Lately there’s been a noticeable decline in the tone of our usually civil and interesting comments section. That’s partly because many of the recent posts have been dealing with controversial subjects (like circumcision and the relationship of religion to character), but it’s also because of among some posters towards a drift towards more ad hominem […]

North central Africa, the band of territory across the world’s second largest continent, south of the Sahara and north of the rain forests, continued to see religious violence over the weekend. In northern Kenya, “goons” attacked two churches with grenades and guns, killing 15. In Timbuktu, religious radicals with links to Al Qaeda destroyed historic […]

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously lamented that Moses led the children of Israel for forty years of wandering in the desert until he found the only place in the Middle East where there wasn’t any oil.But could Moses have been smarter than believed? Apparently the Canadians and the Russians think so, as both countries […]

It was an essay-heavy week at Via Meadia. The big story was without doubt the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare. Our take: though we don’t much care for the law, the American political system worked and that’s nothing to sneeze at. The President made a proposal, the Congress then in office debated the proposal […]

I review books on the United States for Foreign Affairs; that means every couple of months a huge box of books arrives at the stately Mead manor and I go through piles of books trying to decide which ones to read for review. It’s a lot of work for not much product; the “capsule” reviews […]

[iframe src=”https://apps.the-american-interest.com/campaign/index-embed-magic-701.php”]With four months to go before the election, and two months before the “real” campaign starts after Labor Day, polling on the presidential election continues work better as a national mood indicator than as a way to predict what will happen next November.That said, it’s clear the presidential race has changed since the last […]

Kashmir, according to recent reports, has been more peaceful over the past few years than it has been for decades. Tourism is at record levels, there is no news of riots or disappearances or extremism.But things are still tense under the surface. Kashmir’s Grand Mufti tried to convince the government to outlaw the Ahmadiyyas, a […]

The news from the legal world keeps getting worse. Recent financial data published by the University of California-Hastings, a San Francisco law school that is part of the UC system, and publicized by the indefatigable Paul Campos at Inside the Law School Scam, shows the kind of questions that prospective students need to ask before […]

Though neither the date of the vote nor the make up of the ballot have been agreed upon, the campaigns over the coming Scottish independence referendum are now in full swing.Despite widespread dissatisfaction with their present economic situation, support for outright independence among Scots is down to around 35%. The governing nationalist party and First […]

Religious freedom is not just under attack in Germany; New York City has also been conducting whatever the secular equivalent is of a crusade or a jihad to win the “freedom” to discriminate against religious groups who want to rent city schools for worship services on Sunday.In the US, at least, the courts are siding […]