In April, French polling companies predicted the tightly-contested first round of the Presidential Elections with pin-point accuracy. The current surveys of their British counterparts, by contrast, look like random guesswork. Extrapolating upon the available data, the polling guru Nate Silver has concluded that “anything from a 17-point Conservative win to a 3-point Labour win is… more
Marine Le Pen flunked the final debate. Over the course of three hours, she tried to portray her opponent, Emmanuel Macron, as President Hollande Mark 2, as a candidate promising five more years of failure. Voters would prefer her populist confection of anti-elitism, anti-globalism and anti-immigration. It was a flawed tactic. After the debate, her… more
Garth Greenwell, the author of What Belongs to You, a novel about gay life and the experience of cruising in Bulgaria, said in an interview with The Guardian: “You build bridges across difference to arrive at the universal through describing the particular.” The bridge between the particular and the universal, in literature, is built with… more
A0970455 was sentenced to die in 12 hours, and, because he was labeled as violent, a reprieve was unlikely. What I saw through the bars wasn't some hardened criminal, but a hard-luck Pug-Beagle mix of tender age—probably a discarded Christmas gift like so many of the others. He appeared underfed and anxious, quivering in a cramped, feces-littered… more
Because college admissions committees look for evidence of an applicant’s ability to do more than get good grades and high test-scores, high-schoolers look for ways to showcase their wide-ranging interests. And since these interests are generally conveyed by a commitment to community service, one popular option has been to volunteer abroad. Known as voluntourism, it… more
My last visit to Maiduguri and Chibok was eight months ago, on Easter Sunday. Since then a lot has happened, including the negotiated release of 21 Chibok schoolgirls in October. Before then, one Chibok girl, Amina Ali Nkeki, was discovered wandering in Sambisa Forest with her child on May 17. Amina was the first to… more
Colombians have been living through war for more than fifty years. In a conflict primarily between the state and a leftist insurgency, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), other various antagonists (paramilitary forces, competing leftist guerrilla groups, and narco-armies) have complicated and bloodied the picture: over 220,000 people have been killed—80 percent of them… more
Quick test: Point to Brunei on a map. Do you know where it is? Do you know what it is? Is it the capital of a Middle Eastern country? A Balkan enclave? An Asian province? The answer: None of the above. Officially the Nation of Brunei, Abode of Peace, the country is a small Islamic… more
From the 1960s to 2000, corporations brought fewer than 40 cases through Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) tribunals. In the last 15 years, they’ve brought nearly 500. In Shadow Courts: The Tribunals that Rule Global Trade, Haley Sweetland Edwards makes a devastating case that these tribunals, which were designed 50 years ago to protect foreign investors' property rights abroad,… more
In 2012, when I was ordered out of Mexico for over-extending a student visa, I took a quick trip to Guatemala, flashed my United States of America passport at a guard, paid a one-peso fee, and clacked through a turnstile. In the shadow of the bridge I had just walked over, inner tube rafts loaded… more
