Reuters gives us something we haven’t seen in a while: good news about public pensions. The median rate of return on public pensions has risen to 7.5 percent during the first quarter of the year—a significant increase from last year’s dismal rate of 4.2 percent, and better than the 6.03 percent median for the past […]

No good deed goes unpunished; this must be what US Ambassador to China Gary Locke must have been thinking as a firestorm of criticism erupted over his embassy’s handling of the Chen Guangcheng case. Under great pressure, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner arriving for high profile talks with China’s […]

One of America’s most venerable institutions is dipping its toes in the waters of online-ed. The Washington Post reports that Harvard is joining MIT in a new partnership to offer free online courses to all comers. The new partnership, named EdX, will offer courses from both schools and will be run by a nonprofit organization founded […]

Via Meadia has been following Iraqi politics these days with much interest. The long knives are coming out: Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s rivals, like former Vice President Tariq Hashemi and Massoud Barzani, president of Iraqi Kurdistan, accuse him of becoming dictatorial and pushing Iraq back to the brink of sectarian conflict. Maliki accuses his rivals […]

Among the many colonial legacies of the Raj, perhaps the most popular is cricket. The sport is huge in India, with all its complicated rules and jargon—ducks and sixes and something called an lbw. Traditionally, a game of cricket is completed over a marathon five days, but in 2008 the Indians created a new league, […]

In the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, Prof. Mead reviews five books: some great, some…not so great.Here they are:The Real Romney by Michael Kranish & Scott Helman The World America Made by Robert Kagan Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power by Zbigniew Brzezinski The Crisis of Zionism by Peter Beinart Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 by Charles […]

At his Foreign Policy blog, Stephen Walt makes a bold claim: If realists had been in charge of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy may have been more reasonable: no Iraq War, no Balkan adventures and no “nation-building”. Perhaps if American policy had been conducted by rigorous, unsentimental […]

The Obama Administration’s war on Iran has relied heavily on wide-ranging sanctions that score points in some places even as they lose ground elsewhere. So far, many of Iran’s biggest oil customers, like Japan and South Korea, have pledged to reduce their reliance on Persian oil, but others, like India and South Africa, have gone […]

For the second time in two weeks, a Spanish company operating in Latin America has been nationalized by a populist government looking to score political points. Last week, Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez, following the advice of her Marxist adviser, nationalized YPF-Repsol, a Spanish energy company. Now the FT reports that the leftist Bolivian President Evo […]

The big domestic story that we try to cover here at Via Meadia has two dimensions: the breakdown of our old social model, and the construction of something that can one day replace it. We track that story in many fields: education is one of the most important. From K to PhD the old system […]