Ehsan Masood

Ehsan Masood is editor of @ResFortnight. His latest book, The Great Invention: The Story of GDP and the Making and Unmaking of the Modern World is published this week in the US by Pegasus.

A post-imperial diplomat

In May 2006 at Wilton Park, a large government-owned country-house near England's south coast, officials from European Union countries met over two days with counterparts from countries with

By Ehsan Masood

/ 30 May 2006

Ziauddin Sardar: paradise lost, a future found

Ehsan Masood: You believe Islam cannot be reduced to a single ideology, a set of rules and regulations that define everything from personal conduct to state power. At what point

By Ehsan Masood and Ziauddin Sardar

/ 15 May 2006

The light of education: blind childrens best buys

It is morning and I am looking down from a balcony directly into the courtyard of the Noor school for the blind in Alexandria, Egypt. A group of boys dressed

By Ehsan Masood

/ 1 May 2006

Measuring miracles

At university, my passion was to probe the physics of the very small. I wanted to discover more about what scientists mean when they say that there is no such

By Ehsan Masood

/ 18 Apr 2006

The rocky road to citizen rule

Bottom-up. Community-based. Multi-stakeholder. Participatory. And now Everyday Democracy. The litany of descriptions seeking to convey the value of citizens' direct involvement in public life is proliferating. At one time,

By Ehsan Masood

/ 3 Apr 2006

Language: a toolkit for life on earth

I am an occasional reader of Global Science, a mass-circulation monthly in Urdu published out of Karachi. It provides news and commentary on the world of science to a Pakistani

By Ehsan Masood

/ 22 Mar 2006

The Islamic worlds United Nations

On 17 February, an imam at a mosque in Peshawar, northern Pakistan, offered a $1 million bounty to anyone who would kill one of the Danish cartoonists who had caricatured

By Ehsan Masood

/ 7 Mar 2006

Alexandria's bridge

Ismail Serageldin, judging by the after-midnight emails he fires off to his colleagues, doesn't get much sleep. More recently, the director of Egypt's national library in

By Ehsan Masood

/ 28 Feb 2006

A post-Satanic journey

It is an email subject-line I will never forget. "See: insulting photos of our beloved Prophet." The body of the message began: "To all Muslims, please see

By Ehsan Masood

/ 7 Feb 2006

Bush's "war on science" through the microscope

America's scientists are at war with their own government. A rare, perhaps even an unprecedented spectacle and a shocking one. Why? Because scientists are meant to embody measured

By Ehsan Masood

/ 24 Jan 2006

Doing the maths

In December 2005, a new prize was unveiled for leading young mathematicians from the developing world. The first Ramanujan prize went to Marcelo Viana, a professor at the Institute of

By Ehsan Masood

/ 10 Jan 2006

Why the poorest countries need a WTO

Size matters. This phrase, all of two words, sums up the world of the multilateral organisation. At its very simplest it means that richer, more developed countries have more influence

By Ehsan Masood

/ 13 Dec 2005