Opinion

Soho House looks like a members club, swims like a members club and quacks like a members club: “From the beginning, and throughout our 25-year history, our members have always been at the heart of everything we do.” But Soho House isn’t really a members club at all. A genuine members club is owned and operated by its members, who ...

Could Germans’ cherished right to drive as fast as they like on the Autobahn soon be outlawed? With the country’s center-left Social Democrats now leading the polls ahead of this month’s federal election, we shouldn’t rule it out: If voted in, they promise to limit motorway speeds to a maximum of 130 km per hour (81 miles per hour). Possible ...

If you can tear yourself away from the disappointing US jobs numbers and what that means for the Federal Reserve’s prospective reduction in stimulus, signals from China offer an equally sobering view of the global recovery. Economists are wringing their hands over employment growth in August, which was weaker than even the most pessimistic estimate. Tapering of the Fed’s quantitative ...

There have been many dark moments in the two decades since 9/11, some of them in Kabul last month. I remain especially haunted by a snapshot from 2007 Iraq. British political adviser Emma Sky was riding a Blackhawk with US commander Gen Raymond Odierno. She mentioned to her boss over the intercom a glimpsed graffiti on a building wall in ...

A smartphone widely believed to be priced below $50, likely the world’s cheapest, will start selling a week from now. If Mukesh Ambani’s JioPhone Next, an Android device custom-built for India by Alphabet Inc’s Google, is a hit in the price-conscious market, it will solve one problem for banks while posing another. With the country’s remaining 300 million feature-phone users ...

The advent of gaming, especially computer gaming, marks a fundamental break in human affairs. Gaming is profoundly transforming two central aspects of the modern world: culture and regulation. There will be no turning back. When it comes to culture, the West has been in a dialogue with itself for centuries, indeed millennia, stretching at least as far back as the ...

Billionaire Jack Ma seems unable to move beyond his controversial past. He paid dearly for his open critique of Chinese state-owned banks last October, when weeks later a furious President Xi Jinping personally decided to pull Ant Group Co’s $34 billion initial public offering. In April, his e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd was slapped with a record $2.8 billion ...

Global leaders have spent these last critical weeks asking themselves: “What went wrong in Afghanistan?” They’d be better off asking: “What did we do wrong in Afghanistan?” To get a sense of how badly the foreign intervention went off-course, you could do worse than to scroll through the Twitter feed of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as ...

If the topic is a new Tesla model, then the first item on the agenda is how long it will be delayed. The polyhedral wonder that is the Cybertruck continues this grand tradition. While traditions hold true, however, the world around them changes. The Cybertruck was first unveiled at that impromptu window-smashing event in late 2019, scheduled to be available ...

Who wants to be a national leader in the pandemic era? Yoshihide Suga declared he was done after a year and relinquished leadership of Japan, which is wrestling with an inconsistent economic recovery and soaring infections. Governing in the Covid years is especially fraught for premiers that lack a popular mandate; it’s hard enough for those who actually won elections. ...