The long, slow decline of the U.S. Postal Service is old hat at this point, but the magnitude of the failure still makes it feel like genuine news sometimes. As this Bloomberg report (h/t Zerohedge) shows, in the past quarter alone, the USPS lost $5.2 billion—nearly 70 percent higher than a similar figure last year (when, we […]

As student loan debt surpasses credit-card debt as the leading liability for Americans, the reality of a “higher-ed bubble” is becoming increasingly obvious. Yet it isn’t just the students that are going broke; a new report from the Economist suggests that the same fate is befalling everyone connected to higher education, including the universities themselves: Federal […]

In a recent high-level meeting, Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev raised an issue that has increasingly been on Russia’s mind of late: immigration to Russia’s Far East. The Far East is a huge, thinly populated area thousands of miles from the rest of the country, with little direct contact with Moscow or the country’s other […]

Raghuram Rajan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and former Chief Economist at the IMF, will be India’s next chief economic advisor, the Wall Street Journal reports.Rajan’s appointment could be good news for India, which is currently in a pessimistic mood—partly due to the monsoon, partly due to the […]

If ever there were a unifying cause in the Middle East, it would be the scramble between America, Israel, and Sunni states in the Persian Gulf to contain an intransigent Iran. The U.S. wants a balance of power in the region, not Iranian hegemony; Israel can’t afford the security risks of such a hegemony; and […]

More bad news from the Golden State: apparently not content with creating what amounts to a free life-insurance policy for state employees, California legislators are considering creating another open-ended budget commitment. This time, the new commitment will go to private-sector workers rather than public employees.SB1234, a new bill currently working its way through the state legislature, aims […]

Walker Percy distrusted the esoteric and the arcane, looking instead to the concrete and the quotidian as a bridge to faith and meaning. A man of both the American South and the Catholic Church, his novels and essays never evince a claim to know any mortal's destination—only the value of the journey.

Scholars are fond of criticizing ideologues who ransack history for useful material to promote contemporary agendas. It turns out that many scholars do more or less the same thing.

The former director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty assesses what's right and what's wrong with U.S. broadcasting policy.

Cyber security is an ultra-modern challenge, but we could learn a lot about it by examining how pre-modern European city-states managed their defenses.