In case you missed it, the next two installments of the Beyond the Blue essay were posted this past week. Part three dealt with the disruptive promise of infostructure, and part four with the painful but necessary changes we’re all likely to experience in the near future as a result of these disruptions.As Syria continued its […]

As those of you who’ve been with me from the beginning know, Via Meadia is an experiment and a work in progress.  I didn’t know how to blog when I started – and one of the things that attracted me to the form was that nobody else did either.I don’t mean there aren’t some excellent […]

The big news today: according to family members, by the end of his life Osama bin Laden was telling his family to “Go to Europe and America and get a good education.”What? The great Islamic umma, center of global culture and light of the world has no universities where the children of the Great Jihadi […]

An earlier post drew attention to falling gasoline consumption as a potential harbinger of bad economic news, but there is a flip side to the issue. As Blake Clayton, a new energy blogger at the Council on Foreign Relations, a former Mead haunt, explains, falling domestic demand combined with a surge in foreign consumption and […]

It’s been a rough week for Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Last week, reports surfaced that the man in charge of Brazil’s mint had his hand in the till.  The FT reports: The government is investigating allegations that the head of the national mint… was taking kickbacks from the institution’s suppliers… Denucci was being investigated by […]

Last October, Via Meadia highlighted a new product from the man who brought us the iPod: the Nest learning thermostat. It was a great example of innovative design and engineering lighting the way forward for a greener future. And it showed how iconoclastic American startups can continue to revolutionize previously stagnant markets by bringing technology to […]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federally backed mortgage titans, have cost US taxpayers as much as a small war.  Last summer, the CBO estimated the cost of bailing out the two agencies at $317 billion. Administration proposals to write down principal on troubled mortgages backed by the two agencies could add $100 billion or […]

Something to watch closely: unrest in Saudi’s Eastern Province appears to be heating up.  In two separate incidents in the last 24 hours, two protesters have died from police gunfire.Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province is mostly Shiite in faith; the strict Wahabi imams who shape Saudi religious orthodoxy consider Shiites in some cases to be apostates […]

As Mead followers — both on-line and in print — are aware, culture interacts with economics in mysterious ways, creating complex and complicated situations that often defy simplistic economic explanations or solutions. Over at The Atlantic, Megan McArdle has a story noting that this dynamic might help to explain the decidedly unimpressive recent performance of […]

Democracy has probably seen better days in Africa. Coming on the heels of an ill-advised and fraudulent election in the Congo, Senegal is conducting its own presidential elections on February 26 that have already been plagued by undemocratic developments. Those elections will probably be more organized and better administered than Congo’s—since that’s not hard to […]