MILAN – In the aftermath of Italy’s recently concluded election, no one knows who can and will govern the country. In fact, the best solutio…

BERLIN – Two years after popular uprisings began to convulse the Middle East, few people speak of an “Arab Spring” anymore. Given Syria’s bl…

NEW HAVEN – Apparently, policymakers at the Federal Reserve are having second thoughts about the wisdom of open-ended quantitative easing (Q…

PARIS – Mali is a landlocked West African country of 15 million people, covering 1,240,000 square kilometers (478,800 square miles), three-q…

BERKELEY – On the back left corner of my desk right now are three recent books: Arthur Brooks’ The Battle, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, an…

MOSCOW – In 1970, Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik observed in Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? that “all totalitarian regimes grow …

WASHINGTON, DC – Because information technology (IT) has so quickly transformed people’s daily lives, we tend to forget how much things have…

WASHINGTON, DC – The developing world is experiencing rapid urbanization, with the number of city dwellers set to reach four billion in 2030…

NEW DELHI – Marc Andreessen made his first fortune writing the code that became Netscape Navigator, the Internet browser. He is now a ventur…

MADRID – Today, three European countries are among the world’s seven largest economies. Ten years from now, only two will remain. By 2030, o…

SYDNEY – In a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, on February 22, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo…

WASHINGTON, DC – Financial reform in the United States and worldwide hangs in the balance. The problems that brought us the terrible crisis …

PARIS – In his masterpiece Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger describes, probably too idyllically, the international balance-of-power system that, f…

CAMBRIDGE – On the question of how the evolving relationship between the United States and China will influence the international order, the…

BERKELEY – The United States is confronting another round of cuts in federal government spending, this time threatening to trim at least 0.5…

LONDON – Almost two decades after the idea was first mooted, the United States and the European Union agreed last week to begin negotiating …

NEW YORK – Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s current visit to the United States provides an ideal opportunity to reinvigorate the long-st…

SEOUL – South Korea’s incoming president, Park Geun-hye, takes over a country that has been a global role model for economic development. Bu…

PARIS – In the early phases of the financial crisis, it was fashionable to argue that the United States’ system of regulation needed a funda…

ALBERTA – As the twentieth century neared, Pope Leo XIII, grieving for humanity’s choice between atheistic socialism and venal liberalism, c…

NEW DELHI – Asia’s lack of institutions to ameliorate regional tensions is often lamented. But greater Asian unity may be arising by the bac…

PALO ALTO – Humanity faces a growing complex of serious, highly interconnected environmental problems, including much-discussed challenges l…

CAMBRIDGE – In a recent commentary, I examined whether increasing pressure from more rapid stock trading is inducing corporate managers to o…

PRINCETON – The United States is rising; Europe is stabilizing; and both are moving closer together. That was the principal message earlier …

NEW YORK – How many e-mails do you have in your inbox? In general, each one represents a task – something to read, a query to answer, a meet…