Seeing the future The Dec. 30, 2019 & Jan. 6, 2020 cover story, “The world in 2050,” was an interesting article. I’d like to provide another perspective and perhaps a longer view. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. There have been five mass extinction events during that time. In one, more

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United States An all-time high of 63,000 children were adopted across the United States through the foster care system in 2018, an almost 25% increase since 2014. The upturn largely reflects the thousands of families that have been broken by the opioid crisis – forcing children to be placed in

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The Hungarian hamlet of Bodrogkeresztúr is fast becoming a major pilgrimage site for Jews around the world who want to pray at the grave of a rabbi in hopes of miraculous intervention. But their presence in the village – which had a significant Jewish population until its deportation in

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Singer Lizzo is a contender for the most Grammys at Sunday’s awards show. She is breaking industry records, and as a full-figured black woman rapper, Lizzo celebrates her complexity in a society that remains determined to devalue it.  Body-shaming by other public figures is a

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The Senate trial of President Donald Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress began in earnest on Tuesday with wrangling over rules, but its endpoint appears to be a foregone conclusion. The Constitution sets a high bar – a two-thirds vote, or 67 senators – to convict and

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Christmas trees The cover story “Holiday foresters” in the Dec. 23 Monitor Weekly brought smiles to me. In 1959, our family moved to the country in York County in Pennsylvania. One of the first things my parents did was plant pine seedlings, which grew to become Christmas trees. This was

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Months of anti-government protests in Iraq have rejuvenated the theological dispute between the religious rulers of Iraq and Iran and their rival views about the role clerics should play in politics. At stake is leadership of the world’s 200 million-plus Shiites. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani

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The Trump administration’s full-bore assault on environmental regulations has been unprecedented. And it’s taking on not just recent Obama-era environmental regulations, it’s also aiming to reform bedrock laws that have shaped federal environmental policy for 50 years. The latest target is the

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Early in December, former Vice President Joe Biden embarked on a “No Malarkey!” campaign tour across Iowa. The word’s definition – “insincere or foolish talk” – was emblazoned across the side of his tour bus, in case people were unfamiliar with this piece of 1920s slang. No one, or at least no

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My family had one set of luggage when I was growing up: hard-side suitcases in marble white that my parents received as a wedding gift. I was particularly enamored of the cosmetic case. It was small and sturdy with metal latches that you pushed in with your thumbs to open, and the inside was

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Following the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran said it would no longer refrain from the production of enriched uranium as proscribed in the nuclear agreement it signed with world powers. And Israel, which opposed the deal, once again faces the prospect of its arch enemy being as

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Outrage over Tehran’s lack of integrity spawned a weekend of protests in Iran after the government admitted late Friday that Iranian forces had inadvertently shot down a commercial airliner last week, killing all 176 people on board. The populist anger directed at the U.S. after the killing of

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African literature Regarding “Rewriting the historical epic: African women writers go big” in the Oct. 28 Monitor Weekly: I found the article particularly interesting as soon as I started to read about Petina Gappah and her research on David Livingstone.  Two other authors from Africa

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Today it seems, hypocrisy is particularly rampant – and there’s a reason. “It’s a function of our extreme partisan polarization,” says the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato. “Hypocrisy is the lifeblood of politics.”  In behaving hypocritically, each political “tribe” can argue it is

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Uganda and Congo Data gathered in 2018 in Uganda and Congo suggest the population of endangered mountain gorillas has grown to more than 1,000, even as human-made threats to the species remain. Local tourism and conservation projects have helped spur the change, with ecotourism benefiting both

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Dictionaries announced their words of the year (WOTY) for 2019, and I am here for it, as my Gen Z daughter would say. I love reading about the most frequently looked-up words, and the ones chosen by lexicographers “to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year,” as Oxford

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It was my first time enjoying the book with my youngest child, but I’d done so more than once with each of my older two. I knew the novel well: its slow build; its complex, painful evocation of the 18th-century encounter between struggling European pioneers and indigenous Americans resisting

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Refined Kitten, also known by other names, is a shadowy hacker group that cybersecurity firms believe works in the interests of Iran. When tensions between Washington and Tehran spiked last June, Refined Kitten launched a broad phishing attack against a range of U.S. government agencies,

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Forced to choose between the United States and Iran, Iraqi lawmakers voted Sunday to expel all 5,200 U.S. troops from their country. The vote, however, was nonbiding.  The short-term implication of Iraq’s backlash is an American military-ordered shift from targeting ISIS (Islamic State)

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Two presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, weighed the option of taking out one of Iran’s most prominent and revered military leaders, Qassem Soleimani. In the end both presidents held back, worried about potential consequences – including a further destabilized Middle East. Now President

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