World
The European Union is buried with impressive regularity: every crisis is declared the beginning of the end. The design proved sturdier than the forecasts because it grew from a simple thought — countries that trade closely find it harder to go to war. Unions where one country decides everything fall apart sooner.
World
In the popular mind Africa is reduced to two pictures — poverty and wildlife. Neither is false so much as hopelessly incomplete. It is the youngest continent on the planet: half the population is under twenty. Many people without work are either an engine of growth or a source of instability. The outcome is not yet decided.
World
Central Asia is often spoken of as somebody's periphery. It is enough to look at the map without the centre-and-margin frame: for centuries roads, ideas and goods between East and West passed through this region. A crossroads is a position of strength. But it carries a temptation — to serve other people's routes.
World
A century ago textbooks condescendingly called Asia the sleeping East. Today half of what you are holding was invented or made there. Step back two thousand years and the picture reverses: paper, gunpowder and the very numerals you count with came from there. The lag was the exception, not the rule.
