With all the doom and gloom in world financial markets, it’s good to know that some things are still holding their value.  Despite the challenging economic environment and, worse, questions about whether there were enough insects at the right time to fatten up the chicks, prices for grouse shoots are at record levels, chirps the […]

It’s one thing when Russia’s ‘bad cop’ Prime Minister Putin smacks you around.  That’s to be expected.  But now instead of offering us cigarettes and a cup of coffee, President Medvedev,  Russia’s ‘good cop’, is taking out the rubber hose.Read it all in the New York Times. In an interview Friday that was timed to […]

The evidence that glamorous Queens is the best of the boroughs keeps pouring in.  Brooklyn has tribes of vagrants barbecuing the wildlife in its parks; Manhattan’s parks teem with rats; Queens by contrast has the best year round surfing in the regions, and I’m not talking about broadband.From the city to the surf in the […]

What is war good for?  Absolutely nothing, says the Edwin Star song.Increasing numbers of historians and archaeologists beg to differ, according to this NYT report. War may be the mother of civilization, it now appears. [Ancient societies] were shaped by human choice as people sought new forms of cooperation and new institutions for the more […]

There is, of course, no global war on terror.  We are much too evolved and mature for that.  Otherwise there would be some common vision linking the wars the US is currently fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya and goodness knows where else.But if there were such a war, this would be good […]

In Libya as elsewhere, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.  The Dear Loon of Libya, heir-apparent Seif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, used to pose as a modern and western looking liberal.  But ever since the Libyan rebellion broke out, Seif has been following in his father’s bloody and eccentric footsteps.Last spring, he vowed to crush […]

[Note: Via Meadia will publish occasional reading recommendations by Team Mead associates brave enough to let WRM know they still have enough spare time for personal reading.  CFR veteran and Bard research associate Peter Mellgard currently leads the researchers and interns who collaborate with WRM on the blog.]By Peter MellgardI recently finished reading From The […]

Winslow Homer is renowned for his landscape watercolors and prints. Less well-known are his Civil War drawings, which Harper’s dug out of their archive this week. With it being the 150th anniversary of the Civil War this year, these old drawings are well worth a look.

Greens often tell us that the science of climate change is “settled”.  In broad outlines, perhaps — but the details, timing, and the interrelationship of key factors remain frustratingly obscure.One of the hot green disaster scenarios is that melting Arctic ice will reach a “tipping point” in the near future.  The latest research suggests that […]

Maybe its the global economic crisis, maybe it’s all the publicity about the skyrocketing price of college tuition.  Either way, the approach of those September tuition bills is leading to some unusual creativity out there.First came the sugar daddy website story where students are getting to know older adults interested in supporting their educational plans; […]