Technology Archive

On Dec. 4, a man with an assault rifle entered a Washington, D.C., pizza shop, planning to “self-investigate” a conspiracy theory purporting that Hillary Clinton was at the center of a “pedophilia ring” being run out of the restaurant. The rumor—which has, needless to say, been emphatically debunked—can be traced to Twitter posts with the hashtag #pizzagate, which started trending on Twitter in early November and were subsequently tweeted and retweeted thousands of times over the next several weeks. The incident is one of many that have drawn attention to social media’s changing role in a tense political and social […]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Japan last month saw the conclusion of an India-Japan nuclear deal that had long been in the works. Not so many years ago, that development would have elicited major international reaction, given India’s status as a nonsignatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The lack of such reaction to the latest bilateral agreement is perhaps due to the fact that India already has 14 such deals in place, with a list of countries that includes the United States, Russia and France. Nevertheless, that India became the first non-NPT country to firm up such […]

For years, Costa Rica has been a Latin American success story. The country’s democratic institutions and attention to good governance have enabled its resource-poor economy to thrive in a dangerous part of the world. The country overachieves on various measures of prosperity, with its ranking on indices such as economic quality, business environment, governance, education, health, personal freedom, social capital and the natural environment above the norm for countries at a similar level of development and wealth—and often considerably so. In terms of overall economic growth, data from the International Monetary Fund show the economy expanded at a steady rate […]