The specter of economic doomsday makes war between China and the United States as unthinkable as fear of nuclear doomsday made Soviet-U.S. war. Or does it? In fact, Chinese and American military planners are thinking in exquisite detail, as they are expected to do, about how to win such a conflict. The problem is that the specific plans being concocted could make hostilities less unthinkable, and two great powers with every reason to avoid war could find themselves in one.Having been impotent ag

For those of us who believe the American public deserves and needs to know much more about what goes on in the rest of the world, the arrival of a television network determined to focus on hard news, to “make news the star,” to quote my old boss Ted Turner, should be cause for celebration. But when that network is Al Jazeera, we all need to take a few steps back and prepare before we start watching.The first fact to keep in mind when watching the just launched Al Jazeera America is that the new

Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg is thinking big about how to increase Internet access in the developing world. That’s an ambitious and laudable goal. Incidentally, it could also be very profitable for Zuckerberg’s company. This week, Facebook and a few other companies announced a partnership, Internet.org, with plans to expand access “to the two-thirds of the world who are not yet connected.” They want to make it cheaper to get online, improve the efficiency of data usage and encourage bus

EASTHAM, Massachusetts ― Americans are a bunch of lazy layabouts who don’t want to work and would rather live off the taxes generated by the toil of their countrymen. I hear some version of this rant repeatedly from people who believe that the American work ethic disappeared at some point in the past generation.Here on gorgeous Cape Cod, where I vacation, I’ve been thinking about the state of the American work and workers. So let’s clear up a few matters.First, American worker productivity is hi

The International Olympic Committee is letting Russia off far too easy. Russia has argued nonsensically that its new anti-gay law is in keeping with the Olympic Charter’s protections against discrimination, and the IOC simply has accepted it. The law, approved by the Russian parliament in June, prohibits “propaganda” in support of “nontraditional” sexual relationships. This means virtually any expression of homosexual love, or approval of or information about homosexuality. Russians face fines;

It’s time to set our clocks back in Asia. Not to 1997, as many are recommending, but to 1994. Memories of the former year remain raw. Currencies had gone into free fall and current-account deficits exploded. Central bankers and International Monetary Fund officials scurried to contain the chaos. It’s true that another 1997-like crisis is highly unlikely. Today, exchange rates are more flexible, foreign-currency debt is lower, banks are healthier, countries are sitting on trillions of dollars of

Like the hundreds of tons of radioactive water now streaming daily into the Pacific Ocean off the Japanese coast, the bad news from Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi plant just keeps coming. Stanching the flow and getting the Fukushima cleanup on track are critical not only to health and safety, but also to the future of nuclear energy in Japan and elsewhere, and to the credibility of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government. The latest scare came last week, with the announcem

Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of such popular science books as “The Blank Slate,” recently wrote an essay for the New Republic in defense of science. From left and right, he notes, from intellectuals as well as from anti-intellectuals, science is under attack for its arrogance, vulgarity and narrowness of vision. Why is this happening? Pinker asks. Because, he says, science is intruding on the humanities, disciplines lacking in vitality or any real purpo

Patent trolls are a widely reported problem for big business and technology makers. They are companies that exist primarily to buy up patents and then collect money, in the form of licenses or lawsuit settlements, from alleged infringers of those patents. Trolls take advantage of a patent system with serious flaws, and their abuse of the system is creating, as a White House fact sheet recently put it, a “drain on the American economy.”And, as it turns out, a drain on you, the ordinary consumer.L

Like many others who read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” when it came out five years ago, I was impressed by the 10,000-hour rule of expertise. I wrote a column (for a different publication) espousing the rule, which holds that to become a world-class competitor at anything from chess to tennis to baseball, all that’s required is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. David Epstein has convinced me I was wrong. His thoroughly researched new book, “The Sports Gene,” pretty much demolishes the 1