Which has the superior economic model, the United States or Europe? The question keeps coming up and never gets resolved. It is having another go-round at the moment, with the adversaries lining up as usual. Conservatives say that Europe’s social-democratic model is bound for the landfill of history. Progressives defend the model, even if they usually stop short of recommending it outright. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Fifteen years ago it seemed that the great debate about the proper size and role of the state had been resolved. In Britain and America alike, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton pronounced the last rites of “the era of big government”. Privatising state-run companies was all the rage. The Washington consensus reigned supreme: persuade governments to put on “the golden straitjacket”, in Tom Friedman’s phrase, and prosperity would follow. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Imagine that you are an old lady from a poor household in a town in the outskirts of Chennai city, India. All you have wanted desperately for the last year and a half is to get a title in your name for the land you own, called patta. You need this land title to serve as a collateral for a bank loan you have been hoping to borrow to finance your granddaughter’s college education. But there has been a problem: the Revenue Department official responsible for giving out the patta has been asking you to pay a little fee for this service. That’s right, a bribe. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The pluralism and diversity that has defined spiritual life on the Indian subcontinent for centuries, Pankaj Mishr writes, continues to transcend the divisive politics of religion and preserve the possibilities of coexistence. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Russians can go nutty when it comes to dogs. In Moscow, stray dogs have recovered their genetic wolf roots. They have also learned how to board subways and where to step off. All by themselves. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It was an idea born out of a late night of drinking, but it quickly became reality. Three Swedish men have established a line of jeans made in North Korea and sold in Stockholm. But they weren’t prepared for the criticism their pants have produced. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
American bioethics was born out of a desire to be relevant. The philosopher Daniel Callahan has said that he and his colleagues founded the Hastings Center—the premier bioethics think tank—in 1969 because they wanted to give philosophy “some social bite, some relevance.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
One of the biggest disconnects on Wall Street today is between the way Goldman Sachs sees itself (they’re the smartest) and the way everyone else sees Goldman (they’re the smartest, greediest, and most dangerous). Questioning C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein, C.O.O. Gary Cohn, and C.F.O. David Viniar, among others, the author explores how their firm navigated the collapse of September 2008, why it has already set aside $16.7 billion for compensation this year, and which lines it’s accused of crossing. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Until recently, the United States had become complacent about terrorism. The general view was that al Qaeda was on the run and Islamic terrorism was a receding threat. We now know better. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Academic economists gather in Atlanta this weekend for their annual meetings, always held the first weekend after New Year’s Day. That’s not only because it coincides with holidays at most universities. A post-holiday lull in business travel also puts hotel rates near the lowest point of the year. Economists are often cheapskates. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
We have swung around a full 180 degrees to the opposite extreme, at least in American school lunchrooms. As Janet Poppendieck writes in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, we live in “a new age in which a business model permeate[s] school food.” Where lunchrooms in the past treated children as lucky recipients, they now view them as customers whose business must be won. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
British archaeologists have unearthed evidence that Neanderthals wore makeup 50,000 years ago. Researchers say the discovery proves the human subspecies were not the ‘half-wits’ people assume and were capable of symbolic thinking. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The second-oldest republic in the Western Hemisphere has been wracked by coups, dictators, and foreign interventions throughout nearly its entire history. But you don’t have to agree with Pat Robertson to agree that even by Haitian standards, the last few decades have been particularly tragic. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Many people who feel passionate about saving the planet justify their intense feelings by pointing to the seriousness of the problem and the high stakes involved. No doubt they are right about the seriousness. There are indeed environmental challenges, and steps must be taken to ameliorate them. But there is another way to understand the unique passion surrounding our need to go green. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“Get ready for all Muslims to join the holy war against you,” the jihadi leader Abd el-Kader warned his Western enemies. The year was 1839, and nine years into France’s occupation of Algeria the resistance had grown self-confident. Only weeks earlier, Arab fighters had wiped out a convoy of 30 French soldiers en route from Boufarik to Oued-el-Alèg. Insurgent attacks on the slow-moving French columns were steadily increasing, and the army’s fortified blockhouses in the Atlas Mountains were under frequent assault. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A Whole Foods store, in some respects, is like John Mackey’s mind turned inside out. Certainly, the evolution of the corporation has often traced his own as a man; it has been an incarnation of his dreams and quirks, his contradictions and trespasses, and whatever he happened to be reading and eating, or not eating. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
There are good reasons to expect that bosses can’t help but be incompetent – adrift on a sea of troubles they neither understand nor can control. Better to take pity on the poor souls: there with the grace of the promotion committee go all of us. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In some respects, the story of our universe resembles a Hollywood action movie. Several physicists have argued that a slight change to one of the laws of physics would cause some disaster that would disrupt the normal evolution of the universe and make our existence impossible. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Imagine you are at a restaurant debating whether to order a healthy, but not very appetizing salad or an artery-clogging, yet delicious hamburger with all the works. What would lead you to choose the salad? New Wharton research suggests your decision might not be dictated by the fear of retribution from your doctor or partner or any other factor offered up by conventional wisdom. Rather, what may matter most is how long the menu is. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Britain has had a long and sometimes problematic relationship with alcohol. James Nicholls looks back over five centuries to examine the many, often unsuccessful, attempts to reform the nation’s drinking habits. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Videogames are no longer the preserve of adolescent males in dark bedrooms. Their emergence as a social medium is changing the way we work, learn and fight wars. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Contemporary international relations is moving toward a state of entropy. Chaos and randomness abound. Now, the story of world politics unfolds without coherence, unfettered by classic balance-of-power politics, a plotless postmodern work starring a menagerie of wildly incongruent themes and protagonists, as if divinely plucked from different historical ages and placed in a time machine set for the third millennium. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Astonishing discoveries in space, revelations about human nature, frightening news on the environment, medical advances that will banish life-threatening diseases: an inexhaustible stream of wonders runs through the pages of New Scientist. All tell the same tale. Science is exciting. Science is cutting-edge. Science is fun. It is now time to come clean. Science is boring. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Compared with the market-driven, killer-app insta-culture of the Digital Age, the new Large Hadron Collider exists in a near-magical realm, a $9 billion cathedral of science that is apparently, in any practical sense, useless. Exploring its whizbang machinery, deep underground, the author probes the collider’s brush with disaster last year—and the secrets it may soon unlock. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Hardly anyone noticed this summer when former president Jimmy Carter explained why he had decided to leave the Baptist Church. Considerably more attention was generated some months earlier by another story about how religion conceives and enforces its view of a woman’s place. The horrific attack on two Afghan girls en route to school—the young women were severely disfigured by acid allegedly thrown by Taliban fighters—was widely reported and discussed. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The world’s tallest skyscraper will open soon in Dubai, even as the emirate continues to be battered by the financial crisis. Is Burj Dubai an expression of failed megalomania or proof of Dubai leader Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s stunning vision? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
This season’s fashion in conspiracy theories—for those out of the loop of enlightenment—concerns health. The Web sites, marginal cable shows and radio phone-ins are full of tales about how Big Pharma and Bad Government are deliberately spreading diseases or manufacturing scares in order to sell us expensive drugs, gull us into dangerous vaccinations or just simply to create an atmosphere of panic which will allow “them” to take over. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
One of the themes that came up while I was profiling White House manufacturing czar Ron Bloom earlier this fall was managerial talent. A lot of people talk about reviving the domestic manufacturing sector, which has shed almost one-third of its manpower over the last eight years. But some of the people I spoke to asked a slightly different question: Even if you could reclaim a chunk of those blue-collar jobs, would you have the managers you need to supervise them? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
