Reading Time: 4 minutes Last November, government ministers at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) agreed to The Glasgow Climate Pact. It was both ambitious, in setting key targets for emissions reductions by 2030, and also heavily criticized, including by the Scientist Rebellion, for not going far enough. Critics noted that nations needed to […]
International
Posted inSocial Media
What next? Twitter’s complicated role in the literary world
Reading Time: 11 minutes Not long after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, another exodus of site users began—and with it, discussion about the people who aren’t ready, or able, to leave. Transitioning to a new platform isn’t easy for everyone: for many disabled people, for instance, leaving Twitter means learning all the ins and outs of yet another system […]
Posted inWar and Peace
North Korean missile strikes raise questions about our ‘war games’
Reading Time: 4 minutes On Wednesday, North Korea fired 23 missiles. One landed less than 37 miles from South Korea’s coast. South Korea responded with three air-to-ground missiles along a territory closed to commercial air traffic, and around 100 artillery shells from North Korea entered a military buffer zone. According to the Japanese Coast Guard, another missile landed 16 […]
Posted inPolitics
Lula wins in Brazil, but Bolsonaro does not concede
Reading Time: 3 minutes It’s a story for our troubled age: a democratic contest takes place, a winner emerges at the polls, and… the incumbent does not concede. Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is slated to return to office in January after squeaking out a narrow victory with 50.9 percent of the Brazilian vote: around 2 million […]
Posted inThe Future
The overthinking humanist: Life in a world of eight billion
Reading Time: 13 minutes At 4 a.m. on Sunday, I just needed fifteen minutes to finish a news brief. Fifteen minutes, and I’d be ready to leave for a trip to a pueblo two hours away. Fifteen minutes, and I’d switch modes completely: from English to Spanish, from digital to analog, and from the high-minded literary life to something […]
Posted inPolitics
Xi Jinping’s third term brings more questions than answers
Reading Time: 3 minutes Over 1.4 billion human beings (around 18 percent of our species) live in the People’s Republic of China. This weekend a series of ceremonial acts in the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) placed all of them—and the watching world—on unprecedented ground. For almost 40 years, since the 1982 State Constitution developed […]
Posted inSocial Media
Twitter’s Elon Musk debacle raises serious questions about digital citizenship
Reading Time: 9 minutes On October 3, Elon Musk tweeted a proposal for “Ukraine-Russia Peace”, with a Yes/No poll that yielded 2.7 million responses (59 percent “No”). Because Musk is the richest person in the world, with a current net worth of around $230 billion USD from Tesla, SpaceX, and recent AI ventures, his views on Russia’s invasion of […]
Posted inPolitics
What Colombia’s presidential election can teach us about change
Reading Time: 7 minutes On June 19, Father’s Day took a back seat in Colombia to a second presidential run-off, the last part of a process that began with legislative elections in March. At that time, candidates were also chosen for the presidential race, which had its first run-off in May. Because no candidate passed the key threshold, the […]
Posted inReligion
Fascism in India: The weaponization of religious custom
Reading Time: 8 minutes Where I live, Navidad and Semana Santa are significant religious affairs, times when the hustle and bustle of city life eases for a month and a week respectively: to observe Catholic customs, to be with family, or simply to travel to nearby towns and farms. One side effect, though, is the impact of reduced foot […]
Posted inPolitics
Fascism in India: The global turn toward nationalist politics
Reading Time: 9 minutes Although I never needed to “deconvert” from a religious tradition, I was fascinated by New Atheism’s debate circuits at the turn of the century: The eloquence of its speeches. All those witty rejoinders. The rallying of knowledge from a range of disciplines to out-fact an opponent. It was easy to fall prey to the idea […]