Opinion

  Mac Margolis I have a confession: The other day I went sailing in Rio de Janeiro. I took the whole family, in fact, on a blustery, pre-Olympic afternoon. And we enjoyed it. There were no shoals of garbage, no bodies bobbing in brine, as so many alarming pre-Olympic dispatches have warned. True, my daughter didn’t feel so well, but ...

  How did Donald Trump win the Republican nomination despite clear evidence that he had misrepresented or falsified key issues throughout the campaign? Social scientists have some intriguing explanations for why people persist in misjudgments despite strong contrary evidence. Trump is a vivid and, to his critics, a frightening present-day illustration of this perception problem. But it has been studied ...

  The tangle of Syria is getting deeper. What started as a bloody crackdown on peaceful protesters mutated into a multifaceted proxy war that triggered Europe’s worst migrant crisis since World War II and facilitated the rise of IS and its global campaign of terror. It has grown into an international proxy conflict. There are regional powers Iran and Saudi ...

  The improvement in the US labour market is certainly good news. It could soon become a headache, however, if it persists alongside disappointing economic growth. The economy added 255,000 jobs in July, after adding 292,000 in June. Employment growth was weaker earlier in the year, and two solid months don’t make a trend — but even so, the labor ...

  Once again, India is in danger of sabotaging its own efforts to raise foreign investment to China-like levels. The latest salvo in this undeclared, self-defeating war is the government’s reported decision to block Tata Sons from paying what arbitrators say the company owes to a former partner, the Japanese company NTT DoCoMo. The decision is particularly odd because, under ...

  Statistically, the odds of being caught up in a terrorist attack in Europe are still vanishingly small. But the Bastille Day killings in Nice, the attack in Ansbach, and the brutal slaying of an elderly French priest in his church near Rouen have punctured any remaining sense that the threat from terrorism is remote or receding. Saturday’s machete attack ...

  Marie WOLFROM In Africa, military coups and election violence are becoming rarer but poll rigging and manipulation remain rife, hobbling the continent’s democratic progress, experts say. “We have this paradox where the number of elections is increasing but their quality is decreasing,” said Nic Cheeseman, an associate professor of African studies at Oxford University. “Leaders are becoming more and ...

  Can messy, polarized democracies ever get anything done? Could real reformist laws ever be passed by legislatures obsessed with partisan point-scoring? Across the liberal-democratic world, it seems that obstructing legislation by any means necessary is now part of politics as usual. Partisan gamesmanship, increasingly, looks like a genuine threat to the legitimacy of legislatures — and of democracy itself. ...

  Pankaj Mishra Political life in the West, it is safe to say, has not witnessed a figure such as Donald Trump for decades. His attacks on the parents of Army Captain Humayun Khan, who died on duty in Iraq in 2004, is the latest jaw-dropping episode from his presidential campaign. But as he lurches toward what one hopes will ...

  In the public imagination, no industry better symbolizes the downfall of US manufacturing than steel. Shuttered plants dot the Midwest. Since 1973, steel employment has dropped 76 percent, from 610,700 to 147,300 in 2015. Moreover, the culprit seems clear — trade — and its influence seems pervasive: Manufacturing as a whole lost about 5 million jobs from 2000 to ...