

In one of the more arresting videos that circulated after the fall of Kabul, a journalist follows a collection of Taliban fighters into a hangar containing abandoned, disabled US helicopters. Except that the fighters don’t look like our idea of the Taliban: In their gear and guns and helmets …

The story is not about Afghanistan. We are not talking here about Russia, China or a major European state. That is, we are not talking about a country that sleeps on a nuclear arsenal or an economy that influences its surroundings or the world. Afghanistan is a normal country. The world can forget…

In a parliamentary system, a politician could say: I will run for the presidency, and if I don't win, I will resign from politics. Another could say: I will run for this position, and if I don't win, I will rethink the strategy I had followed. Politicians can say many things, just not what Jair…

You’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s smooth sailing ahead for the OPEC+ oil producer group. The 23 members concluded their meeting last week in less than an hour, agreeing to raise output again in October. There were no signs of the tensions that had marred earlier gatherings, just a quick…

Since breaking above $100 a metric ton in May, the price of coal at Australia’s Newcastle port — a benchmark for Asia, which consumes about three-quarters of the world’s soot — has gone almost vertical, hitting a record $173.10 a ton Thursday. The key regional contract for liquefied natural gas,…

To listen to the debate in Europe over the chaotic retreat of United States troops from Afghanistan is to be struck by what a huge vocabulary Europeans have developed over the centuries for describing military calamities. What we just witnessed has already been described as a débâcle, a débandade,…

The advent of gaming, especially computer gaming, marks a fundamental break in human affairs. Gaming is profoundly transforming two central aspects of the modern world: culture and regulation. There will be no turning back. When it comes to culture, the West has been in a dialogue with itself…

Lost wars are supposed to provoke soul-searching. In America, they usually bring historical revisionism instead. When once-good wars go bad, Americans tend to conclude that there was never anything redeeming about them in the first place. This impulse is already coloring the debate over…