Fair Observer

A genuine Devil’s Advocate spends time poring over the biographies of potential saints to determine whether the exceptionally virtuous life of each candidate reflects a state of grace that will justify designating them officially as examples to emulate. To cross the finish line towards canonization, they must also be accountable for at least two miracles. In other words, the Devil’s Advocate has little commerce with the devil himself or with people whose demonic behavior marks them as exceptional.

I spent five wonderful years in Ithaca, New York, as a grad student at Cornell University during the 1980s. It’s where I got married and had my first child, where I got my PhD and where I had my first full-time teaching job at nearby Ithaca College.

Few figures in contemporary technology and politics generate as much contradictory commentary as entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Depending on the lens, he appears as a visionary investor, a philosophical contrarian, a kingmaker of the American right, or, in darker readings, an architect of illiberal politics dressed in Silicon Valley language.

In April, I spent four days in a role nobody photographs. I was the Mandarin–Hungarian translator between Chinese executives and European dealers at Foton Motors’ Global Media Day in Beijing, standing between two men who each thought they understood exactly what the other one had just agreed to. They hadn’t. Not quite. What they’d agreed to was what I’d said. I remember one conversation where a European representative asked whether production deadlines could be moved forward.

In recent months, Bahrain — the only Gulf state that is home to a Shiite Muslim majority and a prime target of Iranian retaliatory strikes in the Islamic Republic’s on-off tit-for-tat war with the United States — has rounded up scores of religious scholars whom authorities accuse of conspiring with Iran.

When someone thinks their own life got worse because someone else’s got better, the ballot box stops choosing governments and starts handing out punishment. The best diagnosis of the average Brazilian came in a one-minute statement by Felipe Nunes, the founding partner of Quest, a Brazilian polling and research institute.

In a recent column, I suggested a logical workflow with regard to the use of AI in a learning context.

The cyborg is not a distant fantasy — it is already embedded in everyday life. In 2024, the Delhi High Court ruled that a deceased cancer patient’s cryopreserved sperm was inheritable property, allowing his parents to have a child using his genetic material after his death — a process known as posthumous reproduction. A similar case unfolded in China, where a couple killed in a 2013 car accident became parents four years later, after their frozen embryos were carried to term by a surrogate.

Wars are no longer confined to the battlefield, nor are they declared in the traditional sense. As ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu observed, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Today, that principle is being operationalized through artificial intelligence, cyber operations and information warfare on a global scale.

On September 12 and 13, New Delhi hosted the 18th BRICS summit under the solemn theme “Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.” It was a fine formula, but what reality did it cover? For the first time in their history, the BRICS met with members waging war on one another, members who had just signed military alliances directed against other members and a host country, India, that enforces American sanctions against its own strategic partner, Russia.