Dictators: why heroes slide into villainy
Many autocrats come to power with good intentions only to morph into monsters. A new model explains common drivers of this inexorable slide.
The year of singing politically: The 68th Eurovision Song Contest 2024 Malmö, Sweden
Breaking out of the chains had emerged as a central leitmotif and call for activism at the Eurovision Song Contest long before Swiss non-binary singer, Nemo, performed it as the winning song, “The Code,” at the Grand Finale on May 11 2024 in Malmö, Sweden.
A chronology of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China [timeline]
In Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Outbreak in China Spiraled Out of Control, Dali L. Yang scrutinizes China’s emergency response to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, delving into the government’s handling of epidemic information and the decisions that influenced the scale and scope of the outbreak. This timeline adapted from the book walks through the day by day chronology of the initial outbreak and explores how both the virus and information spread.
State supported Covid-19 nudges only really worked on the young
A Swedish study reveals vaccination nudges barely influenced the older, more vulnerable people who needed them but younger people complied. Why?
Is it democratic to disqualify a popular candidate from the ballot?
That a popular candidate could be disqualified from running and removed from the ballot might, at first glance, seem at odds with the very idea of democracy. For that reason, despite his evident role in instigating an insurrection, many Republican senators demurred and chose not to impeach former President Donald J. Trump on 13 January 2021.
The rising power paradigm and India’s 2024 general elections
India, the world’s largest democracy, is holding its national elections over a six-week period starting 19 April. The elections to the 543-member lower house of the parliament (Lok Sabha) with an electorate, numbering 968 million eligible voters, assumes critical importance as India is going through both internal and external changes that are heavily linked to its rising power aspirations and achievements.
Pay attention to your children
You’ve probably been ignoring your children. This isn’t simply you not paying attention to them because you’re distracted or need to do something.
Why decolonization and inclusion matter in linguistics
As sociolinguists, we have centered social justice in our research, teaching, and administrative work for many years. But as with many other academics, this issue took on renewed collective urgency for us in the context of the events of 2020, from toxic politics and policies at the federal level, to state-sanctioned anti-Black violence and the ensuing racial reckoning, to the Covid-19 pandemic and the many inequities it exposed and heightened.
The origins of the war in Ukraine [timeline]
The fall of the Soviet Union meant independence for Ukraine, and radically altered the shape and power structures of Eastern Europe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was the culmination of a number of growing fissures and collisions in the region—between Russia and Ukraine, but also between Europe and Russia, and Russia and the United States. Michael Kimmage, a historian and former diplomat who served on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State where he handled the Russia/Ukraine portfolio, looks at the origins of this conflict dating back to 24 August 1991.
Homer’s Penelope and the myth of the ‘model military wife’
Ostensibly a tale of the adventures of a soldier, Homer’s ancient Greek epic Odyssey also has at its heart the remarkable story of Odysseus’ waiting wife Penelope, who is renowned for her patience and her fidelity.
Policy meets politics on the frontiers of world urbanization
At a time when funding for urban infrastructure and the promotion of an overarching global goal—the hard-won SDG 11—have catapulted cities up the international policy agenda, it’s hard to believe that urban issues could ever have been considered marginal.
Analysis of the Nuclear Risk Reduction Agenda
In a context of intensifying great power competition and deep divergences of view between nuclear and non-nuclear powers on the urgency of nuclear abolition, ‘nuclear risk reduction’ has gained renewed attention as a pragmatic framework for managing and reducing nuclear dangers.
The third sister: beauty, and why the aesthetic matters
In the current critical/political atmosphere, the “aesthetic” has come to be regarded as the province of dandies and their descendants, not to do with the enormous difficulties of the here and now.
Election plays and the culture of elections and electioneering in the days of Dunny-on-the-Wold
England’s pre-Reform elections are memorably satirized in the historical sitcom, Blackadder the Third. Also glancing at late 1980s politics, the series begins with the rigged by-election for a fictional rotten borough—Dunny-on-the-Wold—taking centre stage.
Less-than-universal basic income
Ten years ago, almost no one in the United States had heard of Universal Basic Income (UBI). Today, chances are that the average college graduate has not only heard of the idea, but probably holds a very strong opinion about it.
How can business leaders add value with intuition in the age of AI? [Long Read]
In a speech to the Economic Club of Washington in 2018, Jeff Bezos described how Amazon made sense of the challenge of if and how to design and implement a loyalty scheme for its customers. This was a highly consequential decision for the business; for some time, Amazon had been searching for an answer to the question: “what would loyalty program for Amazon look like?”
A junior software engineer came up with the idea of fast, free shipping. But a big problem was that shipping is expensive. Also, customers like free shipping, so much so that the big eaters at Amazon’s “buffet” would take advantage by free shipping low-cost items which would not be good for Amazon’s bottom-line. When the Amazon finance team modelled the idea of fast, free shipping the results “didn’t look pretty.” In fact, they were nothing short of “horrifying.”