Comment & Opinion - Columnists Archives
Rarely were the price increases so enormous, rarely was the helplessness of the industrialized countries so great as in the rare earths sector. While precious metals like silver…
Following the earthquake and the nuclear catastrophe in Japan, a state of shock, intuitive defensiveness and frantic political activity of those in charge of utility companies as…
Black with gold lettering. It feels heftier than most passports, maybe due to the thicker paper used on the visa pages. Before it is born, it is simply black vinyl and a dozen…
How much does popular music influence society? How does it shape society’s image of itself? How does it change a society’s image of other societies? It’s been…
The Libyan problem isn’t a problem to be solved by policymakers. It’s a problem to be solved by financiers. Bankers stand a far better chance of helping the Libyan…
Whether I’m travelling in a developed or developing country, one of the common features of news reports is the presence of ratios, often termed the “something…
As a third-generation graduate of the University of Chicago, nuclear power has a special place in my thinking about policy. The University of Chicago Maroons (the university…
On the face of it, they are similar. New Orleans, USA had been under threat of serious hurricanes for over a century. The fault lines running along the Japanese coast were…
In January, I again watched the Paris-Dakar Rally (this being the 32nd running of the event, on a route that passed through neither Paris nor Dakar), one of the top events…
From 1981 to 1989, some of the cleverest diplomats and lawyers from around Europe met in Luxembourg to devise what we now know as the Schengen agreements. These agreements, a…