Hell hath no fury like the anger of a tenured professor whose discipline is under attack.In a move that has sent the nation’s academic establishment into an uproar, the House of Representatives recently passed an amendment that prevents the National Science Foundation from funding political science research.As expected, the forces of American political science have […]

The U.S. News and World report has an interesting look at Tuesday’s election in Wisconsin: According to Crossroads Generation, a group dedicated to reaching young people with the messages promoting individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise, in the recall election Walker carried the vote of those under the age of 25.“According to exit polling,” […]

Argentina and Britain have once again been trading barbs over the disputed Falkland Islands, and now Argentina has declared what the British are calling “economic blockade” on the islands, refusing to allow ships flying the British flag to land in Argentinian ports. As the BBC reports: Argentina has been turning away cruise ships carrying the […]

As the Washington Post’s Wonkblog reports, while American homes keep getting bigger and we keep stocking them with growing numbers of energy hogging devices like big screen TVs, energy use per homeowner is actually shrinking.  Overall, even though we have 30 million more homes than we did in 1980, and though these homes are bigger […]

In the Biblical story, God sent ten plagues to Egypt to persuade Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. The news from Cairo today suggests that at least one of those plagues — the plague of darkness — is back.From the Associated Press: A mob of hundreds of men assaulted women holding a march demanding an […]

Australia has become a popular partner in Asia’s Game of Thrones. Both China and the United States have courted it in the past few months, with varying success. China has highlighted its own economic importance as a major trade partner, while the U.S. has strengthened military cooperation both in Afghanistan and at new American bases […]

Most commentary on Tuesday’s recall vote in Wisconsin has focused on the raw politics of the episode. This is what our media thrives on: who’s up, who’s down, and what it all means looking toward November. Some commentary, thankfully, has delved deeper into the meaning of the entire skein of events over the past nine […]

President Obama has authorized what appears to be the first use of cyber warfare (beyond passive information retrieval), in what Steve Coll has called “the first formal offensive act of pure cyber sabotage by the United States against another country, if you do not count electronic penetrations that have preceded conventional military attacks.” The target? […]

In Egypt, the Arab Spring feels more like an Arab “Thermidor.” Thermidor, one of the summer months of France’s revolutionary calendar, was the month in which Robespierre was overthrown and sent to the guillotine. Today, it’s generally taken to mean the end of the most radical phase of a revolution, or the beginning of the […]

This past week’s New York Times has been a showcase in just how little we understand how our world works and just how fluid scientific consensus can be. On June 2, in a piece entitled “Salt, We Misjudged You,” Science magazine correspondent Gary Taubes debunked the conventional wisdom that salt is bad for us: Although […]