OPINION

CAMBRIDGE – Was the current crisis in Ukraine caused by a lack of realism in US foreign policy? According to some analysts, the liberal desire to spread democracy is what drove NATO’s expansion up to Russia’s borders, causing Russian President Vladimir Putin to feel increasingly threatened. Viewed from this perspective, …

NEW HAVEN – The US Federal Reserve has turned on a dime, an uncharacteristic about-face for an institution long noted for slow and deliberate shifts in monetary policy. While the Fed’s recent messaging (it hasn’t really done anything yet) is not as creative as I had hoped, at least it has recognized …

PRAGUE – In the war on disinformation, the enemy can be hard to determine. Journalists, politicians, governments, and even grandparents have been accused of enabling the spread of online falsehoods. While none of these groups is entirely innocent, the real adversary is more mundane. As Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified late last year, …

CAMBRIDGE – As 2021 drew to a close, Russia had massed troops near its border with Ukraine; China had flown military jets near Taiwan; North Korea was still pursuing its nuclear-weapons program; and Taliban fighters were patrolling the streets of Kabul. Seeing all this, friends asked me: “Whatever happened to …

NEW YORK – My book, A World in Disarray, was published five years ago this month. The book’s thesis was that the Cold War’s end did not usher in an era of greater stability, security, and peace, as many expected. Instead, what emerged was a world in which conflict was much more …

With a first snowfall in Bhutan behind us, winter is clearly here and weeks of wintry weather might well lie ahead. Yet, so too arrives the lunar new year this February and Losar this March, and the Year of the (Water) Tiger.  As we now welcome in 2022, who was …

WASHINGTON, DC – Turkey’s economy is in crisis. Inflation is high and rising, economic growth is stalling, foreign-exchange reserves have plummeted, many goods are in short supply or simply unavailable, and low- and middle-income households are increasingly impoverished. With per capita GDP having fallen from $12,600 in 2013 to $8,500 in 2020, Turkey’s …

NEW DELHI – The World Inequality Report 2022, produced by the Paris-based World Inequality Lab, is a remarkable document for many reasons – starting with its demonstration of the immense power of patient collective research. The report provides the latest estimates, based on careful aggregation of national data from a multitude of …

WASHINGTON, DC – It has been less than two years since phrases like “flatten the curve,” “contact tracing,” “social distancing,” and many others related to the COVID-19 pandemic entered the lexicon and became part of everyday communication. People everywhere have learned more about epidemiology, virology, and immunology than they ever …

An Instagram post highlighted a headline about a non-peer-reviewed study from Israel that found that unvaccinated people previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 had greater immunity against the delta variant than never-infected people fully vaccinated with Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine. But the social media post omitted the study’s other finding that one dose …