[Serendipity] Golden Rule

It was a hectic year-end. Flying 13 hours for a family reunion, doing last-minute gift shopping and getting together with extended family for Christmas dinner kept me busy with scarcely any time to think about the coming year, much less the requisite New Year’s resolutions. Coming up with New Year’s resolutions, as perfunctory as they may be, for me is an opportunity to ruminate on how I want to live the next 12 months. Of course, by February, I would come to realize that I had bit

Jan. 4, 2024

[Andreas Kluth] Only patriotism can save the US from nationalism

It’s patriotism when love of your own people comes first; it’s nationalism when hate for people other than your own comes first. That definition comes from Charles de Gaulle, a former national hero and president of France. It’s worth keeping in mind as we enter an election year in the US where these two deceptively similar and yet utterly contrary forces will clash. De Gaulle was onto something subtle but big. Patriotism, when you observe that warm feeling welling up inside of

Jan. 4, 2024

[Karin Klein] Holiday travel darkens climate picture

The jetliner was packed so tight that I couldn’t even work on my laptop. The tray table was too low and the seat in front too far back. The screen on the seat in front was too close for my eyes to focus on a movie. I’ve opened cans of sardines that seemed to have more room. My partner, Rick, and I were among the 7.5 million estimated US air travelers this holiday season, a record number since the American Automobile Association started tracking numbers in 2000. We headed from LAX to

Jan. 4, 2024

[Kim Seong-kon] What we wish for in the Year of the Dragon

According to the Chinese zodiac, 2024 is the Year of the Dragon. In classical Western mythology, dragons are hideous monsters to be slain by valiant warriors. Thus, dragon-slaying was an initiation ritual for would-be heroes. For example, Beowulf, Siegfried and Tristan were among the famous dragon slayers of medieval and early modern legends. In classical Chinese mythology, however, a dragon is a pious and auspicious creature that soars into the sky. A python has to wait a thousand years to beco

Jan. 3, 2024

[Noah Feldman] NYT’s edge in suit against OpenAI

The lawsuit filed by the New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement pits one of the great establishment media institutions against the purveyor of a transformative new technology. Symbolically, the case promises a clash of the titans: labor-intensive human newsgathering against pushbutton information produced by artificial intelligence. But legally, the case represents something different: a classic instance of the lag between established law and emerging technology.

Jan. 3, 2024

[Jeremy Adelman] What kind of authoritarian would Trump be?

Following Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in 2016, many pundits predicted a worldwide breakdown of democracy, and some warned of civil war. But, aside from Africa’s Sahel region, military coups remain rare, and civil wars rarer still. Instead, democracies have tended to break down through civilian coups. Such coups have been of three types in the post-Cold War era. Two have attracted much media attention; the one that should worry us the most, especially give

Jan. 2, 2024

[Robert Fouser] Improving housing quality in Seoul

City rankings often produce strange results. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s high ranking for Osaka, Japan in recent years has always struck me as odd. The group produces the “Global Liveability Ranking” report for cities around the world. The 2023 report examined 172 cities around the world using more than 30 quantitative and qualitative indicators. Among Asian cities, Osaka was tied for 10th place with Auckland, New Zealand. The most liveable city ranked as Vienna, Austria,

Dec. 29, 2023

[Steven Kull, J.P. Thomas] Safeguarding democracy from AI

The Founding Fathers of the United States asserted that elected officials should listen to and be influenced by the views of the electorate. As James Madison said, “It is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government.” However, the means for government officials to hear from the people are limited. Elected officials receive emails, letters, phone calls and input at town halls, and some agencies occasionally ask for public comments on complex regu

Dec. 28, 2023

[Wang Son-taek] Beyond the security dilemma and Pyrrhic victory

Year 2023 has been another eventful year, as we have experienced in the past, and foreign and security policies are not exceptions. There were some successes in diplomacy with the Republic of Korea, but there were also many disappointing and embarrassing scenes. There has been some progress in the Korea-US alliance, Korea-Japan relations and Korea-US-Japan cooperation. However, as a reaction xto the three nations' solidarity, North Korea has shown more provocative actions, and China, Russi

Dec. 28, 2023

[J. Bradford DeLong] The US Fed's remarkable feat

Monetary-policy watchers are currently divided into two groups. But perhaps both sides should pause and reflect on where we were 18 months ago and where we are now. On one side of the divide are those of us who still obsess over the great imbalance between the supply of savings and the demand for funds for real investment. These were the conditions that underpinned a decade of zero-lower-bound (ZLB) interest rates and secular stagnation (low growth due to structurally low aggregate demand) after

Dec. 27, 2023

[Kim Seong-kon] Reminiscing about the turbulent year, 2023

The tempestuous year 2023 is waning and the hopeful year 2024 is dawning. Looking back upon this past year, the best thing that happened was the announcement of the end of the COVID-19 health crisis after the pandemic had devastated the world for three years. The worst thing that happened was the terrible war between Israel and Hamas that broke out amidst the ongoing horrors of the war in Ukraine, making so many people’s lives miserable. In addition, we witnessed the awesome power of artif

Dec. 27, 2023

[Erwin Chemerinsky] Decide on Colorado's ruling quickly

The Colorado Supreme Court did the country an enormous service by ruling that Donald Trump is ineligible to be president and squarely presenting the constitutional issue before the US Supreme Court. The high court should take the case and decide quickly whether Donald Trump is disqualified from the ballot because of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. It would be a political nightmare to resolve this question after Trump wins the Republican nomination or even worse, after he’s elected presi

Dec. 26, 2023

[Martin Schram] Challenges of a leader-lite world

The Donald and Bibi are two of a kind. Among the things they have in common is that they are not up to coping with the challenges of today. We are about to see why. The world has been watching as these two men well into their 70s, with courtroom trials pending, have appeared willing to do whatever it takes to regain or retain the power – and not end up in jail. Even if it meant shattering their nation’s democracy. They have seemed desperate to remain in control. Until things explod

Dec. 21, 2023

[Anastassia Fedyk, Tatyana Deryugina] Talks can’t end the Ukraine war, because Russia lies

Following the full-scale invasion by Russia in February 2022, Ukraine has suffered tremendously. Tens of thousands have died, and a quarter of the country’s prewar population has been displaced. Homes, neighborhoods and entire cities have been reduced to rubble. Some question the wisdom of Ukraine continuing to fight back instead of seeking to negotiate with Russia. President Vladimir Putin himself claims he “does not reject the idea of peace talks,” while prominent figures hav

Dec. 21, 2023

[Jonathan Bernstein] Will 3rd parties hurt Biden or Trump?

With former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney’s comments that she’s considering an independent bid for president against Donald Trump, experts are beginning to game out how she and other third-party candidates could affect next year’s election. A political action committee backing independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign announced that it’s planning to spend at least $10 million to get his name on that ballot in 10 states. And the quasi-party No Labels has threatened

Dec. 20, 2023

[Kim Seong-kon] For world peace, we should all be like 'The Interpreter'

The 2005 American political thriller, “The Interpreter,” directed by Sydney Pollack, illustrates how a good politician who was once a rebel leader fighting tyranny can easily turn into a dictator himself when he possesses political power. They say that you become a monster when you fight a monster. Of course, after slaying the monster, the idea is that you should return to being a normal human. Unfortunately, however, many monster fighters remain monsters and become dictators themsel

Dec. 20, 2023

[Robin Abcarian] Who will make abortion pill rules?

Here we go again. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court announced that it will decide whether the Food and Drug Administration has wrongly loosened the rules for abortion pills, which have been used safely for decades and now account for half of all US abortions. The case against the drug, mifepristone, was filed by a group of antiabortion physicians in a Texas federal court whose sole judge, US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, is known for his right-wing, anti-LGBTQ+, antiabortion bent. The physicia

Dec. 19, 2023

[Jeffrey Frankel] How to fix America’s broken air-traffic control system

With air travel finally returning to pre-pandemic levels, this holiday season is expected to be exceptionally hectic. Many passengers, especially in the United States, will face maddening flight delays, and many more will suffer unnecessarily long flying times. But, most worrying of all, at least a few might witness or be involved in frightening airport near-misses. To be sure, the US has an outstanding record of aviation safety, with no fatal commercial airplane crashes since 2009. But the freq

Dec. 19, 2023

[Michael Ignatieff] Universal values at bay

Seventy-five years ago last week, UN member states meeting in Paris adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was not a binding law, only a statement of principle. But it was the first declaration to embed an ancient moral ideal of human equality into the new architecture of international law established in response to the genocidal nationalism that had left so much of the world in ruins after World War II. This new moral universalism asked us to turn our backs on our instinctive par

Dec. 18, 2023

[Christine Abely] Are sanctions against Russia actually working?

In February 2022, Russian troops mounted an invasion of Ukraine. Following Russia’s flagrant violation of Ukrainian territorial sovereignty, the US joined with nations around the world to impose sanctions. Instead of military action against Russia, these countries turned to economic warfare. The world is now approaching two years of Russia’s war, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy went to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress for support after Republican lawmakers rejected US

Dec. 18, 2023