A study of students at Northwestern University found that students actually perform worse when taught introductory classes by tenured professors, and were more likely to remain in the discipline when they took introductory classes with outside instructors. We can almost hear the murmurs of consternation emanating from teacher lounges across the land. The NY Times reports: According […]

Even though it’s called the “Affordable Care Act,” Obamacare’s main goal is expanded access, not lowered costs. But a piece at Wonkblog notes that the law won’t even come close to achieving universal access to care: The Affordable Care Act, the most sweeping health care program created in a half century, is expected to extend coverage […]

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is preparing its latest Assessment Report (AR5) on the state of climate science, and is having to iron out disagreements between its scientist members. The vast majority of scientists agree that the Earth is warming, and that humans are culpable to some degree do to greenhouse gas […]

Here’s a trend we’d like to see more of: the WSJ last week reported that companies are increasingly setting up private exchanges similar to but separate from the ACA exchanges. The scheme is simple: the company gives its employees a lump sum of money, and they get to choose which kind of plan they buy on an internal […]

So what exactly happened with Syria yesterday? Was Secretary Kerry’s off-the-cuff quip exploited by a wily Putin? Or was it a lucky break that helps defuse a major rolling disaster for President Obama? (We’re ruling out the variant suggested by the President’s most fawning admirers, some of whom affected to see a deeply laid master […]

A majority of American workers have jobs that do not require a college degree, according to a new Gallup poll. This finding wouldn’t be particularly surprising if it were only blue-collar workers saying this, but the poll also found that four in ten college grads agreed that they don’t need a college degree for the work they do.It’s not […]

Late last week Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper reportedly wrote to President Obama with an offer to draw up a joint emissions reduction plan in exchange for White House approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. The offer was followed up by a visit from Canada’s top energy official Joe Oliver, who informed reporters after meeting […]

Joel Kotkin has an insightful piece that breaks America down into “seven nations and three quasi-independent city-states” and looks at the economic prospects for these ten sub-units. He makes a number of interesting arguments, including that the Northeast will cede cultural, intellectual, and economic power to the so-called “Left Coast” and that Houston will soon be […]

One of the most commonly asserted objections to MOOCs is that there’s only so much you can learn by passively sitting in front of a screen watching bite-sized video clips of a talking professor. Without a lecturer and classmates to bounce ideas off of, to push each other to new discoveries, the criticism goes, no […]

The Israeli-Turkish relationship has experienced ups and downs since 1949, when Turkey was the first Muslim country to recognize the State of Israel. And because both countries are partners with the United States in a sensitive region, American policy has an invested stake in that relationship as well—one which occasionally demands active engagement during low […]