Tabla de contenidos para January - February 2017 en Foreign Policy

When former Labour Party leader EAMON GILMORE helped spearhead Ireland’s successful national referendum on same-sex marriage, the 2015 Global Thinker hoped the vote might serve as a symbol of progress for queer people in countries where their identities invite persecution. Novelist SALEEM HADDAD wonders, though, why LGBT communities should look to the West for inspiration. The 2016 Global Thinker’s debut novel, Guapa, explores alienation and community in the Middle East through the eyes of a queer protagonist. The two men recently connected to debate the virtues of a global LGBT rights agenda. SALEEM HADDAD: As someone who is both queer and Arab and living with one foot in the Middle East and one foot in Europe, where you have very diff erent concepts and understandings of what it means to be…

IT STARTED AS A SEEMINGLY SWEET TWITTER chatbot. Modeled after a millennial, it awakened on the internet from behind a pixelated image of a full-lipped young female with a wide and staring gaze. Microsoft, the multinational technology company that created the bot, named it Tay, assigned it a gender, and gave “her” account a tagline that promised, “The more you talk the smarter Tay gets!” “hellooooooo world!!!” Tay tweeted on the morning of March 23, 2016. She brimmed with enthusiasm: “can i just say that im stoked to meet u? humans are super cool.” She asked innocent questions: “Why isn’t #NationalPuppyDay everyday?” Tay’s designers built her to be a creature of the web, reliant on artificial intelligence (AI) to learn and engage in human conversations and get better at it…

Remember the Social Security lockbox? It seems a long time ago, doesn’t it? Almost quaint. There was good old Al Gore in his first presidential debate against George W. Bush arguing passionately that he had found a way to ensure that America’s elderly received retirement support from their government. It was 16 years and a lifetime ago. Back when winning the presidential election by almost 500,000 votes and still losing the presidency seemed the worst travesty imaginable. ¶ Now if you think I’m heading into another screed about the rancid mess that is the American political process at this moment, you are wrong. It is a travesty. But candidly, I’m all screeded out. Besides, the biggest changes that have taken place between the first U.S. election of this century and…

Anyone with a penny to spare in 17th-century London could purchase a “Bill of Mortality,” a weekly leaflet that recorded the city’s burials. In the mid-1660s, an amateur statistician decided to analyze all of the bills together. John Graunt’s report discerned trends in baptisms, funerals, and causes of death—and helped give birth to modern demography. Some 350 years later, the field benefits from advanced technologies and data-gathering methods. As FP’s Demographics Issue reveals, the forces shaping populations grow ever more complex, too. Paul Taylor, a senior fellow at Encore.org, explains how women’s empowerment, religious fundamentalism, and other social trends will define who inhabits the world in 2050. Journalist Erika Hayasaki probes a future in which artificial intelligence proves as misogynistic as its creators. From South Africa, writer Eve Fairbanks asks…

Americans have been warned for decades about the potential consequences of the U.S. surveillance state—the largest, most powerful, and most intrusive in the world—falling into a would-be tyrant’s hands. With Donald Trump’s inauguration looming, I have to wonder: Was anyone paying attention? ¶ In the summer of 1975, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Sen. Frank Church issued an early admonition. He had just completed a comprehensive investigation of the U.S. intelligence community, and he came away stunned by what he discovered at the National Security Agency (NSA), even in the digital Stone Age. “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left,” Church said. “There would be no place to hide…. I know the capacity that is there to…

Demographics aren’t just about identity. They’re about how and where different populations interact. Social infrastructure is the network of physical spaces and institutions—from sidewalks to public parks, libraries to cafes—that, when robust, promote community-building activities among otherwise diverse clans. When these resources are degraded, however, they discourage interaction, leaving different demographic groups—however you define them—to fend for themselves. The stakes are real: Weak social infrastructure breeds economic isolation, political misunderstanding, and the social divisions that fuel the most dangerous forms of xenophobia. Particularly in the wake of the recent U.S. election, the need for public and private investment in this infrastructure couldn’t be more urgent. ERIC KLINENBERG IS A PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AND DIRECTOR OF THE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY. HE’S WRITING A BOOK ON SOCIAL…

Performance- Enhancing Jolts WHILE TRAINING FOR the Rio Olympics last year, a few athletes donned headsets that zapped their brains. The Halo Sport, a $700 gadget that became available to general consumers in the fall, looks like a fancy pair of headphones that wouldn’t seem out of place in a gym. But rubbery electrodes tucked into the headband press against the top of the wearer’s head and send an electrical current through the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls voluntary movement. The stimulation, when sustained for 20 minutes, strengthens the neural connections between the brain and muscles. Initial research by the company indicates that when athletes later enter competition, they have souped-up motor memory. Elite athletes, including NFLlinebackers and Olympic sprinters, have endorsed the Halo Sport, proudly…

THE 21 ST CENTURY is still just a teenager, but we can already forecast with a fair degree of confidence what its demographic profile will look like by 2050 Population growth will have slowed down. Global aging will have risen to unprecedented levels. Birthrates will drop. The working-age share of the world’s population will shrink. Poverty will ameliorate in poor countries; income inequality will worsen in wealthy ones. And for the first time ever, Islam will challenge Christianity as the world’s largest religion. What’s notable about these disparate trends is how much they are interrelated. They’re driven not just by the traditional demographic triad of births-deaths-andmigration, but by myriad powerful new forces that define modernity—from the empowerment of women, to improvements in health care, to the information and technology revolutions,…

ONE AFTERNOON ABOUT SEVEN YEARS AGO, Marty Hadge tentatively stepped outside a two-family, white-shingled house in the former mill town of Holyoke, Massachusetts. Hadge, who was pushing 50, lived in one of the units, alone. He wore 280 pounds on his 5-foot-2 frame, a side effect of consuming antipsychotic medication for several decades. His skin was marred by a haphazard array of tattoos and scars from hundreds of small cuts he’d inflicted on himself. Going out in public wasn’t easy for Hadge, but he was desperate to save his own life. He didn’t have a car and was afraid of taking the bus, so Hadge set out on foot, walking down roads dotted with handpainted Pentecostal church façades, liquor stores, and auto-body repair shops. Mountains and the smoke-stacked ruins of…

This month, Davos Man will come out to play. January is when the World Economic Forum (WEF) holds its annual conference at a Swiss mountain resort to “improve the state of the world.” More than a business meeting for 2,500-plus globetrotting academics, executives, politicians, and lobbyists, it is a tribal celebration for leaders who worship a holy trinity of ideas: capitalism, globalization, and innovation. In a 2004 essay, Samuel Huntington, who popularized the term “Davos Man,” described this breed of humans as “view[ing] national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing.” (And, yes, more than 80 percent of attendees at the WEF conference are male.) ¶ This year, though, something extraordinary is happening. While previous reports of Davos Man’s death have been greatly exaggerated, a revolution is now brewing against…