Lately, I avoid conversations with my father because of his passion for lecturing me about politics from a hard-right perspective. It began during COVID lockdowns. Not long ago, he told me he sees Tucker Carlson as a hero. Exasperated, I told him he was idolizing a guy who had mocked his daughter's reporting on national TV. He shook his head as if I were lying or whining, then soliloquized about Carlson's defense of traditional masculinity. "Tucker has balls down to the floor,&quo

It was a hectic year-end. Flying 13 hours for a family reunion, doing last-minute gift shopping and getting together with extended family for Christmas dinner kept me busy with scarcely any time to think about the coming year, much less the requisite New Year’s resolutions. Coming up with New Year’s resolutions, as perfunctory as they may be, for me is an opportunity to ruminate on how I want to live the next 12 months. Of course, by February, I would come to realize that I had bit

It’s patriotism when love of your own people comes first; it’s nationalism when hate for people other than your own comes first. That definition comes from Charles de Gaulle, a former national hero and president of France. It’s worth keeping in mind as we enter an election year in the US where these two deceptively similar and yet utterly contrary forces will clash. De Gaulle was onto something subtle but big. Patriotism, when you observe that warm feeling welling up inside of

The jetliner was packed so tight that I couldn’t even work on my laptop. The tray table was too low and the seat in front too far back. The screen on the seat in front was too close for my eyes to focus on a movie. I’ve opened cans of sardines that seemed to have more room. My partner, Rick, and I were among the 7.5 million estimated US air travelers this holiday season, a record number since the American Automobile Association started tracking numbers in 2000. We headed from LAX to

According to the Chinese zodiac, 2024 is the Year of the Dragon. In classical Western mythology, dragons are hideous monsters to be slain by valiant warriors. Thus, dragon-slaying was an initiation ritual for would-be heroes. For example, Beowulf, Siegfried and Tristan were among the famous dragon slayers of medieval and early modern legends. In classical Chinese mythology, however, a dragon is a pious and auspicious creature that soars into the sky. A python has to wait a thousand years to beco

The lawsuit filed by the New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement pits one of the great establishment media institutions against the purveyor of a transformative new technology. Symbolically, the case promises a clash of the titans: labor-intensive human newsgathering against pushbutton information produced by artificial intelligence. But legally, the case represents something different: a classic instance of the lag between established law and emerging technology.

Following Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election in 2016, many pundits predicted a worldwide breakdown of democracy, and some warned of civil war. But, aside from Africa’s Sahel region, military coups remain rare, and civil wars rarer still. Instead, democracies have tended to break down through civilian coups. Such coups have been of three types in the post-Cold War era. Two have attracted much media attention; the one that should worry us the most, especially give

City rankings often produce strange results. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s high ranking for Osaka, Japan in recent years has always struck me as odd. The group produces the “Global Liveability Ranking” report for cities around the world. The 2023 report examined 172 cities around the world using more than 30 quantitative and qualitative indicators. Among Asian cities, Osaka was tied for 10th place with Auckland, New Zealand. The most liveable city ranked as Vienna, Austria,