HOPE I DIE BEFORE I GET OLD The Last Case of Sherlock Holmes Tickets now available here. Read about the show in the Daily Hampshire Gazette! And here in The Reminder! “Saw this very funny and engaging play last night and really enjoyed it. The playwright and performer, John Feffer,, has melded history, humor, and… Continue reading New Play: Hope I Die Before I Get Old
Entrepreneurs and adventurers have long traveled the world in search of gold. European empires looted Latin America for its silver and tin. Diamonds attracted the rapacious to Africa. Oil has built enormous empires of wealth in the Gulf states. Today, an entirely different scramble for natural resources is taking place. These “critical raw materials” play… Continue reading The Mineral Rush
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has resulted in the deaths so far of more than 8,700 Ukrainian civilians, including more than 500 children. It has caused a massive drop in the country’s economic output, with GDP declining by 29.1 percent. And it has had widespread consequences for the environment: inside Ukraine, in surrounding countries,… Continue reading How Russia’s War in Ukraine Threatens the Planet
Henry Kissinger is arrogant. At 100 years old, he still represents all that is smug and imperious about U.S. foreign policy. Donald Trump and his fellow denizens of the far right project the same vibe with their MAGA madness. A similar strain of American arrogance can even be found among liberals, the ones who believe… Continue reading The Surprising Pervasiveness of American Arrogance
The burning of fossil fuels—oil, coal, natural gas—is responsible for nearly 90 percent of global carbon emissions. Despite almost-universal recognition of the need to reduce the use of those fossil fuels, the industrialized world is having the hardest time breaking its addiction. The economic rebound from the COVID-19 shutdowns generated the largest ever increase in… Continue reading How to Rapidly Reduce Fossil Fuel Use
Taiwan is a country, but not many other states recognize it as such. Only 13 countries maintain diplomatic relations with the island nation. These are small or poor or both, like Haiti, Paraguay, and Tuvalu. Honduras switched its diplomatic allegiance from Taipei to Beijing just one month ago. Taiwan doesn’t have a seat at the… Continue reading The Trouble with Taiwan
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the United States quickly moved to support the government in Kyiv. With Joe Biden in the White House, having replaced someone who made no effort to conceal his admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, this U.S. support was no surprise. Prior to the invasion, the Biden administration had… Continue reading U.S. and Ukraine: Sending Arms or Twisting Arms?
“After me, the deluge,” Louis XV reportedly said back in 1757. “Be careful what you wish for,” the French king seemed to be saying, “because once I’m gone, the country will go to the dogs, and frankly I don’t care.” Louis’ remark had a very specific context—an assassination attempt in 1757, a French military defeat… Continue reading The Persistent Allure of Military Coups
If you take a poll of American pundits and policymakers about the greatest threat facing the U.S. government, they’d probably put China at the top of the list. Maybe a handful would opt for Russia. A few holdouts from the War on Terrorism era might point to Islamic extremism. But the greatest threat to the… Continue reading The U.S. Government’s Greatest Enemy
Donald Trump is currently facing 34 charges of tax and accounting fraud in a New York trial. It is the first time that an American president has faced criminal charges. The United States now joins a number of democratic countries where the chief executive has been put on trial. In some of these countries—South Korea,… Continue reading Donald Trump and America’s Democratic Reputation
Gustavo Petro doesn’t just want to transform his own country; he wants to change the world. The new leader of Colombia, who took office last August, is targeting what he calls his nation’s “economy of death.” That means pivoting away from oil, natural gas, coal, and narcotics toward more sustainable economic activities. Given that oil… Continue reading The Shift from Pink to Green in Latin America
Leaving aside the manufactured justifications, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 to reassert U.S. power in the Middle East and reduce the influence of Iran. It wasn’t terrorism or yellow cake or even Saddam Hussein’s appalling human rights abuses that motivated one of the most tragic of U.S. foreign policy blunders. It was geopolitics,… Continue reading Ukraine and the Lessons of the Iraq War
The global economy hit a new milestone in 2022 by surpassing $100 trillion. This expansion, which has experienced only the occasional setback such as the 2020 COVID shutdowns, has been accelerated by trade. The world trade volume experienced 4,300 percent growth from 1950 to 2021, an average 4 percent increase every year. This linked growth… Continue reading Free Trade or Just Green Trade
On February 24, the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to commemorate the occasion with a speech. There wasn’t much for Putin to celebrate. The invasion had failed to dislodge the government of Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv or incorporate all of Ukrainian territory into greater Russia. Over the last… Continue reading Ukraine’s Future: Like Korea or Yugoslavia?
Right after delivering this year’s State of the Union address, President Joe Biden briefly encountered his former Senate colleague, Bob Menendez. The Democratic senator from New Jersey, well-known for his hawkish views on Cuba, was never a fan of the Obama administration’s vaunted opening to the island a decade ago. He continues to stand in… Continue reading Does Cuba Have a Future?
This weekend, I went on a walk on a paved road that soon turned to dirt. The further into farmland it went, the muddier and more difficult to traverse the road became. The map function on my phone, connected by invisible strands to a satellite way above my head, continued to show me these roads,… Continue reading Spying vs. Spying
Lynas bills itself as the only significant producer of separated rare earth oxides outside of China. It mines these minerals at Mt. Weld in Western Australia. From there, it sends the material to a secondary processing facility in Malaysia where it separates and processes the ore. According to its own promotional materials, Lynas is “designed… Continue reading Battling a Mining Giant on Two Continents
The international community is not in great shape. The war in Ukraine pits two entirely different conceptions of the global order: authoritarian Russia and its supporters versus the more-or-less democratic world. This war is currently mired in a stalemate that could, nevertheless, escalate into a nuclear conflict very rapidly. At the same time, the United… Continue reading Maybe the World Isn’t Falling Apart?
There are currently only two Jewish heads of state in the world. The first, not surprisingly, leads Israel. The second is Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. They don’t get along. Religious affiliation by itself does not determine political or military alliances. Plenty of wars have pitted Christians against Christians and Moslems against Moslems. But… Continue reading Israel’s Strange Ambivalence on Ukraine
In 1972, the Club of Rome released a report called The Limits to Growth that laid out the damage to the planet and to human beings of unrestrained increases in economic production and population. It was a straightforward extrapolation from then-current trends that took into account limited resources like water, fertile soil, and fossil fuels.… Continue reading From the Unsustainable Here to the Sustainable There
Some politicians just hate politics. They get into the game in order to disrupt it. They have such a visceral hatred of governance that, like suicide bombers, they’ve smuggled themselves into government in order to blow it up from within. Much of the coverage of the multiple attempts to elect Kevin McCarthy as House speaker… Continue reading The Rise of Self-Hating Politicians
The German government recently arrested 25 members of a conspiratorial right-wing group plotting to overthrow the government. One of those arrested was a member of a defunct German royal family that the group hoped to install as Germany’s new leader. In the United States, the Republican Party did well enough in the mid-term elections to… Continue reading The Future of Korean Democracy
Arizona is ground zero for the wackiest theories and craziest political candidates. Exhibit A: Kari Lake, the Republican who ran for governor in the recent midterm elections. Though she lost in November, she’s still campaigning — on social media, in the courts, and in her own beclouded imagination. She refuses to accept that Katie Hobbs,… Continue reading The Far Right Is Crazy – Like a Fox
It should be obvious to pretty much everyone at this point that anything crypto is an old-fashioned grift, a scam, a Ponzi scheme. Those who got in on the ground floor of crypto-currencies and NFTs and the like—and then left when the going was good—have made out like bandits. The rest of us are left… Continue reading The Crypto-Populist Pyramid Scam
In the early 1990s, as the war in Yugoslavia spread to Bosnia, I took what I considered to be a principled position. I backed the UN-imposed arms embargo to the region. I urged friends and colleagues not to support actions to escalate the war. I believed that I was in the pro-peace camp. I hoped… Continue reading Changing My Mind on Ukraine
To keep the planet from overheating, there’s just so much more carbon that humans can pump into the atmosphere. From the onset of the Industrial Revolution until today, humanity has used up approximately 83 percent of its “carbon budget”—the amount of carbon the atmosphere can absorb and not exceed the Paris climate agreement’s aspirational goal… Continue reading What Climate Debt Does the North Owe the South
Vladimir Putin is playing the long game. The Russian leader believes that he can outwait all of his adversaries. Since he has ruled over Russia for more than two decades, he obviously has sound political instincts (as well as a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness). He is gambling that the Ukrainians, the Europeans, and the Americans… Continue reading No Time for a Ceasefire in Ukraine
Every election these days seems more consequential than the last. Oh my god, Lula won in Brazil! Can you believe that Netanyahu just came out on top in Israel–again! Forget about purple America, Blue and Red are tearing the United States apart! In the days of yore, democratic elections pitted candidates of wildly different philosophies.… Continue reading Will Democracies Be Polarized Out of Existence?
When it comes to a global clean energy transition, China is both part of the problem and part of the solution. On the problem side, China is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world by a rather wide margin. In 2020, China was responsible for a little over 30 percent of annual carbon… Continue reading The Future of China’s Green Revolution
In the last couple months, Ukraine has successfully pushed back against Russia’s invading forces. It retook a large chunk of territory around the northeastern city of Kharkiv. It is on the verge of recapturing the only major city—Kherson in the south—that Russia has occupied since February. Ukrainian forces have also targeted airfields in Crimea and… Continue reading Is Ukraine Going Too Far?