President Donald Trump’s critics have consistently underestimated his political communication skills, perhaps because he is so different from predecessors such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Both FDR and Reagan, after all, were known as “great communicators.” Read Here – Project Syndicate
Algorithms are aimed at optimizing everything. They can save lives, make things easier and conquer chaos. Still, experts worry they can also put too much control in the hands of corporations and governments, perpetuate bias, create filter bubbles, cut choices, creativity and serendipity, and could result in greater unemployment. Read Here – Pew Research
Politicians routinely bemoan the loss of good blue-collar jobs. Work like that is correctly seen as a pillar of civil middle-class society. And it may yet be again. What if the next big blue-collar job category is already here—and it’s programming? Read Here – Wired
Political correctness about Islam isn’t confined to America. It also exists in Europe. Last week Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel thus learned a sad lesson in Ankara: those who seek to distinguish between Islam and Islamism face accusations that they are condemning a whole religion and are thus being “Islamophobic.” Read Here – The National Interest
The clamour for security, accountability and transparency is leading to unfettered increase in the power of states. We are enacting law after law, introducing technology after technology, to render citizens transparent to the state. But at the same time, we are weakening protections and consenting to technologies in a way that makes the state less […]
Donald Trump has vowed to put “America first,” but who comes second, and third, and 193rd? Barack Obama may have been more willing than his predecessors to “question why America’s enemies are its enemies, or why some of its friends are its friends,” as Jeffrey Goldberg once wrote in The Atlantic, but Trump has thrown […]
In a new report titled “The World in 2050,” consulting firm PwC projects that India’s GDP would exceed US GDP in purchasing power parity terms by 2040 (purchasing power parity accounts for the different prices levels across countries). This would make India the largest economy in the world after China. Read Here – Quartz
Pakistan’s improvement matters because, with approximately 200 million people, it is the sixth most populous country in the world. It is also a nuclear power, and arguably a key to peace in the region. Read Here – Bloomberg
The Obama administration seemed to operate under the premise that signing the nuclear deal with Iran would bring it in from its international isolation and serve as an incentive for it to become a more responsible member of the international community. Read Here – Arab News
Spouses of politicians rarely take center stage on Iran’s political scene and, for the most part, remain entirely out of the public eye. Few Iranians know very much about their presidents’ wives, including their names. Effat Marashi, however, is an exception. Read Here – AlMonitor
