We hold in our thoughts the millions of people worldwide who are enduring the devastating impacts of interconnected crises of climate change, war, conflict, and displacement, the many families this Christmas who will sadly experience fear, uncertainty, or profound loss,
I have studied Sudan all of my adult life. I lived there in 1980 and wrote my doctoral dissertation on Sudanese foreign policy. It's a country, I learned, that breaks the heart of anyone who loves it. In the years since, I have not found a single American article or book on Sudan that did not get some detail wrong. But Anne Applebaum's "This Is What the End of the Liberal World Order Looks Like," deeply depressing though it is, gets everything right. It even conveys, somehow, the feeling of Sudan. I had thought that I should write something about the utter depravity of the current civil war, but now I don't have to.
Led by facilitators from Belgium and the United Kingdom, the workshop began with the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which the participants were asked to reimagine from the perspective of the wolf. In the reimagined version, massive deforestation had left the wolf increasingly isolated, so when he met the girl in the red hood, he had not eaten in weeks. Driven by hunger and fear that he might die, the wolf ate the grandmother and the girl.
Car culture has a higher body count than both World Wars combined. So why don't we think of automobility in the same way we think about the bloody and destructive global conflicts that dominate the news - and what would it take to transform our streets into a tool to make our whole society more peaceful, rather than more violent?