Analyze

As world leaders gather this week in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, they face a central problem: the world has become more interconnected than at any other point in the history of international relations since the fifteenth century. Yet, at the same time, it has become more fragmented and polarized, with power increasingly dispersed. National economies are deeply intertwined, technology connects billions of people across borders, while capital, goods, data and ideas move at speeds unimaginable when the United Nations was founded in 1945. Global trade reached a record $35 trillion last year, while six billion people, nearly three-quarters of humanity, are now connected to the Internet.

On Thursday, U.S. President Donald Trump welcomed his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to the White House for a closely watched summit with both economic and political dimensions, given its potential international repercussions. Several sensitive issues are on the agenda: trade, U.S. tariffs, U.S. access to Chinese rare earths, artificial intelligence, U.S. support for Taiwan, Iran, U.S. sanctions imposed on Tehran, and Chinese support for the Islamic Republic. These are all issues that have left many analysts skeptical about the prospect of major announcements, including those quoted by Reuters. In their view, the Xi-Trump summit should primarily enable the two leaders to “stabilize a relationship under intense strain.”

Assala Nasri’s return to Damascus, after an absence of nearly sixteen years, was not simply that of an artist returning to a stage from which she had long been absent. There was something in that image that went beyond music and nostalgia. As though the years separating her last concert in Damascus from her return before a Syrian audience had suddenly been condensed into a single question: who truly remained with Syria, and who was really standing with the power that ruled it? Assala broke with Syria’s official cultural scene when, beginning in 2011, she chose to oppose Bashar al-Assad’s regime and support the protest movement. That choice led to a long rupture with Syria’s official institutions and kept her away from the stages of her own country. When she returned to Damascus after the change of regime, she was therefore not an artist rediscovering her homeland because power had changed. She was an artist who, throughout those years of absence, had continued to insist that her dispute was with the regime, not with Syria.

Just days before the start of the school year, public schools and secondary schools found themselves facing a problem that should have been settled before they even opened their doors: which teachers does each school need, and how many teaching hours does it require? The problem arose after the Ministry of Education decided to postpone the return of contract teachers paid through school and secondary-school funds, as well as the so-called “auxiliary” teachers, until a survey of needs had been completed and any surplus identified. As a result, around 3,500 teachers are waiting to find out what will happen to their teaching hours, while some schools have been forced to shorten their schedules because of teacher shortages.

The ongoing conflict between the United States and Iran, along with the struggle over the Gulf’s strategic waterways, has once again brought to the fore the question of militias as actors operating in the Middle East outside the framework of the state and international relations. The world had expected the war against Iran to mark a turning point: striking the center of regional patronage was supposed to weaken the “militia” model, pave the way for the return of the state and political settlements, and perhaps bring an entire chapter in the region’s history to a close. Yet what is happening so far appears to point in the opposite direction. The war has not ended the age of militias. It has brought them back into diplomatic calculations themselves.

Ali al-Taher is not just a hill whose story is over. It may be the beginning of a new map. After what happened there, the question is no longer where Israel will strike tomorrow, but how far Israel wants to extend the security perimeter it is trying to impose inside Lebanon. Will it stop at the border, or move from Ali al-Taher toward the heights of Iqlim al-Tuffah, al-Rayhan and Jabal Safi, and perhaps farther toward the Bekaa? That is the most dangerous question today. Not because there is evidence that Israel has decided to occupy all these areas. So far, there is no information that would justify such a conclusion. But there is enough to raise the possibility that Israel has moved from a strategy aimed at striking Hezbollah’s capabilities to a broader one: reshaping the military geography the party has built over decades.

The history of science has followed a winding course of demolition and reconstruction, rather than the calm, linear accumulation long assumed to characterize it. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the prevailing view regarded science as an edifice rising brick by brick, with each generation of scientists adding another stone to the monument of absolute truth. The publication in 1962 of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by American historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, however, caused an intellectual earthquake that transformed our understanding of how human thought develops. Kuhn did not merely offer a new reading of the history of science. He laid the foundations for a new epistemology, showing that scientific development proceeds through sudden leaps and sharp ruptures, shaped by sociological and psychological contexts that are themselves not free of conflict.

The death of French photographer Jean-François Leroy offers an opportunity to explore the passion that drew him to the image. Not as a cold document, but as a means of approaching human beings in moments of their greatest vulnerability, as a sensory expression of human thought and the human psyche through the physiology of perception. This is what made his experience different. He was more than a mere witness to events. He ventured into that sensitive space, fascinated by life as it appeared in its utmost fragility, with a particular ability to express the autonomy of the image and what distinguishes it from other symbolic manifestations.

One of the most famous phrases in political history is attributed to Louis XIV of France, the “Sun King”: “L’État, c’est moi,” or “I am the state.” Although historians doubt that he ever uttered those exact words, the phrase endured because it captured an entire philosophy of government: the ruler and the state become two images of the same reality, opposition to his decisions becomes opposition to the nation, and the strength of institutions is measured by the degree of their submission to his will. France’s problem under Louis XIV was not that its king was weak. On the contrary, France was one of Europe’s greatest powers, and its monarch one of the most powerful rulers of his age. Yet the strength of the state became increasingly tied to centralized decision-making and the person of the king, while wars, expenditure, social inequalities and imbalances in public finances accumulated costs that later generations would have to bear.

The question “Has the world become stupider?” frequently returns in contemporary debates about digital media, search engines, and social networks. On the surface, it seems simple. Yet behind it lies a deeper issue concerning the very nature of knowledge: how it is produced, how it is transmitted, and how it is consumed. Perhaps “Have we become stupider?” is not the most accurate question. A better one might be: Is knowledge still being transmitted in a way that allows it to be understood and made productive? Do most readers still go back to the original texts? Or do they turn instead to summaries and to what is said about those texts through material circulating among readers?