Can some of the world’s most prominent people, entrusted with great decisions of state and supported by teams of well educated professional aides be bamboozled for years by an eccentric poseur?Believe it: Felix Krull takes Washington by storm, befriends elites, and poses as a key figure in Iraqi-American diplomacy. Then he murders his wife and […]

For years, American greens have looked with envy at the situation across the pond. If only we were nice and green like Europe! If only we had higher energy taxes and a cap and trade law!But Europe’s green policies, though expensive, have a way of coming up short in the results department. More evidence appeared […]

Tiny drones are going to invade your privacy and rock your world a lot sooner than you think. Watch this Lockheed Martin video for an early look at the new age of drones.Once you get over the sheer inventiveness of the people behind these things—from the engineering which brilliantly mimics nature’s best designs, to the […]

Though countries like Greece and Spain dominate coverage of the euro mess, Europe’s real crisis is much wore widespread and the effects are much more worrying than the headlines might lead you to think.A lot of the damage is happening in countries that aren’t in the euro, but whose economic and political journeys toward democratic […]

A wonderful appreciation of the British orator, parliamentarian and essayist Edmund Burke appears in The American Scholar this summer, written by Brian Doyle. Read the whole thing is our advice. One (of many) highlights in the essay: Doyle tells us what Burke read.It’s a paragraph any aspiring writer, reader and orator should study: read like […]

Bad Boy Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, fresh from taking on collective bargaining and triumphant after winning the recall election, is headed for more controversy, more upheaval and more angry squeals as he prepares to go after yet another sacred cow. His next mission is to take on Wisconsin’s higher education system. On June 19, […]

A gold and turquoise ring that belonged to Jane Austen, a Mozart among English novelists if one thinks about the dazzling perfection and brilliant invention of her prose, or perhaps a Vermeer if one considers the intense observation and painstaking description of her portrayals, is being auctioned off at Sotheby’s next week in London. The […]

Facing a grim job market for which they are unprepared and feeling cheated of not insignificant amounts of time and money, university graduates are ramping up their criticism of colleges. In case this scenario sounds familiar, it’s happening in China.The Wall Street Journal notes that a 2006 survey on Chinese attitudes to higher education has resurfaced […]

We’d dared to hope at Via Meadia that the last European pseudo-fix for the euro would be one of the more successful — that it might buy a few weeks or even a couple of months of time before the whiff of panic returned to world financial markets.We were wrong. We reported earlier this week […]

California is going for broke, and the country’s most dysfunctional and badly governed state, enmeshed in debt and unable to manage its yearly budget, has voted to borrow billions of dollars it can’t afford to begin a train project that it may never be able to finish — and that it may not even need.A […]