The economist who taught the world to measure a good life by freedom, not just income. A nine-year-old watched the 1943 Bengal famine. Decades later, he showed that famines are rarely about missing food. Most of us measure success by what we own. Amartya Sen asked a harder question: what are people actually free to...

How ordinary people ended a division, and what it still teaches us. On 9 November 1989, a confusing press conference and thousands of fearless people ended 28 years of division in Berlin, and they did it without a war. Within 15 years, a continent once split by an iron curtain was largely a community of...