In an interesting new piece in The Atlantic, Edward Tenner discusses the rapid increase in musical virtuosity over the past generation, to the point where bygone masters would have trouble simply gaining acceptance to Julliard today. There is a downside, however — the flowering of new talent has been accompanied by a contraction in job […]

Butcher Assad as history will probably name him has had a good first week of Ramadan.  Yes, scores and maybe hundreds of innocent Syrians died in the streets, the Assad dynasty is now cordially hated throughout the Sunni Arab world, violence at home is continuing, the diplomatic isolation of Syria deepens by the day, sanctions […]

James Peyser, a partner at NewSchools Venture Fund, a non-profit education grant-making fund, has some interesting thoughts on education reform and charter schools over at educationnext.org: Our analysis suggests that most of the CMOs [charter management organizations] in our “portfolio” are outperforming the local districts, especially for low-income students. Nevertheless, there is significant variation across […]

John Ellis at Business Insider suggests we all take a look at this depressing report from Zerohedge.  It is scenarios like this that drove markets crazy last week and pushed the price of gold past $1700 an ounce.  We are by no means out of the woods. One of the key catalysts for Wednesday’s market […]

China continues to surprise; the latest shock — to foreign observers and to Chinese authorities — is the new boldness of what used to be a lap dog press.  Nobody quite knows where this is headed, but at the moment some Chinese journals and journalists seem to be defying official direction and getting away with […]

There’s been a lot of news about the epidemic of piracy off the coast of Somalia — and about the expensive and not very effective efforts to quell it by the navies of various countries.  Now piracy is popping up off the West African coast near Benin, reports the BBC.This is potentially an even worse […]

No lobster in the lobster salad? Apparently so. The NYT reports that Zabar’s, a famous grocery store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, has been selling “lobster salad” for over a decade — with crawfish instead of lobster.  Bigger shock:  in all those years only a handful of snooty and pretentious Manhattan food snobs […]

This is the time of year when Americans give thanks for the divine miracle of air conditioning. Next summer that may not work out. The New York Times reports that new EPA regulations may lead to the shuttering of a number of coal-fired power plants that contribute significantly to our power grid, already taxed in […]

The Assad family is winning the Battle of Ramadan — for what that is worth.  Brute force massively but not unintelligently applied has kept protesters at bay and prevented the consolidation of an unstoppable national movement for change.  The cost is high: every day more countries turn their backs on the regime.It isn’t over yet.  […]

The corn harvest this year won’t be as big as expected, a bad sign in a time of high food prices, low supply, and famine in parts of the world. The WSJ reports: The plant damage likely means that U.S. farmers for the second consecutive year won’t keep up with surging demand for the crop, […]