At the time of last winter's World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, and at meetings of the WEF Global Risk Network (of which I'm a member) over the following...
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.
Safe hands?
Here's an alarming thought about the current turmoil in financial markets: what if the drivers of the crisis are so complicated that central bankers don't...
US policy on Iran (cont.)
Earlier this week, I published a post quoting my CIC colleague Barney Rubin, who's picking up noise about Cheney's office calling on allies to start rolling...
Coming soon to a high street near you
(Hat-tip: Crooks and Liars)
Angela Merkel proposes contraction and convergence
Here’s the chapter and verse from the German Chancellery website: According to Merkel’s proposal, CO2 emissions would be measured per capita. The maximum COs...
The epistemic tribes of climate change
John Llewelyn, a senior economic policy adviser at Lehman Brothers, had a great piece in the Observer yesterday identifying five distinct categories of belief...
One to watch: Iran coverage this week
George Packer in the New Yorker has a blog post up today quoting my CIC colleague Barney Rubin: If there were a threat level on the possibility of war with...
Guardian: food security perfect storm “appears to be gathering force”
The Guardian today has a lengthy piece by John Vidal on "the looming food crisis": A "perfect storm" of ecological and social factors appears to be gathering...
Greece aflame
Greece from space (hat-tip: NASA). Meanwhile, John Robb at 4GW blog Global Guerrillas is saying that ...according to my Greek sources, most of the fires have...
Fourth generation warfare on the Jon Stewart Show. No, really…
Unreal. On Thursday night's Jon Stewart show in the US, one of the guests was Lt. Col. John Nagl - one of the leading US military experts on...
Chertoff for Attorney General
Well, that's the rumour doing the round on various American blogs today, anyway. Here's the gossip at US News: The buzz among top Bushies is that beleaguered...
Iran and her periphery: a region without a name
View Larger Map Back when the US chaired the 2004 Sea Island G8, George Bush’s flagship proposal centred on the idea of a Greater Middle East Initiative, or...
Another record Afghan opium crop – but prices set to fall?
The New York Times this morning has a leaked copy of a UN report due out on Monday, with news of another record opium crop in Afghanistan - "led by a...
Time for more upbeat historical memes
Another week, another comparison between the US and the last days of Rome. This week, the man full of woe about military overstretch and fiscal implosion is...
A Weimar moment on Iraq?
Writing in the Washington Post today, George Will poses a question that I've been wondering about lately: if political pressure on the Bush Administration...
David Bohm on system coherence
I'm reading David Bohm in spare moments this week. Bohm was a US-born quantum physicist who worked with Einstein and died in 1992. In his later career, he...
Hearts and minds… and souls?
From the Los Angeles Times this morning: the news that the US Department of Defense was (until halted by an investigation by the Military Religious Freedom...
Congressional oversight kills Americans shock
Talking Points Memo has this: last week, US Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was giving an interview to a Texas newspaper, and when asked...
Not just a liquidity crisis
Gregory Djerejian at Belgravia Dispatch has a good tip if you're after an informed blog to decode recent happenings on the financial markets: Nouriel Robini's...
Cheney in 1994: toppling Saddam Hussein in 1991 would have led to “quagmire”
Someone's found interview footage of Dick Cheney being interviewed in 1994 about the 1991 Gulf War. Should US or UN forces have pressed on to occupy Baghdad,...
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Saying the unsayable in 2015
It’s 2015, a year where global debate on development will be loud and active, with the new global sustainable development goals, the conference on how to finance them, and the important climate summit. However, having now been part of development debates for longer...
The Great Acceleration
Great Acceleration 2015 from International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme A set of slides from the Stockholm Resilience Centre, who've just published their latest research on planetary boundaries.
It’s time for development experts to admit that poverty is a #firstworldproblem too
“Starbucks wifi not working on my iPhone #firstworldproblems” – if your twitter timeline is full of such stories, you are probably following a few too many Northern development experts. Though minor inconveniences still trouble their lives of unexotic comfort in...