On the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, Meghan O’Sullivan, former Deputy National Security Advisor for President Bush, has a piece up at TAI looking back at the conflict and the lessons Americans have drawn from it: Given the complexity of U.S. efforts in Iraq over the past decade, the lessons derived will necessarily span volumes and require […]

A new study conducted by economist David H. Autor, and reported in the NYTimes, analyzes how and why men have started to lag behind the fairer sex, and what that means for marriage.It all boils down to education. Today, a degree is all but a prerequisite for finding gainful employment. Women have done a good […]

For years, America’s higher ed discussion has focused on encouraging more students to earn bachelor’s and associate’s degrees. But students with vocational certificates in fields like IT often earn more money than many of their peers with traditional degrees. The big disadvantage of certificates, though, is that it’s much more difficult to get financial aid. The […]

The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) has become notorious for poor investments and fleecing bankrupt cities, and now there are allegations of appalling in-house corruption.One of the main suspects is Alfred J. Villalobos, a former deputy Los Angeles mayor and CalPERS board member. A man ostensibly dedicated to such noble causes as serving the urban […]

It’s no secret that the recession caused states to cut back aid to public colleges. Now we know more about how deep those cuts really were. A study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that state spending per student on public colleges fell by 28 percent over the past five years and […]

Amazon has reportedly signed a 10-year, $600 million deal to build a cloud computing network for the CIA. It’s not yet clear what the CIA intends to do with this network, but it is likely an effort by the agency to stay current and secure in a world of accelerating technological change. As data moves from hard drives […]

Soon after the white smoke rose from the roof of the Sistine Chapel, a Vatican official announced to the huge crowd gathered outside that “Habemus Papam!”—“We have a Pope!” Then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, came out as well on the famous balcony and spoke to the crowd in fluent Italian (his […]

Americans haven’t been saving enough money, and now the US has entered a retirement crisis the likes of which it has not seen for decades. The WSJ has some shocking statistics from a study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute: Fifty-seven percent of U.S. workers surveyed reported less than $25,000 in total household savings and investments […]

Corn ethanol gets just about everything wrong: it increases emissions, it starves the world’s poor, it isn’t efficient, and it drains billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies. As it turns out, it might also be responsible for last year’s violent labor protests in South Africa and food protests in Haiti and Argentina. The story was […]

As President Obama heads off for his first visit to Israel, we are getting the usual flood of poll results indicating that Americans want a pro-Israel foreign policy. Meanwhile, the world continues to marvel at American support for the frequently isolated Jewish state. Why, people ask, does the United States incur such risks and costs […]