The Economist’s 2020 award for most-improved country went to Malawi, with New Zealand, Taiwan and Bolivia as runners-up. The United States of America, not surprisingly, didn’t rank — although the country was credited last year with developing a COVID vaccine in record time as well with voting out Donald Trump. …

How America hasn’t changed in 35 years In October 1995, the American writer Dale Maharidge — the co-author with the photo-journalist Michael Williamson of the 1985 book A Journey To Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass — got a call out of the blue from one of Bruce Springsteen’s…

The COVID news remains disturbingly bleak. Deaths in the US are over 300,000 with Tennessee as “ground zero” and California running out of ICU beds. The suffering behind these numbers is obviously heartbreaking. So how should journalists be telling the world about this human misery? I spoke today with Lesley…

With only 33 days to go until Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th U.S. President, Biden is mercifully replacing Trump at the vortex of our attention economy. Today we learnt that he’ll have his public COVID vaccine shot on Monday — a convenient photo opp to roll up his…

As we crawl toward 2021, the headlines remain all about COVID. Today, the U.S. set records for both new cases and deaths with three times as many people dying now than three months ago. Emmanuel Macron tested positive, so did Cedric Richmond, one of Biden’s closest advisors. Meanwhile, an F.D.A…

In our first series of How to Fix Democracy interviews, I spoke to Leon Botstein, not only the President of Bard College, but also a very distinguished musicologist and conductor, orchestra conductor. I asked him what democracy sounded like and it was the one moment in the interview when he…

In our second series of How to Fix Democracy, we’ve been focusing on this complicated relationship between capitalism and democracy. And in this series, we’ve had some pretty severe critics of capitalism. Richard Wolf and Gabriel Zucman for example, I wouldn’t necessarily call them traditional Marxists, but they definitely borrow…

In our second How to Fix Democracy series, we’ve been focusing on the complex, thorny & convoluted relationship between capitalism and democracy. Anne-Marie Slaughter is a distinguished political scientist who has taught for many years at Princeton University. And she’s the CEO of New America, which is a think tank…

American democracy is in danger. That’s not just my opinion; it’s the opinion of Protect Democracy, one of America’s leading nonprofit observers of the functioning of American democracy. Ian Bassin is the Cofounder and Executive Director of Protect Democracy as well as a former high-level person in the Obama White…