[John M. Crisp] Trump should cancel meeting with Kim Jong-un

The notion of a Nobel Peace Prize for President Donald Trump is a peculiar one, but only the most petty, hyperpartisan soul could wish for him to fail at the meeting currently scheduled for June 12 in Singapore. A lot is at stake.　Events are moving quickly, but at this writing both the meeting itself and its chances for a successful outcome appear to be in jeopardy. The seemingly good-willed rapprochement that began with North Korea’s attendance at the recent Winter Olympics has largely evaporat

May 23, 2018

[Julian Lee] Russia flexes its soft power muscles

Oil has touched a level above $80 a barrel for the first time since November 2014. OPEC’s inventory target for output cuts has been met.　But even though its oil companies want to turn on the taps and its finance ministry may be worried about prices rising too far, Russia won’t bring its output deal with the group to a juddering halt when the participants meet in Vienna next month. Instead, it will stand alongside its Saudi partner and continue to toe the line on production restraint.　Its partici

May 22, 2018

[John R. Eperjesi] The mephitic breath of global warming: PM2.5 as hyperobject

In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Timothy Morton observes that, “You can no longer have a routine conversation about the weather with a stranger. The presence of global warming looms into the conversation like a shadow, introducing strange gaps.” These days in Seoul, South Korea, you can no longer have routine conversations on the street about the weather due to the simple fact that your and your interlocutor’s faces are probably both covered in air pollution ma

May 22, 2018

[Amy Nathan] You’re never too old, busy or rusty to make music

Eighty-five percent of adults in the US who do not play a musical instrument wish they had learned to play one, according to a 2009 Gallup Poll; 69 percent would like to play one now. Nearly all believe musical skills can be learned at any age. Yet a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts survey found that just 12 percent of US adults were playing musical instruments.　This gap between aspiration and actuality occurs despite research that shows that making music, as a pro or amateur, is good for th

May 22, 2018

[Matthew Mitchell] Sports wagering has an unlikely foe

Last week the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an issue that seems to be nearing a tipping point in terms of public acceptance: sports betting. But will it be enough to overcome staunch opposition from those who stand to lose the most? Time will tell.　Back in 2011, New Jersey voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment to their state constitution to allow sports betting in the Garden State and the following year, then-Gov. Chris Christie signed a law permitting the practice. In doing so, he chall

May 21, 2018

[Aryeh Neier] Where free speech ends

I have long defended freedom of speech for all, even those expressing the most appalling views. Yet I applauded when a United Nations court sentenced Vojislav Seselj, a Serbian politician, to ten years in prison for inciting war crimes with a nationalist speech in the former Yugoslavia during the early 1990s.Freedom of speech is a fundamental human right. That is why, when I was the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1977, I defended that right for a group calling themse

May 21, 2018

[Markos Kounalakis] Trump moves fast and breaks things to disrupt world

Hang out in any Silicon Valley cafe and the word “disruption” is sure to be uttered at a nearby table. It is the keyword to unlock funding for forward-leaning ideas and the approach toward cutting out the middle man in transactions, leaving behind the inefficiencies in mediation, and burying the slow-to-change and inertia-bound in industry. Disruption is everything and everyone wants a piece of it. Including the American people.　Disruption has hit every industry, from car transportation services

May 21, 2018

[Colin Irwin and Yoon Seong-won] A tale of two peace processes: Korea and Cyprus

All peace processes are different, different peoples, histories, places, time lines and how they got in the mess they are in and how to get out of it. This is true of Cyprus and Korea but there are also some similarities and if we focus and those there may be some peace making lessons each side can learn from the other. Both Korea and Cyprus are “frozen conflicts,” Korea since the armistice in 1953 and Cyprus since the Turkish invasion in 1974. Although not all conservatives are intransigent, in

May 20, 2018

[Ramesh Ponnuru] Furor over Trump’s ‘animals’ remark misses the point

One of the oddities of our political moment is how frequently we are asked to tease out the layers of meaning of remarks by President Donald Trump as though he had chosen them with the care of a good poet. The latest controversy -- although by the time this appears it may have been overtaken by another one -- concerns the president’s comment, “These aren’t people. They’re animals.”　The New York Times and USA Today were among the media outlets that suggested that Trump had referred to illegal imm

May 20, 2018

[David Ignatius] Trump is fomenting a trans-Atlantic rift

President Trump’s dismissive treatment of Europe is beginning to erode the trans-Atlantic alliance, which for many decades has been the central pillar of US national-security policy. The growing European-American rift may be the most important but least discussed consequence of Trump’s foreign policy. His disruptive style is usually seen as destabilizing distant adversaries in Pyongyang, Tehran and Beijing. But the diplomatic bombs have also been exploding here in Brussels, the capital of the Eu

May 20, 2018

[Noah Smith] US social safety net has improved a lot

There’s a common misperception that the US is the land of small government, where the poor receive little assistance. To many on the left, the US is a uniquely bad actor, eschewing the enlightened social democracy of Western Europe and leaving the economically unfortunate to suffer. Those on the right tend to take a more positive view of the same notion, trumpeting the US’s small welfare state as evidence of a commitment to free markets and self-reliance.　As with most myths, there is a grain of

May 18, 2018