This past week, our latest essay Beyond Blue series looked at some housing trends which may point the way to an efficient yet distinctively suburban future. It turns out young people prefer free-standing homes over crowded cities, and there’s hope that multi-generational family dwellings are the wave of the future.As far as the blue model itself, we continued our […]

The United States is consumed by an immigration debate shaped in large part by fears that don’t match the facts.There are legitimate questions about immigration: whether policy should favor skilled or unskilled migrants, how “global” do we really want our policy to be, what do we do about the related problems of border control and […]

The Brookings Institute, in partnership with the Center for the Constitution, has just launched a new site called ConText. Its purpose? To crowd-source scholarly and popular commentary for the underappreciated notes of James Madison on the debates of the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787.The project, which aims to surround the notes themselves with columns of […]

Rush Limbaugh said some mean things to a young woman, and is reaping the results of his remarks. Something like 100 advertisers have dropped his show, and the decency police don’t think he’s suffered nearly enough.Some on the right have looked at the left’s tolerance of self-confessed “pottymouth” Bill Maher and seen a double standard. […]

An interesting piece in Foreign Policy by Sadanand Dhume sounds an alarm: the kind of non-alignment that is hard to distinguish from anti-Americanism, a mainstay of Indian foreign policy during the Cold War, is still alive and kicking in parts of the Delhi establishment. India, notes Dhume, sided with Russia and China over most issues […]

This morning there was a car bomb in Aleppo. Yesterday saw two explosions in Damascus with heavy casualties. Syria is descending into the kind of communal madness that produces bloodbaths and anarchy; it is looking more like Iraq and civil war era Lebanon every day.The violence seems to be coming both more sectarian and more […]

In an industry where safety is an absolute necessity, any defect can be devastating to an aircraft maker. The European company Airbus is learning that the hard way: small cracks on wing brackets of the A380 have angered operators, who have demanded compensation for the time their fleets have been grounded for repairs.As the FT […]

How the tide has turned in Japan. Once a powerhouse that sent manufacturing jobs and massive investment abroad, Japan can no longer grow without outside help. The NYT reports that Japanese mayors are now traveling to China to implore manufacturers to come build factories on their jobs-deprived shores.Trapped in slow growth since the early 1990s and […]

While the Russian opposition’s hopes fade for immediate reforms, Vladimir Putin is quickly consolidating his power base after sealing the election victory. Putin reserves the right to choose regional government officials, keeping the ones he likes and throwing out any pesky reformers–even after they’re elected. He has not allowed smaller parties to  join together to […]

After 10 years in operation, the International Criminal Court (ICC) delivered its first verdict this week, convicting the Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga of recruiting child soldiers in the long and brutal conflict that has festered at the center of Africa. One of 15 defendants before the ICC, its ruling in the Lubanga case brings to […]