The Jumbo Floating Restaurant, a landmark attraction built in the style of an imperial palace that adorned the south side of Hong Kong island for more than four decades, capsized this month in the South China Sea, having been towed away after its business was rendered unprofitable by the pandemic. Social media users were quick to see a metaphor. As ...

The idea of time travel is an old British preoccupation, from H.G. Wells’s 1895 novel to the seemingly immortal television series “Doctor Who,” which first aired in 1963, the year before I was born. Although I didn’t travel by Tardis or encounter any murderous Daleks, returning to my native land last month felt more than usually like a “Doctor Who” ...

  Rather as the US is an outlier among developed countries in equating freedom with gun ownership, Germany is almost unique in defining liberty as the absence of speed limits on the autobahn. That mentality, however, is now slamming into the imperative to save energy, which is in turn part of the West’s common effort to resist the warmongering of ...