11+ mon, 2+ week ago   (656+ words) Terrorist attacks are more common during security and economic crises, but they decrease during humanitarian disasters. That’s the main finding of our in-depth analysis of global data from 1980 to 2014. Looking at incidents of terrorist attacks during that time period across…...

4+ day, 8+ hour ago   (1100+ words) Ten years ago, I had the honour of meeting Gloria Steinem. It was International Women’s Day 2016: Donald Trump was a joke that would supposedly never happen and #MeToo was still two years away. Yet, the clouds were gathering. Being in…...

1+ day, 11+ hour ago   (929+ words) From 1960, Cuba’s leaders organised local committees to monitor political dissent. And informant culture is so embedded in everyday Iranian life that there are common Persian terms to describe it. A mokhber or khabarchin is an informant and a zirabzan secretly…...

1+ day, 13+ hour ago   (1106+ words) Japan’s Foreign Minister Motegi Toshimitsu phoned his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, on Sept. 8, 2026, to express concern over the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It was reportedly the ninth such phone call between the pair since March. Tokyo’s…...

1+ day, 8+ hour ago   (1113+ words) The Trump administration wants to strip all nonprofit colleges, universities and private K-12 schools of their tax-exempt status if any of their programs designed to help students uses race as a criterion for eligibility. This change is included in a rule…...

1+ day, 9+ hour ago   (784+ words) MPs at Westminster have voted to reject the assisted dying bill, in a significant blow to those campaigning to change the law – 11 years to the day after MPs rejected a previous attempt. Had it passed, the bill would have made…...

1+ day, 9+ hour ago   (732+ words) Ghosts in Sweden? It sounds strange to place the supernatural in a country of health-conscious, pragmatic engineers. But even though Swedes readily accept modernity, their popular culture hints at something else. From the outside, Sweden appears to be a secular…...

6+ mon, 1+ week ago   (900+ words) The Technocrats, sometimes also called Technocracy Inc, proposed merging Canada, Greenland, Mexico, the US and parts of central America into a single continental unit. This they called a “Technate”. It was to be governed by technocratic principles, rather than by…...

2+ day, 5+ hour ago   (454+ words) Historical games let us engage with the past, but what matters is how they frame this history, and what they ask players to do....

2+ day, 5+ hour ago   (573+ words) Despite their name, Tasmanian devils could be found across mainland Australia thousands of years ago....