Power Play is a weekly column that looks at various facets of US-China rivalry and its implications for Asia. It was a moment orchestrated for TV cameras – Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou waving to the crowd below, her bright red dress matched by the red Chinese flag emblazoned prominently on the side of […]

When I was a student at Harvard in the early aughts, Mark Zuckerberg and some other classmates dropped out to become the young kings of tech. They were smart, competitive and hard-working — like most people there. But I never could exactly relate. They had a confidence that was hard to describe, a peculiar kind […]

When I was in college, I met a chain-smoking Franciscan priest who changed my life. He was a chaplain at my university and, like all Franciscans, had taken a vow of poverty. He was smart and compassionate, and I could not doubt his commitment to the marginalized. Soon after I graduated, passionate about justice and […]

The first time I went to BooksActually, I was 17 years old. I do not remember much from that first visit, only that the bookshop was on the second floor of a shophouse and that the door handles were labelled “Philip PULLman” and “Alexander PUSHkin”, which I thought was very charming. Please subscribe or log […]

This month, the University of Minnesota, Boston University and Harvard, our own institution, announced that they’ll divest from the fossil fuel industry. These decisions are the latest wins for both the planet and for activism against the industry most responsible for the climate crisis. The three universities join over 1,300 schools and institutions — including […]

However horrifying the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol appeared in the moment, we know now that it was far worse. The country was hours away from a full-blown constitutional crisis — not primarily because of the violence and mayhem inflicted by hundreds of President Donald Trump’s supporters but because of the actions of […]

Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut is not a Luddite. But that did not stop him from playing one in a Senate hearing yesterday. In keeping with the old meme that congressional pols couldn’t find the on switch of a computer if their lives depended on it, he managed to ask a Facebook executive an unquestionably […]

How to cool the planet? The energy infrastructure that powers our civilization must be rebuilt, replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free sources such as solar or nuclear. But even then, zeroing out emissions will not cool the planet. This is a direct consequence of the single most important fact about climate change: Warming is proportional to […]

Lakia Higbee thinks she got Covid-19 at the Amazon warehouse near Cleveland where she worked as a picker, filling orders for bleach and cat food and anything else customers wanted. She was sent home in November 2020. She was 43 and in decent health, but suddenly she felt she was breathing through a pillow. Ms. […]

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a staff editor. This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Nearly nine months after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election, a question still lingers over how to place […]