On August 30, 2013, the Washington Post carried a story about a draft for the new Egyptian constitution, which is to replace the one promulgated in 2012 under President Morsi. The latter had pushed through that constitution in a parliament packed with supporters of his Muslim Brotherhood (this was one of the reasons for the […]

Nebraska’s demolition of an old mall earlier this year could have been a story about the declining fortunes of malls in a digital age. Malls across the country have been abandoned or repurposed for schools or clinics in large part because online shopping offers more and better benefits for the consumer than the bricks-and-mortar retail experience. Demolishing or converting an […]

Are American schools trying to stamp out free thinkers? Elizabeth Weil raises this question in an excellent piece for The New Republic on the rise of “social and emotional learning” (or SEL), in which children are trained to avoid bad behavior and to keep an “internal monitor” on their own actions to keep their impulses in […]

“Americans,” Robert Kaplan has observed, “champion idealism while employing realists perhaps because we need to have a high opinion of ourselves while pursuing our own interests.” There’s a lot of truth to this. After all, beneath the soaring rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy, the most successful foreign-policy presidents tend to espouse a kind of […]

Little did I suspect when I put down my pen on August 30, having finished “Painted into a Corner, Obama Ponders Cosmetic Strikes”, that yet another self-inflicted verbal wound from the White House could possibly make the crisis of U.S. Syria policy even worse. I guess I misunderestimated the man. President Obama’s decision to go […]

Japan will increase military spending by 3 percent in the coming year, the defense minister said today; it’s the biggest increase in 22 years. “There are various tensions ongoing in Asia, and in some cases, there are countries that even use threats,” the AP reports the defense minister as saying.The top dangers facing Japan these days […]

It’s not just retiring Americans enjoying the benefits of expatriation; entrepreneurs are also finding that discount luxury living abroad can spur creativity. One company, Happy Hubs, is looking to combine the start-up incubation experience with resort life. Happy Hubs is launching a beta version of a workspace in Costa Rica, but plans to open up […]

A consensus is building that the ACA outreach may not be able to prepare people in time for the October 1st exchange launch. A new study by the insurance company Aflac finds that seven in ten workers haven’t heard anything from their companies about how the ACA will affect their benefits, while only 9 percent […]

The closer we look at the “recovery”, the weaker it looks. Last week we reported that most of the decrease in the ranks of the “unemployed” amounts to people leaving the workforce rather than new jobs being created. This week the WSJ notes that the longer people stay out of the labor force, the less likely they […]

Former NYC Comptroller Bill Thompson is looking to vault ahead of frontrunner Bill de Blasio in the city’s mayoral race, but a recent exposée of his tenure as comptroller will do little to help his chances. As Comptroller, Thompson was responsible for handling  investment decisions by the city’s pension systems. Thompson has touted this experience […]