Reading Time: 7 minutes Much as we might like to think that there exists a global secular commons, a consensus-driven international terrain wherein different cultures might agree to rise above respective nationalist ambitions, the current world landscape only affirms how routinely broken is the promise of international governance.
history
Posted inCulture
Resisting the politics of fatalism
Reading Time: 6 minutes While recent news finds the world teetering on the brink of many potentially disastrous decisions, in war as in climate change and democratic elections, it’s the politics of fatalism we have to avoid most of all.
Posted inHistory
The ghosts of Vesuvius awaken in newly deciphered scrolls
Reading Time: 4 minutes The eruption of Vesuvius buried the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, including one of the greatest ancient libraries ever found. Almost 2,000 years later, modern technology is making it possible to read its scrolls again.
Posted inEthics and Morality
Our secular struggle with medically assisted dying
Reading Time: 14 minutes Suffering from chronic pain, a friend’s grandmother took her own life when I was 18. I was over when my friend and her mother heard the news. I will never forget the character of her mother’s grief. She was devastated to lose her own mother, yes. But she was even more devastated that her mother felt she had to do this alone, without anyone by her side in her last moments, lest they suffer legal consequences.
Posted inWar and Peace
Lessons after 100 days of another war
Reading Time: 15 minutes Shortly before October 7 upended much of foreign politics, a minor scandal in the Canadian parliament revealed (among other things) Western historical illiteracy, including our tendency to see conflicts in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys.”
Two weeks after that incident, Hamas broke through Israeli defenses around the Gaza Strip. And again we became terrible historians.
Posted inPhilosophy
The myth of personhood on a wartorn Christmas morn
Reading Time: 9 minutes Bethlehem is a city in mourning this year: quiet, with its usual tourist venues shuttered for weeks on account of the war in Gaza, and with very little of the joy that Christians usually associate with the season. As the mythology goes in Luke 2, an angel descended after the birth of Jesus Christ, and […]
Posted inHistory
Data support universal basic income. When will that translate into better policy?
Reading Time: 13 minutes We have a wealth of data that dismisses tired, racialized stereotypes about welfare recipients. What will it take to translate Universal Basic Income research into policy?
Posted inEthics and Morality
Ben Franklin’s noble lie
Reading Time: 5 minutes In his published works, Benjamin Franklin expressed the misanthropic view that most people can’t behave without religion to keep them in line. What does the evidence say about this noble lie?
Posted inHistory
No monsters, no monarchs, only humans
Reading Time: 12 minutes For most of Western history, we’ve been stumbling toward some semblance of international standards for individual human rights. Will we ever get there?
Posted inWar and Peace
Wartime hostages and armchair analysts
Reading Time: 14 minutes As the world awaits the Israel-Hamas hostage deal and temporary ceasefire, it bears remembering how complex political and wartime kidnappings always are.