The Onion, the satirical paper of record, has a clever twist on the contraceptive debate in the form of a breathless report entitled “Vatican Dispatches Elite Team Of Bishops To Sabotage Contraceptive Manufacturer“: Anonymous sources within the Vatican confirmed Tuesday that Pope Benedict XVI has dispatched a crack team of six highly skilled bishops to […]

Washington State’s Senate passed a budget proposal last week, but that’s not the big news. The really surprising thing, noted by this Seattle Times editorial, is that it was pushed through by the Republican minority with the help of three Democrats who deserted their own party lines.Washington state’s budget woes will sound familiar to Via Meadia […]

For years, we’ve heard that video games are guilty of creating a generation of inattentive and violent youth wasting away their time on mindless entertainment. Yet a wave of new studies has thrown cold water on that theory and drawn some conclusions about the benefits of gaming. While the findings of the studies are mixed, […]

China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, gave a lengthy interview to the international press on the sidelines of the Chinese legislature’s annual meeting. Here are the highlights as Via Meadia‘s sees it: China continues to have a low-key response to Washington’s “pivot to Asia.” There have been no threats from Beijing, and to our knowledge no important official […]

Adam Garfinkle: Thanks for sitting down with me, Dr. Murray. Let me say to start that while there are aspects of Coming Apart to which I take exception, I appreciate the main point—that class is not synonymous with race, and that culture more than class is what is increasingly dividing American society. Let me also […]

A few months ago, Via Meadia commented on a story developing out in Adelanto, California, one of the newest battlefields where the blue model finds itself under attack. The parents of students at Desert Trails Elementary are seeking to invoke a “trigger law” allowing them to take direct control of the school.Desert Trails has posted dismal […]

The consensus surrounding Syria has been that President Bashar al-Assad was on the defensive, but at least one U.S. general disagrees with that assessment. Marine General James Mattis—who is head of U.S. Central Command—said that with Assad gaining “momentum” on the battlefield, the situation will “get worse before it gets better” and that he expects […]

We’ve grown used to thinking of the developing world as a region beset by insurmountable poverty and strife, but the truth is that sometimes there’s good news too. A new report cited in the New York Times claims that the past few years have in fact been very kind to developing countries. Economists have been […]

President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” appears to have come at just the right moment. A new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) claims that defense spending in Asia this year is set to overtake that of Europe for the first time in centuries.The report, which Financial Times calls “a blunt assessment of […]

The economy keeps sending mixed signals. First we see progress in the energy sector leading to broader job growth in the economy as a whole, then we hear that rising energy prices are threatening to stop the recovery in its tracks. Now the pendulum is swinging back to the positive with some of the best […]