President Donald Trump prides himself on being able to communicate with the American people directly through his Twitter account, but when it comes to resonating on that platform, former President Barack Obama still had an edge in 2017. Three of Obama’s tweets were among the 10 most retweeted this year, while none of Trump’s made the list, […]
The logic in these arguments, whether derived from Newtonian physics or the national interest, is always as impeccable as it is morally numb. This is why around the world we confront a bigger crisis than the one commonly linked to political and economic dysfunction. Demagogues are mere symptoms of an ethical breakdown. The more disturbing […]
It’s no coincidence this evolution has coincided with the rise of social media. The only thing that can accelerate a topic online better than outrage is humour—combine the two and you have a potent tool for reaching millions. (Hell, even protest signs—“We shall overcomb”—spawn top-10 lists.) Read Here – Wired
Feelings of being disconnected and despised, however, are powerful emotions, strong enough to twist facts into a dark alternate reality. It is critical to look beyond a simple story of populism, of masses versus elites. Read Here – Project Syndicate
Social democracy now lies in ruins, its ragbag of policies rejected by electorates. Its heyday was the trente glorieuses, 1945–75, but, as Marc Levinson recounts in An Extraordinary Time, the splendid outcomes during these years cannot be attributed primarily to good economic policy choices. Read Here – The Times Literary Supplement
There can be no doubt that we are wading through an uncertain era of religious atavism. But let us also not ignore another by-product of this apparent iodine deficiency — cultural cretinism. It is steadily shrinking our life skills, including the ability to bond with people from different branches of the tree we share. Read […]
Tocqueville, who wrote in the 1830s and 1840s; John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s; and Karl Polanyi, who wrote in the 1930s and 1940s. Read Here – Project Syndicate
Evolution endowed us with a natural tendency to be kind to our genetic relations but to be xenophobic, suspicious, and aggressive toward people in other tribes. As our brains become better equipped to reason abstractly in such tasks as lumping dogs and rabbits together into the category “mammal,” so too have we improved in our […]
What does global communication look like? One way to picture it is by mapping phone calls—specifically where they’re coming from and heading to. Read Here – The Atlantic
When it comes to trading money for influence, China tops the list. People in the world’s biggest economy give bribery an average rating of 5.5 on the scale. China was followed by Jordanians (5.0) and Russians (4.5). Read Here – Quartz
looking beyond borders 