Europe loomed large in the news this week amid all sorts of economic and political turbulence. Whoever wins the presidency in France will likely be at the head of the anti-austerity and anti-reform movement, which looks to be a political winner across much of the continent. But the triumph of the rejectionists may be pyrrhic, as the […]

Among the things we watch here at Via Meadia are trends in world food prices.  Middle class Americans grumble when prices go up at the supermarket ($5 bucks for a box of cornflakes? Are these people insane?) but for billions of people all over the world rising food prices can mean the difference between happy […]

The New York Times has a startling and important story today on American health care, all the more interesting because the implications of the piece, not fully explored by the paper, suggest that reforming health care markets rather than a government takeover could drive costs still lower and put America’s most pressing domestic problem onto […]

The New York Times has a long piece on the political situation in Wisconsin this morning, and in some ways it is reasonably balanced. The reporters note, for example, that the Koch brothers own a factory in Wisconsin that is unionized and that the union and management at the factory seem to have a reasonably […]

Attacks apparently directed against Christians by radical groups claiming the mantle of Islam in Kenya and Nigeria yesterday illustrated the increasing polarization along Africa’s Christian-Muslim divide.In Nigeria, radicals attacked a university campus in Kano, a predominantly and historically Islamic city in northern Nigeria with a significant Christian minority. Approximately 15 people attending a Christian prayer […]

In a truly disturbing blog post at TNR, Timothy Noah has identified one of those national trends that shows where this country is headed, and not in a nice way: internships for sale. As Noah points out, private schools are selling internships in charity auctions; obviously, this gives privileged kids a pretty good leg up […]

These are heady days in Myanmar. For decades an international pariah dependent on the largesse of China, Myanmar’s recent decision to pull away from Beijing’s embrace and begin a tentative democratization process has been lauded by the global community, both in word and in deed. The Financial Times recaps the latest developments: The UN secretary-general and […]

h/t: InstapunditA $231 million public employee pension fund has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The assets on hand cannot pay the $931 million in claims the fund faces, and the trustees plan to “restructure” their obligations under bankruptcy law. In other words, they will be cutting the benefits they pay to a level the […]

The academic publishing racket is a mess: much of what is published in it is worthless and although publishers don’t pay academics for either contributing articles or peer reviewing the work of their colleagues, publishers charge grotesque subscription fees to university libraries. They have no choice but to pay up because if university faculty can’t […]

It’s a busy day in the sprawling Mead corporate empire; I’m attending the New America Foundation board retreat for part of the day and traveling back to New York later on.  I will post as and when I can; in the meantime I hope readers will enjoy what, at least in this part of the […]