Ben Davis should be allowed to disrupt or defer National Service, writes Brendan Dean. That this will not be allowed under current policy shows that the policy should be changed, to recognise the dynamics of team sports and the contributions to national spirit that having Singaporeans on the world athletic stage makes. The supposed choice between duty and talent development is a false dichotomy.

BY MATTHEW E. SPECTOR The first year of the Trump administration coincided with dizzying shifts in American commercial institutions. Consolidation of consumer-facing businesses from AT&T and Aetna to Amazon and Disney brought new and increasingly pressing attention to market power—the consolidation of a well-defined market among a few firms, yielding anticompetitive prices that reduce consumer […]

BY JESSICA “ZHANNA” MALEKOS SMITH As the U.S., the U.K., Russia, China, South Korea, and Israel begin developing fully autonomous weapons (FAW) systems, the issue of state responsibility for such systems remains undeveloped. In fact, the term “state responsibility” did not even appear in the United Nation’s Group of Governmental Experts Chair’s summary of the […]

BY REED SOUTHARD “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”[1] So said Benjamin Franklin at the very birth of the American experiment. Yet Americans today, more and more, hang separately. We no longer collectively tune in to fireside chats, Walter Cronkite, or even Seinfeld. Instead, like a modern […]

BY ANDREW POULIN AND PARTICIPANTS IN THE DUBIN FIELD LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE “A natural disaster does not create crises, it reveals them.” When Tropical Storm Harvey hit the greater Houston area on August 26, 2017, it dropped over 50 inches of rain—more than Houston’s total annual rainfall—in only 36 hours. Roads, shops, and homes were quickly […]

BY MAKSIM WYNN Rising out of the South Texas brush country, 50 acres of stadium lighting dominate the night sky. Directly to the east of those 50 acres is a small town fairly typical of this part of the state—low-slung buildings; a number of good Mexican restaurants; and a lot of corrugated steel, limestone, and […]

BY JENIE SON AND ANDREW HONG When Americans think of North Korea, they tend to focus on the country’s dictatorial leader and the threat of nuclear war as Kim Jong Un squares off with Donald Trump. It can be easy to forget that there are ordinary people living there, continuously suffering under the most repressive […]

As we put more of our lives and data online, personal data and its management has become a much more controversial issue. What are Singapore’s laws on the issue, and how do we balance technological progress with personal privacy? Jarret Huang explains.

BY BRENDAN ROACH In 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing took to the pages of the philosophical journal Mind to pose a question that has flummoxed philosophers and scientists ever since: can machines think?[1] At the time of writing, the question was almost preposterously optimistic: the world’s first computer, the ENIAC, was barely five years old […]

BY TAMAR SHAPIRA-COHEN With only 25 minutes to grab lunch, I walked to Clover, a Boston-area vegetarian chain. The menu includes all the top hits of the veggie scene, but something out of the ordinary caught my eyes: Impossible Meatballs. I was curious. I took my chances and bit into my first-ever meatless meatball sandwich. […]

BY CAMERON LINDSAY Last month, 27 of the 28 national European Union ambassadors to Beijing denounced China’s “Silk Road” project as one that hampers free trade and places Chinese companies at an advantage. The sentiments, in response to China’s One Belt Initiative (OBI), strongly contrast the themes of cooperation, openness, and mutual benefits espoused by […]

(Photo Credit: CNN) Prior to the Arab Spring and subsequent government transitions, Egypt was quickly rising through the ranks of developing countries primed for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). In fact, it received more FDI than most other African and Arab countries.[1] After decades of deliberate work enacting aid-friendly policies and laws, it was perhaps on […]