author - oman observer

This past week the Internet became radicalised about the progress of artificial intelligence by, appropriately enough, an online essay with an assist from AI. In his viral piece “Something Big Is...

On a recent snowbound day, I took up “Conquistadores,” Fernando Cervantes’ history of the European arrival in the New World, and found myself meditating on the period in the early 1500s when the...

Elon Musk has finally done something predictable (for a gazillionaire with a political itch, that is): He says he’s launching a third party devoted to the cause of deficit reduction. Instead of the...

The only way to know for certain where Donald Trump’s Iran policy is going is to wait — for the president to throw in fully with the Israelis, for a new attempt at diplomacy with a battered...

Whether the debate is occasioned by a polemical book or a movie like last year’s “Civil War”, I consistently take the negative on the question of whether the United States is headed for a...

Pope Francis, who passed to his reward on the morning after Easter at age 88, was a version of the liberal pope that many Catholics had earnestly desired all through the long reign of John Paul II and...

Two weeks ago, I interviewed Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and leading figure of the nascent tech right, for the “Matter of Opinion” podcast; this week I interviewed Steve Bannon, the...

My column last weekend made some pretty sweeping historical claims: that the re-election of Donald Trump proved that we have definitively exited the post-Cold War era; that the phase of history that...

Across Donald Trump’s presidency, the American establishment achieved an unprecedented level of ideological unity and conformity — first in opposition to Trump himself, and then in the embrace of...

The writer is an American political analyst, blogger, author and NYT columnistIn Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, a 'psychohistorian' in a far-flung galactic empire figures out a way to predict the...

Joe Biden is an unpopular president, and without some recovery, he could easily lose to Donald Trump in 2024.By itself, this is no great wonder: His two predecessors were also unpopular at this stage...

“I feel somehow / That it isn’t going to last,” Philip Larkin wrote in “Going, Going,” his lament for the English countryside — that development would soon cover everything green and...

To fully understand a problem like terrorism, you need to accept complexity, a sprawl of general factors — personal, historical, cultural — converging in a specific movement or a single actor.The...

Long before Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine, his aggressions were often met by the accusation — levelled by John Kerry and Angela Merkel, among others — that he’s a 19th-century figure in a...

One of the hardest challenges in geopolitics is figuring out how to conduct a successful retreat. We witnessed that reality last summer in Afghanistan, when the Biden administration made the correct...