In California, a massive fight between two of the country’s largest and most active labor unions offers a look into the dynamics of the deepening crisis of the American labor movement.Globalization and automation first began to challenge the American labor movement in the 1970s and since then labor’s record has been one of almost uninterrupted […]

As the Christmas season draws to a close and the return of regular blogging looms, I’m looking back over this short period of intense religion writing and thinking about how writing on religion is and is not like writing on other controversial topics.There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s important to write about religion.  […]

Lawyers are famous for being able to argue their way out of anything, but even they might have trouble defending the schools that trained them. International Human Rights Attorney Chris Fletcher warns in the WSJ that law schools are being less than forthcoming with potential applicants about the grim job prospects that await them on […]

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are one of the best things going right now. They increase crop yields in extreme climates, are resistant to disease, and are one of our best technological solutions to feeding an ever-growing global population in an environmentally sustainable way. But to many people, they are just creepy, which is why much […]

A car bomb ripped through a procession of Shia pilgrims today in Musayyib, Iraq, almost 40 miles south of Baghdad, killing 27 people. The bombers were most likely Sunnis trying to reignite Iraq’s civil war.As the Shia regime of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki grows increasingly authoritarian and sectarian violence gets worse and worse, the fear grows […]

While Spain is raiding its pension funds to settle its government debt, many cities in America are doing the opposite: borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to pay short-term pensions costs. As the AP notes (h/t Huffington Post), city governments hope that in the long term, pension investments will make up for the cost of the […]

Saudi Arabia’s budget has grown by 58 percent since the Arab Spring, with massive welfare and public spending driving the growth.Even as popular uprisings rocked neighboring Bahrain and Oman and toppled an ally in Egypt, the richest gulf monarchy remained unscathed. But rising housing and food prices, youth unemployment, and other expensive problems are forcing […]

Since its financial crisis began, Spain has been having trouble finding buyers for its increasingly risky government bonds. It thought it had found the perfect solution to this problem: tapping its own Social Security Reserve Fund as a buyer of last resort. But there’s one small catch. As the Wall Street Journal reports, with 90 percent of the […]

The Financial Times has some good news for the Eurozone: the ratings group Fitch announced that U.S. banks have increased their exposure to the EU for the fifth straight month as of last November, with investment up by 8 percent month-over-month. German banks were the greatest beneficiaries, but even French borrowers got some love. So things […]

When, on Tuesday morning, I finished reading David Brooks’s column in the New York Times, I scribbled two words at the bottom of the newsprint. First let’s hear how his typically excellent column, this one on the nature and scope of the debt we are amassing and are refusing to responsibly address, ended: The country […]