Virtually everything we read in novels and newspapers, not to mention the video games we play and the Hollywood movies we watch, reminds us that we’re steeped in violence and that it’s only going to get worse.
Everything, that is, except Steven Pinker.
When Foreign Affairs puts inequality on its cover – and hosts a debate on the topic at the tony offices of the Council on Foreign Relations – the Occupy Wall Street movement has achieved a major victory that eclipses even the generally favorable coverage in liberal bastions such as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. It’s also a sign that a profound anxiety gnaws at the foreign policy elite in this country. The question is: why are foreign policy mandarins suddenly so fretful? Or, put another way, why does Foreign Affairs want its readers to take this issue so seriously?
His name was on the lips of everyone I talked with in South Korea last week. As an underdog with little name recognition but a long history of progressive organizing, he came from behind late last month to become the new mayor of Seoul.
Remember his name. Park Won Soon is perhaps the first politician to win with an Occupy Wall Street platform.
Earlier this month, Montana Democrat Jon Tester and Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced a proposal to create a commission to evaluate U.S. military presence overseas. The bill does hold out the possibility that such a commission might recommend opening new bases overseas. But that’s just hedging bets. Tester and Hutchison are committed to examining “the potential benefits and savings realized by closing outdated overseas military bases.”
This year, the world was united in our excitement for the World Cup, and in praise of South Africa being the first host for the games in the continent of Africa. Thirty-two countries would compete and more than a million tourists came to South Africa during the month; visitors from Zimbabwe, the US, Malawi, Mexico, and all over the globe joined the Zulu, Xhosa, East Indians, Afrikaners, British, mixed-race “Coloureds,” and other infinitely diverse people that make up the hosting “Rainbow Nation.” But when the wave of euphoria subsides, South Africans will still be faced with a fractured society, a legacy of segregation and inequality established under apartheid and persisting to this day.
Obama administration officials fanned out over Washington, convened conference calls, and took to the airwaves in May to sell the new National Security Strategy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made her pitch at the Brookings Institution. Foreign Policy magazine identified the nugget of actual news in her remarks, which came, not in the speech, but at the tail end of the Q&A session that followed.
With a global economic slowdown and a deepening food crisis, the biggest foreign policy priority for the next President must be building a global economy that benefits poor and working families in the United States and around the world.
Seventy-five years ago, major media outlets have reminded us over recent weeks, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal had its American debut. But when exactly did the New Deal end? The American Journal of Public Health has just published a fascinating article that suggests a surprising answer.
Some people, at year’s end, like to spread holiday cheer. The world might do better, suggests a landmark new report from the United Nations University in Helsinki, to start spreading wealth.
The national immigration debate largely is split between two camps.