As a new wave of students began their college careers this week, we republished (and retweaked) an essay written three years ago with some advice for first years looking to get the most out of college. Here’s a selection from one of the seven tips offered up: Get a traditional liberal education; it is the […]

SEPTEMBER 5: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin welcomes US President Barack Obama at the start of the G20 summit in Saint Petersburg. Russia hosts the G20 summit hoping to push forward an agenda to stimulate growth but with world leaders distracted by divisions on the prospect of US-led military action in Syria. Image courtesy of Getty […]

There’s a tough issue that humanitarian interventionists need to take into account when it comes to Syria. There is really no good way to read the Constitution that gives the president an unlimited unilateral power to order US forces into combat for humanitarian missions, and it is even harder to find justification for a unilateral […]

The story ends on a leafy side street in northern Virginia, but it began with a killing machine in Auschwitz. The Washington Post magazine has a great Sunday read this week: Brigitte Höss lives quietly on a leafy side street in Northern Virginia. She is retired now, having worked in a Washington fashion salon for more […]

Fears of insurgency are spreading in Egypt. After Thursday’s failed car-bomb assassination attempt on him, the country’s foreign minister Mohamed Ibrahim ominously predicted that the attack was “not the end but the beginning.” That vague warning echoes a growing fear that Egypt is once again heading towards a protracted fight against Islamic insurgency forces. The FT reports: […]

Andrew Sullivan thinks we’re in a “panic” when we say that a “no” vote from Congress on Syria will destroy the President’s foreign policy credibility.He doesn’t seem to understand how serious it would be for the president’s Syria policy to be repudiated by Congress. Quoting Ezra Klein he tells us that foreigners will still know […]

[A Vintage Via Meadia essay originally published three years ago, republished and retweaked as a new cohort of first year students tries to figure out how to get the most out of college — and a new cohort of parents tries to figure out how to pay for it.]The anxious emails from students are hitting […]

Fellow TAI blogger Peter Berger is back with an intriguing discussion of religious constitutions. After looking at proposed changes to the Egyptian constitution, Berger analyzes how nations ruled by “religious principles” differ from those ruled by specifically defined religious doctrines. He reaches an interesting conclusion by way of contrasting Britian and the Middle East: Grace Davie, […]

Do what the robots tell you, and you’ll succeed. That’s one of the messages of Average is Over, the latest book from TAI board member Tyler Cowen. The book explores how America’s economy, culture, and politics will be transformed in age in which computers and robots can increasingly do a lot of traditional human tasks. Cowen has […]

America’s pension crisis may be much worse than we thought. A new report from State Budget Solutions looks at each state’s pension liabilities using a lower estimate of the rate of return than the states use themselves, and found that the country’s plans are underfunded by $4.1 trillion, and only 39 percent funded overall. The state-by-state breakdown […]