United States Archive

Near the outset of my time as a correspondent for The New York Times in China in the early 2000s, during one of my regular conversations with my research assistants, I had an idea for a story that I thought was promising. Beijing was just then cracking down on both video game parlors and internet access, with authorities saying that age limits needed to be imposed and real-name identification required in order to do many things online. At the time, the state used pornography as the rationale for the moves, arguing that online smut would poison the minds of the […]

COVID-19 has walloped the world’s women. As the virus spread, women—who are overrepresented in hard-hit industries like food service, hospitality, education and, crucially, health care—found themselves vulnerable, unemployed and without a social safety net, and often neglected by government crisis responses. Closures of businesses and schools, necessitated by social distancing, have pushed millions of women from the global workforce: Worldwide, women lost 64 million jobs—$800 billion in earnings—in 2020. At the same time, women’s retreat to the home widened gendered inequities in household labor, as women shouldered ever-greater child care responsibilities and more domestic chores. More time at home also […]

Facebook had a week from hell last week, even without the testimony to Congress of whistleblower Frances Haugen. Two separate technical outages knocked out its entire suite of services—Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Oculus and Instagram. The incident highlights the fragility that a massive consolidation of resources brings to the global information and communications network, caused by the emergence of supernodes such as Facebook and its Big Tech rivals. It also reveals the disparity of public debate surrounding social media platforms on one hand and the internet’s foundational protocols on the other. (In the interests of transparency, Facebook is a client of my […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only Weekly Wrap-Up newsletter, which gives a rundown of the week’s top stories on WPR. Subscribe to receive it by email every Saturday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. This week, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, went public as the whistleblower behind the leaked cache of internal company documents known as the “Facebook Files.” Initially published in The Wall Street Journal, the documents allegedly prove that the company’s internal research had demonstrated the negative effects of Facebook and Instagram on […]

In 1996, the popular and well-respected U.S. television news program “60 Minutes” aired a whistleblower’s devastating account of corporate malfeasance at America’s third-largest tobacco company. At the time, an estimated 25 percent of Americans smoked cigarettes, and the idea that smoking could be linked to cancer and heart disease or produce birth defects was still a matter of public debate. That changed after Jeffrey Wigand, a biochemist who was hired to oversee the science of making cigarettes more marketable at the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation, told “60 Minutes” that the tobacco company, which he had left in 1993, was lying […]

While the Biden administration tries to navigate the domestic political obstacles to implementing the president’s so-called Build Back Better plan, it has quietly started laying the groundwork for a parallel program with major geopolitical implications. Just getting off the ground, Build Back Better World, or B3W, is a plan to improve global infrastructure, widely defined, with an eye to not only raise living standards but, just as importantly, to counter China’s growing influence. The idea was formally announced by the Group of Seven leaders during the G-7 summit last June. It aims to take on China’s high-profile Belt and Road Initiative, or […]

Today, nine of every 10 people in the world who have been internally displaced by conflict have been living in a state of limbo for over a decade. For many of the millions of people who were displaced last year alone, fleeing to escape violent conflict and natural disasters while remaining in their home countries, the end of displacement may not come soon, if at all. When short-term humanitarian aid and media attention dry up, they will be largely forgotten. In a highly anticipated report launched in late September, the United Nations’ High-Level Panel on Internal Displacement called for concrete measures […]

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies enjoyed a near monopoly on economic, military and ideological power in a suddenly unipolar world. Over the decade and a half that followed, the U.S. emerged as the dominant power atop a liberal international order in large part shaped by its preferences.  But the rise of China and resurgence of Russia as great power competitors has challenged Washington’s global leadership role, while offering new options to countries seeking alternatives to the U.S.-led order. That coincides with the emergence within the […]