In Box

It's a long journey from U.S. enemy to ally, but for the last half-century, there has been one sure-fire sign that things are moving in the right direction: holding a "strategic dialogue" in Washington. Think of it as the foreign-policy equivalent of a meeting of mafia dons: There's no love lost, but there's mutual advantage to be won from breaking bread together. These days, though, everyone wants a strategic dialogue -- from close friends to wary adversaries -- and increasingly, they're looking to Beijing.

How a clunky old Soviet rocket outlasted the space shuttle.

A look at the rising class of results-minded bureaucrats who are finding a new way across the Islamic World.

Somalia is the quintessential "failed state" -- and not just because it has topped Foreign Policy's Failed States Index since 2008.

The curse of distance isn’t going anywhere.

What happens when political parties trend in the other direction?

A theoretical physicist who spent 14 years as Bill Gates's ideas guru at Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold might seem an odd candidate to take up the fight against malaria, long combated with technology no more advanced than bed nets and quinine. Here, he explains why geek power might be exactly what's needed to tackle the scourges of the developing world.

When U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to the "known unknowns" that remained in Iraq in 2002, he was mocked endlessly -- and those mysterious black holes ended up confounding his administration's project there. Rumsfeld's not the only one to encounter this epistemological puzzle: Known unknowns are everywhere, waiting to trip us up. Here are a few of the most enigmatic.

People didn't drown the markets; a bad system did.

When Jacqueline Novogratz first traveled to Africa in 1986, she meant business -- the serious business of sharing her entrepreneurial know-how with the poor. Now, the founder of the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital firm that works in developing countries, tells FP why she first went abroad and why it's time to end the culture of handouts.  

Mexico's increasingly destitute poor are turning to what the U.S. military calls a "death cult" for comfort.

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