[Gina Barreca] Perils of going online in the middle of the night

Whatever you’re doing out of a sense of desperation at 2 a.m., odds are that it’s not going to be one of your healthiest choices.　Last week, I wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t sleep. Not wanting to wake my spouse in the middle of the night (or, as my students call it, “early evening”), I tiptoed into my office, disturbing the cats who blinked, yawned and then put their paws over their eyes in what I felt were exaggerated expressions of feline sufferance.　Once at my desk, I gave into temptation.

Feb. 18, 2019

[Justin Fendos] Government fails at public relations

I asked some university students a few weeks ago about President Moon’s economic policies. By far, the most common response was: “I don’t know what they are doing.” Because this statement was made with a variety of emotions like exasperation and indifference, I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. It was only later I realized it was meant to be taken literally. My curiosity piqued, I convened a second discussion. Most students knew, of course, there had been a recent minimum wage increase.

Feb. 17, 2019

[Sasha Fisher] Democracy beyond voting and protests

For over a decade now, we have witnessed more elections and, simultaneously, less democracy. According to Bloomberg, elections have been occurring more frequently around the world. Yet Freedom House finds that some 110 countries have experienced declines in political and civil rights over the past 13 years.As democracy declines, so does our sense of community. In the United States, this is evidenced by a looming loneliness epidemic and the rapid disappearance of civic institutions such as church

Feb. 17, 2019

[Cass R. Sunstein] Case for curbing social media getting stronger

The US government should not regulate social media. It should stay far away from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and the rest. Any regulatory effort might well violate the First Amendment. Even if it turned out to be constitutional, it would squelch creativity and innovation in the very places where they are most needed.Until recently, I would have endorsed every sentence in the above paragraph. But as Baron Bramwell, the English judge, once put it, “The matter does not appear to me now as

Feb. 17, 2019

[Rachel Marsden] US should resist urge to use mercenaries

US President Donald Trump has expressed a clear aversion to war. As he said in his recent State of the Union address, “As a candidate for president, I pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars.”Trump has already ordered a full US troop withdrawal from Syria and a major withdrawal from Afghanistan, noting that a full withdrawal from Afghanistan is still on the table. Some members of the Washington establishment might suggest that there’s a better way to occupy a country fore

Feb. 14, 2019

[Prue Clarke] How foreign aid fuels African media’s payola problem

At a recent press conference, a small group of Liberian journalists made a courageous admission: They confessed they were all “on the take.” To supplement salaries as low as $40 a month, the journalists said they often rely on payments from the very people they write about.The revelation confirmed a dirty secret of African journalism: Reporters earn most of their income from payments by their sources. And the dirtiest secret of all is that the international aid community is among the most prolif

Feb. 14, 2019

[John Kass] Teaching moment from Virginia Democrats

If there were a state that could educate Americans on politics, and what happens when virtue smacks up against raw political power, you’d have to say it’s Virginia.Illinois is broken. People flee Illinois for the same reason they flee New York: taxes.But they don’t run from Virginia. They gravitate to Northern Virginia, home to some of the wealthiest counties in the country, and all those rich lawyers and lobbyists and journos and politicos and equestrians work in Washington.These are the rulers

Feb. 14, 2019

[Nobuko Kobayashi] Japan’s women need more than jobs

Japan’s leaders seem happy to rest the country’s fate on the shoulders of its women. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to get more of them out of the home to compensate for a shrinking workforce. His deputy Taro Aso, on the other hand, had to apologize recently after blaming them for not having enough kids. I can hear women secretly seethe, “What now, they want us to work, have kids and take care of husbands?” Male participation in chores is notoriously low in Japan.At Davos this year, Abe rightfu

Feb. 13, 2019

[Shuli Ren] China’s 5G riches are a blocked number for investors

How can investors profit from China’s race with the US for 5G supremacy? Finding the answer is as tricky as figuring out the geopolitics.The nation’s sleepy telecom stocks came back to life after Huawei Technologies Co. CFO Meng Wanzhou was detained in Canada in early December. While the official charge was that the company had violated US sanctions on Iran, many in China interpreted the action as another attempt by the American government to thwart the country’s advance in 5G. Huawei leads the

Feb. 13, 2019

[Conor Sen] Older workers need different kind of layoff

The proposed merger between SunTrust and BB&T makes sense for both firms -- which is why Wall Street sent both stocks higher Thursday after the announcement. But employees of the two banks, especially older workers who are not yet retirement age, are understandably less enthused at the prospect of downsizing. In a nation with almost 37 million workers over the age of 55, the quandary of SunTrust-BB&T workforce will become increasingly familiar across the US economy. This merger isn’t born out of

Feb. 13, 2019

[Andy Mukherjee] India’s shadow bank tumult casts widening gloom

It’s time India’s policymakers acknowledged the real problem facing the country’s shadow banks. What they are experiencing is no longer a vanilla liquidity shortage; the entire industry has crashed against a wall of mistrust.On the other side of that wall are a clutch of wealthy property developers and their middle-class customers, as well as teeming multitudes of poor. Everyone is at risk.A crisis of confidence has made financiers’ own borrowing costs jump. The excess yield over government secu

Feb. 12, 2019

[Hal Brands] South America is battlefield in new Cold War

The political crisis in Venezuela has pitted the US against a dictator who refuses to leave office. But the crisis has a broader significance: It shows that Latin America has again become an arena in which rival great powers struggle for influence and advantage. As the US faces surging geopolitical rivalry around the world, its position is also coming under pressure in its own backyard.The region has been the focus of global competition before, of course, from the Spanish-Portuguese rivalry of t

Feb. 12, 2019