Feudalism

It will be months, likely years, before we understand how COVID-19 has reshaped our communities. Yet there is enough data, based on just the last three months, to get some notion of what areas and populations are most vulnerable. The patterns are in many ways fairly clear. Media outlets, particularly…

In Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People, Alex Sager makes a timely and thoughtful case for a borderless world, grounded in the principles of freedom and equality. The book offers a compelling argument against borders as a means of unjustified exclusion, writes Marco Bitschnau, and is…

Satyajit Ray was a quintessential humanist who used the camera with empathy to tell stories. Stories that capture the beauty and severity of life in rural Bengal, decaying feudalism, the struggles and aspirations of the Bengali middle class and its conflict with dogmatic religion. His films told stories in ways…

When there is a general change in conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed, and the whole world altered — Ibn Khaldun, 14th Century Arab historian For a generation, a procession of pundits, public relations aces and speculators have promoted the notion that our future lay in…

In Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People, Alex Sager makes a timely and thoughtful case for a borderless world, grounded in the principles of freedom and equality. The book offers a compelling argument against borders as a means of unjustified exclusion, writes Marco Bitschnau, and is…

The pandemic has brought panic to the once-confident ranks of urbanists promoting city density. At a time when even the New York Times is noticing that density and transit pose serious health risks for any potential re-opening, such people attack their critics as “anti-urbanist” or “sprawl lovers” or “urban gadflies.”…

In the debate over inequality, caste has played a key role. Instead, an ambitious agrarian reform, backed by a more redistributive tax system would have been more helpful, argues Thomas Piketty TopicsBOOK REVIEW | Inequality In addition to health and education, the other structural policy that might have contributed to a major…

The glory of cities is to serve as places of interaction between people and economies. Yet throughout history—from Roman times to the present—this advantage has also entailed exposure to deadly contagions. As Marc Riedl, a specialist in respiratory disease at UCLA, puts it: “Megacity life is an unprecedented insult to…

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | May 15, 2020, 8 a.m. Catherine the Great is a monarch mired in misconception. Derided both in her day and in modern times as a hypocritical warmonger with an unnatural sexual appetite, Catherine was a woman of contradictions whose brazen exploits have long overshadowed the accomplishments that won…

You pay little attention to the systems of your body — circulatory, digestive, pulmonary — unless something goes wrong. These automatic systems ordinarily go about their business, like unseen clockwork, while you think about a vexing problem at work, drink your morning cup of coffee, walk up and down stairs,…