Posts:
By Mac Margolis When Colombians voted in a 42-year-old development wonk as president in 2018, they knew it was a leap of faith. But what Ivan Duque lacked in political adroitness (he’d served a single term as a senator), the argument went, he would finesse as an...
The trouble with using a word as a catchall insult is that it loses its force. If everyone is a racist, then no one is. If U.S. Sens. John McCain and Mitt Romney were extremists, what was former President Donald Trump? It works both ways. Just as “fascist” and “Nazi”...
By Nicholas Goldberg To hear some people tell it, vaccine passports are just another effort by Democrats, progressives and Satan to take away your freedom, just like when they told you to wear a mask and made you shut down your business. In a hyperventilating Wall...
By Roger Cohen Three French lockdowns, and counting, over the past 13 months have been many things, among them a rare opportunity for the formidable national bureaucracy of about 5.6 million public servants to display their gift for the complication of lives. With the...
By Dan Gelernter If you’re in a high-risk group and you’d like to get the vaccine, go right ahead. I’m not a doctor and I have no wish to advise anyone in the matter — but, equally, I resent people throwing unsolicited advice at me. I am not in a high-risk group. I’m...
By Jeff Van Pelt Mark Twain said, “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.” Some people must not have gotten that breeding. Trolling on Facebook, and in the comments section of various online...
By Sean Illing America’s commitment to free speech is uniquely radical. The US Constitution treats freedom of expression as the master freedom that makes every other possible. And our legal system reflects this view, which is why it has always been incredibly...
By David Leonhardt Guido Calabresi, a federal judge and Yale law professor, invented a little fable that he has been telling law students for more than three decades. He tells the students to imagine a god coming forth to offer society a wondrous invention that would...
By Medea Benjamin Ecuador's April 11 election that led to a 5-point victory by conservative banker Guillermo Lasso over progressive candidate Andrés Arauz was not what it appeared to be. On the surface, it was a surprisingly clean and professional election, as our...
By Bruce Wilson This is just my experience and my opinions so take them as that. Just read and contemplate it. I've had a feeling for a long time that the pandemic had mostly petered out. In September 2020 in Machala, I asked the front door guards at the mall and a...
For all the prophecies of doom about the outcome of Sunday’s election, the changes that will follow are likely to be relatively minor no matter who wins. Most of the dire forecasts come from right-wing and centrist editorialists and commentators. At their most...
By Karl Sweetman The term “vaccine hesitancy” has been used in the medical field since the early 2010s but has come into mainstream use recently because of widespread resistance to vaccination for Covid-19. Depending on your point of view, justification for such...
By Karl Sweetman I have recently learned that Cuenca High Life is considering making a number of changes to its format, particularly its comments section and policy. The reason? A number of complaints from readers who object to what they perceive as an increasing...
By David Leonhardt Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, noticed something last year about the Covid-19 television coverage that he was watching on CNN and PBS. It almost always seemed negative, regardless of what was he seeing in the data or...
By Liam Higgins Almost unnoticed in the aftermath of the February 7 national election was the death of the movement that dominated Ecuador’s political landscape for 14 years. Founded by former president Rafael Correa among others, Alianza Pais, failed to place a...
By Jan Dynes Despite all the ugly alternative news and craziness that were a megaphone for how loud the obnoxious can be there are many who have simply perservered through the pandemic. We need to realize that those who were quiet and not screaming from the rooftops...
By Peter West “There is an urgent need today for the citizens of a democracy to think well.” These words, which could have been written yesterday, come from Thinking to Some Purpose, a popular book by the British philosopher Susan Stebbing, first published in 1939 in...
By David Leonhardt If you've been following the Covid-19 news, you’re probably familiar with the idea of vaccine alarmism. It goes something like this: The coronavirus vaccines aren’t 100 percent effective. Vaccinated people may still be contagious. And the virus...
By Chris Hedges The Rev. Will Campbell was forced out of his position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi in 1956 because of his calls for integration. He escorted Black children through a hostile mob in 1957 to integrate Little Rock’s...
By David Leonhardt In a public health emergency, absolutism is a very tempting response: People should cease all behavior that creates additional risk. That instinct led to calls for gay men to stop having sex during the AIDS crisis. It has also spurred campaigns for...
