So far, most of the consensus on what to do about food prices is (as you might expect) strongly focused on the short term: measures like spending more cash on...
Alex Evans
Alex Evans is a Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, and the author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren't Enough? (Penguin, 2017), a book about the power of deep stories to unlock transformational change. He lives in North Yorkshire and is currently working on political polarisation and learning dry stone walling. Full biog here.
Bush’s neanderthal approach to climate change
Via Joshua Keating at ForeignPolicy.com, the news that German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel has issued a statement strongly criticising President Bush's...
Great triumphs of Chinese public diplomacy, part 294
And now for the latest instalment of "how not to do public diplomacy". Last time, readers will recall, we observed with interest as Chinese government...
Re: Ways in which we are screwed #94
A propos of David's post, here's what's scaring me witless this weekend: The Ug99 strain of the killer wheat fungus (stem rust), which recently infected wheat...
Charming China while criticising her human rights record: Kevin Rudd shows us how
Australia's PM Kevin Rudd - who as David noted is "surely the wonkiest head of state ever" - continues to charm the pants off everyone he comes across. While...
From financial services to food: liberalisation’s high water mark
A couple of weeks ago, Martin Wolf penned an FT op-ed proclaiming that the rescue of Bear Stearns "marked liberalisation's limit". We should remember Friday...
When relative inequality has absolute impacts
I'm a big fan of Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim - he was the first person to spot the potential for China's Olympics to become a debacle, for instance -...
Two models of campaigning
Over at NetworkWeaving, there's a bit of compare and contrast going on, between this sort of campaigning: ...and this sort: Worth a read.
The shape of things to come
Nouriel Roubini wins the prize for metaphor of the week: will the US recession be shaped like a V (short and shallow), a U (a bit more sustained at the...
Progressive Governance summit paper on multilateral reform
As David mentioned yesterday, Downing Street's asked us to prepare a paper on reform of international institutions and present it to various heads of state...
Taliban for you on line 2
Barney Rubin does know how to start a blog post: Last week I was at a meeting in Madrid to discuss a "Political Solution" to the conflict in Afghanistan....
A thousand words…
Frank Furedi’s apocalypse now
Frank Furedi on Spiked earlier this year: From global warming to obesity, bird flu to terrorism: 2007 was the year when the threat of an apocalypse became an...
Contagious memes
From Edge, via Mapping Strategy: It is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or music as spreading in a social network. But it turns out...
Half a billion dollars’ worth of system coherence, please
As Charlie noted earlier this week, the World Food Programme has again called for half a billion extra dollars to cope with higher food and transport costs. ...
Meanwhile, in southern Iraq…
...you may have noticed that all is not well. The British troops in Basra (both of them) are needless to say staying out of the way. But as the Yorskhire...
And now for the good news
° The number of armed conflicts around the world has declined by more than 40% since the early 1990s. ° Between 1991 (the high point for the post–World War II...
Avaaz closes in on largest ever internet campaign
Avaaz's current petition, calling on China to begin "meaningful dialogue" with the Dalai Lama, looks set to pass has now passed the one million signature mark...
Ouch
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo] As Ethan Zuckerman observes, this kind of remix culture approach to campaigning has been called...
Number 10: how they are related
Red Box has found this in PR Week: an organogram of Downing Street's comms operation. The resolution's not very good (big version here), but one thing is...
More from Global Dashboard
New Soundcloud mix
What a joy to be able to think about something other than the Sustainable Development Goals for a change...
The struggle over inequality: What to expect as world leaders meet in New York this week
If you're in New York this week, you're in good company, as world leaders congregate at the United Nations to mark the end of the old Millennium Development Goals (old promises hampered by a lack of funding and a failure to tackle vested interests and so not fully...
Quoted without comment
If anything, I have had to keep empathy at bay. It is such a saturation of suffering that somehow as a journalist you have to harden yourself, otherwise it becomes too painful to do your job. Then on 7 April, a few months after I began researching a book on the...