Can Game Theory Combat Discrimination?
When and why do people cooperate or compete? Researchers at the RAND Corporation studied this question in the 1950s using what was then a new…
Category: Politics
How to Build a World
A world made of glass, where a drug called “shatter” runs rampant. A world where a secret sect of writers writes the canon of reality…
Why Write? Toward a Style for Climate Change
It would seem that one of the many by-products of our fossil-fuel economy is books. The atmosphere warms, species are extinguished, the poor are displaced,…
The Never-Ending Frontier? | Public Books
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Yet this thoroughly modern war—now grinding through its 19th straight year—remains haunted by the ghosts of the US’s…
From Versailles to the War on Terror
The Ottoman Empire entered World War I only reluctantly. It did so in a bid to maintain empire, and to finally abrogate long-hated “extraterritorial” treaties…
The Matter of Time | Public Books
The year is 1916. An olive-skinned young man with a dapper mustache sits authoritatively on a stool in Sudan. He wears a white suit and…
Democracy’s Defeat Started at Versailles
The Paris Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919–20 has generally been regarded as a failure. The negotiations dragged on; national interests clashed; the gathered statesmen…
Minorities and Myths: Antisemitism in Europe after 1919
The history of Jewish citizenship in interwar central and eastern Europe, where the vast majority of European Jews lived, is often told as a tale…
Versailles: Arab Desires, Arab Futures
Public perceptions of the Middle East are still crowded with narratives of “artificiality.” In conspiring to share out the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces—so we are…
J. M. Keynes and the Visible Hands
“I’ve never been so miserable as for the last two or three weeks,” wrote John Maynard Keynes to his mother in 1919. “The Peace is…