Here are three ways Pope Francis could seriously rock the boat.
Labor Rights for All: The Fight Against Modern-Day Slavery
The domestic workers’ rights movement offers powerful lessons for the broader fight against forced labor, trafficking, and servitude.
America Under Assault
We often hear of U.S. guns turning up at crimes scenes abroad. But we rarely hear about how many foreign-made guns find their way to the United States.
The World Without U.S.
In his 2007 bestseller, The World Without Us, journalist Alan Weisman describes a planet that regenerates itself after the disappearance of human beings. Skyscrapers crumble and bridges collapse into rivers, but the primeval forests take over and the buffalo return to...
Letter From Sofia: Old Tanks and Modern Mayhem
The military museum in Bulgaria's sprawling capital city consists of a tiny building and a huge outdoor display of weapons that look as if they had been wheeled in fresh from the battlefields and parked, higgledy piggledy: mountain howitzers that shelled Turks in 1912...
Ghana’s Chinese Gold Rush
Compared to the West’s neoliberalism, China’s approach to investment in Africa has often been somewhat idealized as more of a “partnership” with the host country, with less moralizing by the Chinese over human rights practices and fewer strings attached economically....
At the UN, a Latin American Rebellion
Without a doubt, the 68th UN General Assembly will be remembered as a watershed. Nations reached an agreement on control of chemical weapons that could avoid a global war in Syria. The volatile stalemate on the Iran nuclear program came a step closer to diplomacy....
Germany Votes and Austerity Reigns–For Now
Europe's most powerful nation has voted. On September 22nd, the people of Germany granted Angela Merkel a huge victory, awarding her center-right party nearly 50 percent of the seats in the federal parliament, the Bundestag. Although Merkel’s victory was a foregone...
Swords Into Solar Panels: Re-Purposing America’s War Machine
A trillion dollars. It's a lot of money. In a year it could send 127 million college students to school, provide health insurance for 206 million people, or pay the salaries of seven million schoolteachers and seven million police officers. A trillion dollars could do...
The Disease of Short-Termism
It was famously described as the “end of history.” The collapse of Communism and the victory of liberalism near the end of the 20th century seemed to suggest that the great ideological conflicts of the previous eras had come to an end. A new and powerful consensus...