TILONIA, India — It’s the Harvard of rural India, minus wingtips or heels: a 50-year-old institution called Barefoot College that offers lessons for empowering people worldwide. Maybe even in America. Barefoot College does empowerment as well as any institution I’ve ever seen, and here’s what that looks like in the rural state of Rajasthan: An […]

If there’s ever been a topic about which fresh thinking is sorely needed, it’s how to fix the banks so they stop doing what they’ve been doing lately. It’s worth casting the net wide to include even ideas that aren’t fully developed or that are politically unrealistic. So let’s dive in: Issue more Treasury bills. […]

An economic partnership between Russia and China President Vladimir Putin of Russia and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, declared an enduring economic partnership yesterday, promising to bring more Russian energy to China and more Chinese companies to Russia as the two leaders sought to insulate their countries from Western sanctions and other consequences of the […]

Russian oligarchs were hit with sanctions last year in an effort to cut off Vladimir Putin’s overseas lieutenants from their vast offshore wealth — an estimated 60 percent of their net worth. Mega-yachts, private jets and luxury villas were seized, sometimes with news cameras rolling. Yet for all that drama, much of the oligarchs’ money […]

Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ OpenAI last week released its most powerful language model yet: GPT-4, which vastly outperforms its predecessor, GPT-3.5, on a variety of tasks. GPT-4 can pass the bar exam in the 90th percentile, while the previous model struggled around in the 10th percentile. GPT-4 scored in the 88th percentile on […]

Putin in Mariupol; Xi in Moscow President Vladimir Putin made surprise visits to two Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine over the weekend: Crimea and the city of Mariupol. The defiant gesture came after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for his arrest on Friday. It also set the stage for his meeting in Moscow today with Xi […]

I’m not a detail-oriented person. My clothes are usually rumpled; when I write, I rarely dot every i or cross each t (either literally or metaphorically). But when I am officiating at a funeral, I meticulously study each letter of the name of the person who died — especially when I’m leading a memorial service […]

I like to be up when it’s dark in the morning, to move sleepily around in the dark, working and sipping coffee and listening to music undistracted. I keep the lights off, which keeps the visual noise off. Outside, only the moon, maybe one neighbor’s television flashing blue and green on the living room wall. […]

In 2016, I started a New York-based creative agency that specialized in branded content. Among creative agencies, the trend at the time was for names that sounded like punk bands and I unfortunately chose The Insurrection. As of last week the only thing that aged worse than the name was my choice of bank: Silicon […]

Twenty years ago this week, I witnessed the opening salvos of the United States invasion of Iraq from the rooftop of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. I was among the few foreign journalists not embedded with the American military who remained to cover the start of the war from the capital. It was not my […]