Restaurant Associates is not the company it used to be. It has long operated restaurants, catered events and run corporate dining rooms for clients including Google and the Smithsonian Institution. Now it employs about half of the 10,000 or so people it had on staff before the pandemic. As its lines of business dried up, the company invented new ones.
On September 1, 2021, Michael McFaul tweeted “That the US benefits more from democracy in the world does not mean that American leaders today have the ideas or means to promote democracy abroad. After fourteen years of democratic recession worldwide we should be humble in our proclamations & ambitions.”
Climate policy is ultimately an economic question. How much does climate change hurt? How much do various policy ideas actually help, and what do they cost? You don’t have to argue with one line of the IPCC scientific reports to disagree with climate policy that doesn’t make economic sense.
According to Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the onus of supporting sustainable investments should fall on governments rather than central banks, which already have major other policy commitments.
In mid-August, owing to shoddy planning and execution, the Biden administration’s frenetic troop withdrawal paved the way to the Taliban’s lightning takeover of Afghanistan. The United States left stranded behind enemy lines “at least hundreds of U.S. citizens” and tens of thousands of Afghans who supported American efforts.
Politics is defined by rivalries, but rarely do they come as bitter as the one between the most powerful man in Poland and his nemesis. For ruling party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the summer return of former Prime Minister Donald Tusk to spearhead Poland’s opposition has reignited an enmity that’s deeply personal. It involves not only electoral jousting over the years but the death of his twin brother.
A “don’t look back!” approach to life has lots of appeal. We aim for bright futures. Why not focus all our mental energies on plowing ahead with vigor? Preoccupations with the past can slow us down. Future-mindedness, for good reason, is deemed a character strength for people of all ages.
