Octavia Butler’s classic futurist novel “Parable of the Sower” recently made the New York Times bestseller list for the first time. It depicts an America falling apart at the seams due to violence, economic decline, and governmental dysfunction. But despite the chaos, the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, spends much of her time thinking about space exploration. Faced with a dystopian Earth, she motiv...

If Joe Biden enters the White House on the afternoon of Jan. 20, there is reason to expect that intraparty conflicts will come racing to the fore: between the Democratic left and Democratic moderates; between multicultural, debt-laden youth and Whiter, more affluent, suburbanites; between the alternate Sanders/AOC ticket and the actual Biden/Harris ticket. It’s also possible that Biden might suc...

Kastellorizo is one of those places that might become a cause for war even though most people couldn’t find it on a map. The combatants would be Greece and Turkey, formally NATO “allies” but in reality perennial foes since the sloppy unraveling of the Ottoman Empire. And their war would be less about the island as such than about the Mediterranean waters said to belong to it. That’s because unde...

India’s COVID-19 economic gloom turned into despair last week, on news that its per capita gross domestic product may be lower for 2020 than in neighboring Bangladesh. “Any emerging economy doing well is good news,” Kaushik Basu, a former World Bank chief economist, tweeted after the International Monetary Fund updated its World Economic Outlook. “But it’s shocking that India, which had a lead o...

Shares of Big Hit Entertainment, the company behind South Korean boy band BTS, begin trading this week. A top-of-the-range IPO valuation of $4.2 billion implies rock-star earnings multiples. Institutional investors have piled in anyway, displaying impressive confidence in the staying power of ultra-groomed youths and their obsessive followers. To live up to the hype, billionaire founder Bang Si-...

Losses in the main US stock indexes on Friday will go down in history simply as small ones in an otherwise choppy week. But assessed in more detail, they provide a remarkable example of the intense tug-of-war that now grips markets and will most likely persist, if not intensify, in the weeks ahead. Two news developments dominated the runup to the US market opening Friday. First and foremost was...

When Boris Johnson announced on March 27 that he’d tested positive for COVID-19, Brits were in shock, much as Americans were Friday morning when they heard President Donald Trump was infected. The UK prime minister was the first leader of a major country to be hospitalized with the virus, an event that was characterized as “routine” at first before the illness took a more serious turn. Nobody kn...

More by carelessness than design, the European Union has conflated two of its biggest problems into what last week became one hot mess. To get out of it, the bloc may have to make the Brussels equivalent of Sophie’s choice: It could sacrifice the principle that all member states must respect the rule of law. Or it could ditch its plans for economic recovery and fiscal cohesion. This trap was lai...

One feature of the COVID-19 era is how much the standard ways of seeing and doing things have been remixed and turned upside down. The obvious question is then whether people will decide to make these new arrangements permanent or return to the old. For example: I used to enjoy going to nouvelle-style slightly fancy restaurants, ordering 10 appetizers (and no main courses) and sharing them with ...

There are potential catastrophes so dire, only an approach that blurs the realist and the utopian seems appropriate. Take for example the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Adopted by the United Nations in 2017, it seeks to completely get rid of the most satanic arms ever created. The treaty’s already been signed by 84 states and ratified by 45. To take effect -- that is, to be bindin...

When the World Trade Organization was created in the mid-1990s, the US Senate voted 76-24 to establish it. But it is now facing more opposition than ever, and from both parties. “The World Trade Organization has been not good for the United States,” President Donald Trump said in a mid-September press conference. “It’s been good for everybody else, but it’s not been good. It was a method, in my ...

It was 1985, I think. The Federalist Society was hosting a conference in Washington on equality. I was a young professor, the token liberal on a panel, and its least distinguished member. The experience was brutal. Professor Paul Bator, a famous scholar who had been my teacher not long before, was on the panel, and at one point he whispered in my ear. “Just stop talking,” he said. “No one in the...

Wall Street isn’t always too fussed about whether a startup is profitable before listing on the stock exchange. A decent track record of sales growth is usually pretty essential, though. That quaint idea has been turned on its head this year by the fad for special purpose acquisition companies. Called SPACs for short, they raise cash from investors in an initial public offering and then go find ...

The end of the summer holidays and the reopening of schools have sparked a lively debate over the future of remote working. From the US to the UK, politicians and employers are nudging workers to return to the office even though the pandemic is not over. But these requests put employees in a very awkward place -- caught between fearing for their health and fearing for their job. Following two ke...

With the US presidential campaign heading into the home stretch, President Donald Trump will surely try to tout his record on economic issues. But the numbers don’t speak well of his policies. Unfortunately, the approach of his rival, Joe Biden, threatens to make some of the same mistakes. Trump was elected in 2016 on a promise to restore American competitiveness, revitalize the flagging manufac...