California’s cities have been going bankrupt left and right over the past few years. But what is it actually like to live in a bankrupt city? A new New York Times profile of post-bankruptcy San Bernardino paints the picture, and it isn’t a pretty one: plummeting home prices, dead animals left to rot in the streets, and, […]

Newsflash: pampering your kids isn’t good for them. A national study revealed that students whose college tuition was paid for by their parents performed worse academically than their less fortunate peers.The New York Times reports: Dr. [Laura] Hamilton suggested that students who get a blank check from their parents may not take their education as seriously as […]

As often happens, my colleague Walter Russell Mead, with his team of intrepid assistants ever at the ready, has beaten me into print—or electrons, as the case may be—over what is going on in Mali. He takes his cue from the extraordinary story in yesterday’s New York Times. Pardon me for repeating any of Walter’s […]

A Sunni member of Iraq’s parliament was assassinated by a suicide bomber today, just two days after a failed roadside bomb attack, apparently aimed at the finance minister (also Sunni). The AP reports: The governor of Anbar province, Qassim al-Fahdawi, said that lawmaker Ifan Saadoun was killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up in […]

A team of researchers report in Science that China’s one-child policy has created a generation of jerks. The study focused on the psychological characteristics of the generation born after the controversial policy was implemented in 1979. The New York Times brings us the story: The researchers asked two groups of people—born just before and just after the policy was put […]

The multinational corporation that Michael Moore thinks is destroying America is providing a commendable national service: “every veteran who wants a job” will reportedly have one at Wal-Mart. The NYT reports: The announcement, to be made in a speech in New York by William S. Simon, the president and chief executive of Wal-Mart U.S., represents […]

Shell-shocked California conservatives are trying to resurrect the GOP, but their efforts are still falling short. The libertarian-leaning Orange County Register has an editorial suggesting ways in which Republicans can become relevant again: On these pages, we’ve argued that, instead of becoming more liberal – a strategy that rarely gets politicians elected anyway – the […]

Either Egyptian President Morsi is a vicious hater or a totally unprincipled demagogue. Possibly both. The trouble is that nobody can be a democratically elected president of Egypt who isn’t at least one of these things.First noticed by Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic and then eventually picked up by the NY Times and other mainstream outlets, […]

China has alienated public opinion across the region in recent years—partly because of government decisions but also as a result of its growing economic presence and power. You know it’s gotten serious when even the Singaporeans hate you. As Patrick Barta reports in the WSJ: In tightly controlled Singapore . . . a spate of […]

In the grim opening moments of Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s highly anticipated and controversial follow-up to The Hurt Locker, recordings of distress calls and screams amid the harrowing attacks of September 11 echo over a black, blank screen. A ten-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden plays out over the next two hours. It’s an […]