‘Why people stopped having kids’
Shadi Hamid at The Washington Post
“Contrary to popular belief,” mothers “aren’t necessarily having fewer children compared with a decade or two ago,” says Shadi Hamid. It’s “that fewer women are becoming mothers in the first place.” A “fertility-rate crisis is a marriage crisis — and a marriage crisis is a dating crisis.” Houses of worship “have been a way for like-minded young people to partner up.” But the “catch is that even religiously conservative societies cannot fully escape the forces of secularization and modernization.”
‘Remembering Muhammad Ali’s message of peace’
Amina J. Mohammed at Al Jazeera
“Ten years after the world said goodbye” to Muhammad Ali, his “voice still echoes,” says Amina J. Mohammed. Ali “wrote words that still stop me in my tracks: ‘Service to others is the rent we pay for our room here on Earth.’” People “are living in a moment when peace feels increasingly fragile,” but Ali “speaks to something disarmingly simple: Peace remains possible, but only if we are willing to make it our personal responsibility.”
‘There are only four great powers’
Brendan Simms at Foreign Policy
In the “new era of great power competition, it’s important to identify the competitors,” but it has “always been easier to speak about the great powers than to define them,” says Brendan Simms. People can “distinguish the great powers by a set of common characteristics.” While the “United States and China are economically and militarily far ahead of Russia and the United Kingdom, all four states have attributes that mark them out from the next rung of major actors.”
‘America’s warcraft are aging and often mismatched to the task’
Robert Jordan at The Dallas Morning News
The war in Iran has “exposed significant weaknesses in America’s military industrial base,” says Robert Jordan. Part of the “problem is our dependence upon sophisticated systems that rely on supply chains with uncertain availability, especially considering the Iran war.” If the United States is “going on a wartime footing we can expect pressure to spend more,” and “for a nation already $39 trillion in debt, that could lead to significant fiscal challenges.”
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