I love it when FT columnists get all catty. Willem Buiter did a blog post about climate change, asking what's the ideal temperature for the atmosphere, and...
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.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
We do, according to this ABC News piece (courtesy of Bruce Schneier): A teen suspect's snap decision to secretly record his interrogation with an MP3 player...
Comparing waterboarding stories
Like everyone else this morning, I've been reading the account of the torture of cpatured AQ operative Abu Zubaydah provided by retired CIA agent John...
Top down or bottom up resilience? Don’t ask Nick Clegg
Earlier today I went along to the launch of Demos's new report, National Security for the 21st Century, by Charlie Edwards. It's an excellent pamphlet and...
Fallujah: “you’re probably safer here than you are in New York City”
Michael Totten is in Fallujah. "Nobody was shot last night in Fallujah. No American has been shot anywhere in Fallujah since the 3rd Battalion 5th Marine...
Which qualities matter in a PM?
(Source: PoliticalBetting.com. Based on a poll for the Political Studies Association of 300 politics academics in UK universities.) Oh, you thought...
On the interesting relationship between panic and resilience
While we're thinking about infectious disease: how I love the complexity theory boffins at the Santa Fe Institute. This month they've been thinking about the...
Ebola outbreak in Uganda
It should probably set alarm bells ringing automatically when you read stories that begin like this: A mysterious fever has killed 14 people and infected 37...
Climate change as a religious issue
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) have just launched a major three year programme to work with...
Indian demographics
FT Asia Editor Victor Mallett's analysis piece on India yesterday is a worth a look. Scarcity issues are slowly assuming centre stage: It is slowly dawning...
In Praise of Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I am reading The Black Swan. It is exquisite. How can you resist a book that begins like this? The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of...
Facebook = Big Brother
So said Wired.com earlier this week in a piece today entitled 'Facebook is always watching you': Amid heightened concerns surrounding Facebook's new...
The perfect terrorist attack
Here's one I missed first time around: security expert Bruce Schneier held a contest on his blog back in April last year. It went like this: For a while now,...
Why aren’t oil prices falling following the NIE on Iran?
Daniel Drezner has a pertinent question. Following the US National Intelligence Estimate that Iran's nuclear program has been frozen since 2003, you'd expect...
Two worlds colliding
Amid the torrent of news about (a) ongoing turmoil in financial markets and (b) rocketing prices in the real economy for energy and food, it's fascinating to...
What does China want from a post-Kyoto climate agreement?
That's the question I ask in an article published today on ChinaDialogue, a bilingual English / Chinese environment website. I've already blogged here about...
More peacekeeping gloom…
Scott Paul at the Washington Note agrees with Richard about the outlook for UN peacekeeping: "Expectations for UN peacekeeping are sky high even though...
World food consumption has outstripped supply for last five years
So says International Food Policy Research Institute head Joachim von Braun in an exclusive interview with the Guardian today: "Demand is running away. The...
The Eden Project: episode 2
Those of our readers based in the UK (and many who aren't) will already know of the Eden Project: an extraordinary sustainable development centre built around...
Australian Stern Review tilting towards Contraction & Convergence
More interesting post-election goings on in Australia. Since April, a Stern-esque Review of climate change has been underway, headed by Professor Ross...
More from Global Dashboard
The Restorative Economy
Over the past six months, I’ve been working with my friend and colleague Rich Gower on a report for Tearfund, the Christian development NGO, entitled The Restorative Economy: Completing our Unfinished Millennium Jubilee - and today, the report is finally published....
So what could a Global Partnership on Development Data do for us?
As my regular post-2015 update from the invaluable Rachel Quint at the Hewlett foundation reminded me today, there have been (at least) six separate proposals for a global partnership for development data over the last two years. The idea has a lot of fans out there,...
What Happens Now? Time to deliver the post-2015 development agenda
This is the third in a series of What Happens Now? papers from the Center on International Cooperation. Like the previous papers, it provides a guide for all those interested in the debate on the post-2015 development agenda – including for those who have not followed...