Futurists and science-fiction writers have at times looked forward to machines’ workplace takeover with a kind of giddy excitement, imagining the banishment of drudgery and its replacement by expansive leisure and almost limitless personal freedom. And make no mistake: if the capabilities of computers continue to multiply while the price of computing continues to decline, […]
History clearly didn’t end with the triumph of market capitalism and democracy. Those who seek to disprove this old dogma often point to the eruption of radical Islam and the counteroffensive by the West — two events which have indeed overshadowed the last decade in many countries. But history has accelerated more dramatically — in […]
His name, two-horned hat, and tired silhouette will be on the minds of the thousands of people gathering on a small patch of Belgian countryside this week. At the battle of Waterloo, exactly 200 years ago on 18 June 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte lost his army, his Empire, and even his freedom when he was sent […]
It takes about two minutes to mash up national anthems—in the example above, from Venezuela, Turkey, Italy, Myanmar, Australia, China, and France—to show how often they celebrate martial courage. In a couple moments more, I could have drawn on another hundred anthems to the same effect, from Afghanis singing that their “sons are all braves” […]
Residents of Bamiyan got a rare opportunity over the weekend: a chance to once again see giant Buddhas that have been piles of rubble for over a decade. 3-D projection technology has already been used to resurrect dead music legends and pipe busy politicians into campaign rallies, and now it’s been employed to recreate a […]
…Unfortunately for the Chinese, their country’s population is about to peak and then shrink fast. Fewer people may not necessarily mean less power, but a shriveling population requires the country’s leadership to overcome demographic trends rather than be propelled by them, as it has since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Read Here […]
As Shakespeare reminds us, “what’s past is prologue.” This is especially the case with China, a nation with a continuous written history spanning three millennia. In particular, knowledge of five major historical events is essential to fully understanding contemporary Chinese politics and foreign policy. Read Here – The National Interest
Deng famously said that to open the economy, the party would have to “let some people get rich first.” This was one of the most creative policies ever advocated by a Communist Party leader, as it was in direct contradiction to the party’s founding aim. Read Here – New York Times
Two years ago, during Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel’s contentiousseven-and-a-half-hour grilling by the Armed Services Committee, senators mentioned Israel 178 times and Iran 171 times. The number of references to China? Five. The emphasis is odd because it’s likely that the “biggest threat” to America’s national security is neither Iran nor “radical Islam” writ large. […]
On October 11, 2014, according to Islamic State-affiliated Twitter accounts a woman going by the name Ahlam al-Nasr was married in the courthouse of Raqqa, Syria, to Abu Usama al-Gharib, a Vienna-born jihadi close to the movement’s leadership. ISIS social media rarely make marriage announcements, but al-Nasr and al-Gharib are a jihadi power couple. Al-Gharib […]
looking beyond borders 