The indispensable Joel Kotkin recently wrote a new piece about the future of suburbs, and his commentary paints a very clear picture of why, despite its eulogizers, suburban life will live on and even thrive in the coming decades: All 15 of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas of the past decade—led by places like Las Vegas, Raleigh, […]

Via Meadia has argued that there is a perverse linkage between public sector unions, state pension funds, and Wall Street investment banking; a new study from two Maryland think tanks confirms it, finding that not only are state pension funds grossly underperforming, but much of the returns are also going to Wall Street firms rather than pensioners: According […]

This week we’re one step closer to a total revolution in transportation: the prototypes of Google’s self-driving car have traversed 300,000 miles without a single accident (the few exceptions were due to human meddling). Lucky Google employees now use the computer-controlled cars on their daily commute, and as soon as the engineers fine tune the vehicles’ […]

The news that Fareed Zakaria has apologized for plagiarizing a portion of his column at Time magazine and been suspended from both Time and CNN comes as a shock. I’ve known Fareed for many years and have a hard time believing that he would do anything as wrong or as dumb as deliberately appropriating someone […]

India has a long and storied tradition of migrant workers seeking their fortune abroad to escape poverty back home. More than 30 million Indians are estimated to now be living outside of India. Of those, many go to the oil-rich Gulf states, which are famously dependent on foreign labor.But this too is no picnic. Treatment […]

It may be hard to believe, but it’s been a full four years since China hosted the Olympics. At the time, Beijing 2008 appeared to herald China’s return, after a 500 year hiatus, to great power status. Commentators were falling over themselves to pronounce the inevitability of China’s rise and its implications for American influence […]

It’s been a busy few days in India; the U.S. consulates I’ve been visiting have kept me busy visiting colleges, meeting with journalists and giving talks to business and civic groups. Add the jet lag thanks to the nine and a half hour time difference from the U.S. East Coast and the torpor that comes […]

One of the benefits of traveling is getting exposure to different perspectives on contentious international issues. Case in point: this op-ed from earlier this week in The Hindu encouraging India not vote with the West in the Security Council on Syria. Prem Shankar Jha writes: If there is a bloodbath in Aleppo, the West is bound to […]

As we noted the other day, the quickly deteriorating situation in Greece has got people speculating that the Greek exit from the eurozone (“Grexit”) is just around the corner—perhaps coming as soon as September. And contagion is spreading past the troubled countries, maybe even infecting the otherwise-robust German economy.All this tumult has to have forced […]

In the wake of the Solyndra scandal, green energy companies have been losing friends left and right, but at least they could count on support from loyal greens—or maybe not: Two environmental groups in April filed suit to block an energy project they said would seriously harm the local ecosystem.It wasn’t a coal plant, or […]