Why the Best Lessons in Life are Experienced rather than Learned

For Jason Pack, presenter of the Disorder podcast, the person of the year for 2025 was the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney. But for 2026, Pack predicts, the person of the year will be a resurrected Jeffrey Epstein (…

According to the German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder, China both goes to bed and wakes up thinking of China rather than America. How does the Washington DC based Schroeder know? Because, unlike almost all American…

That was the year in tech. When nothing and yet everything happened. A year betwixt and between, simultaneously revolutionary and uneventful. That's the ironic conclusion Keith Teare and I reach about Silicon Valley in 2…

For all the talk of abundance, what’s really abundant these days are the morbid symptoms of a dying international system. According to Georgetown’s Charles Kupchan, these symptoms include the endless wars in Ukraine and…

Lots of headlines today about "peace" negotiations in Ukraine. But does Putin really want to end the war — and is Trump able and willing to broker a real peace? According to the longtime Russia watcher Jim Goldgeier, Put…

What’s the data behind the data? According to data scientist Andrea Jones-Rooy, America-by-the-numbers doesn’t always add up to a pretty picture. Take, for example, the political divisions in American society, the fabled…

Did 2025 mark the formal end of the neoliberal age? Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, has already written neoliberalism’s official obituary, so he’s quite comfortable with a post neoliber…

Gary Marcus claims to just be an AI “realist”. Some would describe the controversial AI sceptic otherwise. But whatever his moniker, Marcus’ warnings about AI have been eerily accurate. In fact, 2025 could be described a…

Could Trump woo the upcoming 2026 World Cup and subvert the world’s most beloved sport for his own ugly ends? Not according to Simon Kuper, the Anglo-Dutch-French football writer whose adventures at the last nine World C…

What comes after neoliberalism? According to Branko Milanovic, the World Bank’s former lead research economist, it’s capitalism with a nationalist face. In his new book, The Great Global Transformation, Milanovic argues…

The 2025 Trump was supposed to be a more refined version of the 2017 original. But according to National Interest editor Jacob Heilbrunn, Trump 2.0 has fizzled into Trump 0.2. 2025 will be remembered, Heilbrunn argues, a…

Whither America? For the Canadian writer Stephen Marche, that’s no longer the question. America in 2025, for Marche, has already withered. The Toronto-based author of The Next Civil War argues that the future has already…

The best fiction seems real, the best non-fiction books read like fiction. That, at least, is Bethanne Patrick’s take on the best books of 2025. Selecting her favorite four fiction and four non-fiction books, the LA Time…

Might 2025 turn out to be the new 1925? In other words, are we currently in the Roaring Twenties and on the brink of another Great Depression? This historical analogy, according to the Financial Times’ chief economics co…

“If they want to put on my tombstone ‘The Last Idealist’, that’s fine,” the iconic (and I don’t use that word lightly) American journalist Ray Suarez tells me. But even Suarez’s idealism was tested by Trump’s America in…