New York police violently attacking unemployed workers in Tompkins Square Park, 1874 First a chart… The chart above recently sparked a debate in my family. What does rising wealth inequality mean for millennials’ expectations to continue living in a peaceful, open society? Is the U.S. now really similar to the time of The Great Gatsby when it comes to the “wealth gap”? Or is this chart misleading … Read More →
With the classical music season 2018/2019 in full swing, I already listened to a lot of wonderful concerts in the last couple of weeks and months. As always when attending live performances, there was more to them than just the music. While a lot of classical music has proven timeless (although even hundred-year-old classics come … Read More →
Singapore - A modern city state Around 700 days since 51.9% of the participating UK electorate voted to leave the EU and around 500 days since Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as 45th president of the United States (with a disappointingly small turnout), I’m beginning to make sense of it all. After months of endlessly reading articles on the subject of … Read More →
In December of 2008, the FT’s columnist Gideon Rachman wrote a controversial article titled “And now for a world government”. Rachman outlined that, for the first time in his life, he thought that the formation of some sort of world government, for instance modeled on the E.U., might be plausible. Rachman based this on three … Read More →
Henry Kissinger is one of the architects of our current political order. First sworn in as fifty-sixth secretary of state on September 22, 1973, he received the Nobel Peace Prize that same year, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and the Medal of Liberty in 1986. This was a world away from Fürth, Germany, where he was born in 1938 as Heinz Alfred Kissinger to an Orthodox Jewish school teacher. With the election of Donal Trump and rising nationalism across the world, we are looking into the next chapter, a new New World Order. As ever, it helps to understand the past to make predictions for the future, which is why I was looking forward to reading Dr. Kissinger’s new biography by Niall Ferguson.
SP, Brazil Post by Dr. Angelica Kohlmann – While overlooking the wide coffee fields, interrupted only by some palm trees, it became clear that this was a moment I wouldn’t want to forget. Our trip was coming to an end. The dark green coffee plantations covering the ground like a velvet carpet reflected the strength of this country … Read More →
This post came about in the light of Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Trump administration’s recent ban on immigration to the US for people of certain nationalities despite them holing valid US visa or green cards – which both fell on the same day past weekend. As the descendant of European refugees, many of whom died … Read More →
Terracotta Warriors Group, Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California This is a book I’ve been quite excited to read. I follow Gideon Rachman’s columns in the Financial Times and posts on Twitter regularly as he is one of the eminent foreign policy journalists today. Of course, he is also a Western journalist so even though he has travelled through most parts of the world and lived … Read More →
Outside the European Parliament. Here, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the European Union on October 12, 2012, an institution currently wracked by crisis but credited with bringing more than a half century of peace to a continent ripped apart by World War II. (AFP PHOTO / FREDERICK FLORIN) Brexit – It seems like no-one expected this to happen despite the various pre-referendum polls that put the odds of a Leave win at about 50%. The financial markets priced Brexit in with about a 10% probability. Then, just before the ballots started to be counted, the pound went up against the dollar, David Cameron … Read More →
The abandoned Jewish cemetery of Diespeck, Germany. Born in 1990, I grew up in a world that was growing ever-closer with unprecedented speed. Every day as a teen when I opened the newspaper I would sure enough find yet another step towards a unifying world. International trade was mostly flourishing, visa-free travel was introduced across more and more countries and the EU … Read More →
