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[...] More people did indeed receive anti-retroviral drugs than before, because the US government brokered a patent-protection deal with the Big Pharma companies. Surely this strategy has its costs. Should we count the number of people “saved” by the pro-patent approach against the number of people…

That is why the issue of debt relief necessarily raises historical and political questions about the way such debts have been contracted, enforced, and unequally imposed across whole societies and the whole world. There is, to say the least, always a disparity between the official parties who contr…

[...] She tries to outsmart the bombers. But, Kluge notes, it is too late. Her only chance to develop an effective strategy against the bombers did not occur that morning or even the night before, or in 1939, or in 1933 . . . but in 1918, at the end of the previous war, when she would have had to j…

This lesson seems especially apt for the good citizens of the West, many of whom tend to mistake their own moments of private repose for the final realization of peace on earth. Against those who assume that the planet has been working its way toward an eventual state of tranquil prosperity—except …

—In the US, the UK, and the EU, the ratio of household debt to GDP has been rising alarmingly since the 1980s. Even so, these broad measures conceal the very differences that the wealth and inequality figures revealed: debt means rather different things for households at different ends of the scale…