Adam Garfinkle: Thanks for sitting down with me, Dr. Murray. Let me say to start that while there are aspects of Coming Apart to which I take exception, I appreciate the main point—that class is not synonymous with race, and that culture more than class is what is increasingly dividing American society. Let me also […]

A few months ago, Via Meadia commented on a story developing out in Adelanto, California, one of the newest battlefields where the blue model finds itself under attack. The parents of students at Desert Trails Elementary are seeking to invoke a “trigger law” allowing them to take direct control of the school.Desert Trails has posted dismal […]

The consensus surrounding Syria has been that President Bashar al-Assad was on the defensive, but at least one U.S. general disagrees with that assessment. Marine General James Mattis—who is head of U.S. Central Command—said that with Assad gaining “momentum” on the battlefield, the situation will “get worse before it gets better” and that he expects […]

We’ve grown used to thinking of the developing world as a region beset by insurmountable poverty and strife, but the truth is that sometimes there’s good news too. A new report cited in the New York Times claims that the past few years have in fact been very kind to developing countries. Economists have been […]

President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” appears to have come at just the right moment. A new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) claims that defense spending in Asia this year is set to overtake that of Europe for the first time in centuries.The report, which Financial Times calls “a blunt assessment of […]

The economy keeps sending mixed signals. First we see progress in the energy sector leading to broader job growth in the economy as a whole, then we hear that rising energy prices are threatening to stop the recovery in its tracks. Now the pendulum is swinging back to the positive with some of the best […]

Here at Via Meadia we’ve been skeptical that our recent trade of food aid for the end to a North Korean nuclear program was anything more than an old trick to extort concessions from America, but the Economist is more optimistic. Hailing the recent deal as a “breakthrough,” it notes that the recent succession has altered the […]

The Wall Street Journal is running a WRM piece on the continuing US role in the Middle East this morning; it’s been reprinted, without the paywall, by RealClearWorld. Writes WRM: The Middle East is on fire. As waves of populist, ethnic and religious unrest sweep the region, long-established regimes totter like ninepins, violent conflicts explode […]

According to the conventional wisdom, moderate Republican Senator Scott Brown was supposed to be toast in Massachusetts. After leftie Democratic hero and Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren entered the race riding a veritable tidal wave of favorable buzz and national publicity, the election had all but been called for her.There’s just one problem with this triumphalist […]

There has been an enormous amount of media and public attention on two young American athletes, rising stars in respectively football and basketball—Tim Tebow of the Denver Broncos and Jeremy Lin of the New York Knicks. My knowledge of the two sports is roughly equivalent to my knowledge of nuclear physics, but I understand that […]