Occupy Wall Street’s emergence last fall was billed as the Left’s answer to the Tea Party’s right-wing populism. Barely a year on, the former is dead and buried, while the latter, nearly two years older, is going strong. It’s doing particularly well in Kansas, where the Financial Times reports that its candidates are poised to push […]

Last week, Angela Merkel visited Greece in a show of friendship to assure Greeks that Germany isn’t as hard-hearted as they think. This week, Greece got a different message when Eurozone finance ministers announced they are giving Greece until October 18—ten days—to implement austerity measures. The latest collection of cuts is a prerequisite for a […]

A pillar of contemporary American race relations is hanging by a thread. With Justice Kagan recusing herself because of prior work as solicitor general, it seems almost inevitable that the Supreme Court will significantly reduce the role of race in university admissions this term. The Wall Street Journal: Justice Anthony Kennedy, considered the only one […]

Los Angeles is one of the densest urban areas in the world, but it has long held a large energy bounty underneath its land. With the development of fracking technology, this bounty is potentially even bigger, providing much-needed funds to cash-strapped California, and well paid blue collar jobs for a metro area with some of […]

Michael Young's coinage of the term "meritocracy" is turning fifty years old. Young's satirical warnings of its downside remain as fresh as ever.

Nary a drop of oil has ever been extracted from Ireland, either on land or at sea. That’s about to change, the BBC reports: Ireland is on the verge of securing revenue from oil that could run into billions of pounds.Providence Resources Plc, an Irish and UK company, has confirmed its Barryroe site, 30 miles […]

Tens of thousands of Spaniards are losing their life savings because of banking trickery. At the beginning of the crisis, banks that needed capital to cover loans gone bad convinced their customers to convert savings accounts into complicated securities, touting higher interest rates and the option to resell at any point. About 22 billion euros in bonds were […]

Earlier this month, the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent—still high but under eight percent for the first time in four years. Now another indicator is moving upward. The FT reports that wholesale inventories and sales rose in August by 0.5 percent and 0.9 percent, respectively—higher upticks than most analysts predicted. This is a promising […]

Yesterday a Taliban gunman singled out and shot Malala Yousafzai in the head (she survived). The teenaged Malala had angered the Taliban for boldly campaigning for girls’ schooling. The shooting made international headlines, and today just about every Pakistani political party, prominent official, and at least one terrorist organization condemned the shooting. “Whoever has done it is […]

It’s no secret that Via Meadia thinks the RealClearPolitics “poll of polls” is the most consistently useful and accessible way to monitor public opinion during the endless American presidential campaign cycle. (How many days or even hours after November 6 will it take RCP to post its first poll of polls on prospective Democratic nominees […]