It’s taken a while, but mainstream publications are finally coming to terms with the severity of the public pension crisis. After Detroit declared bankruptcy last month, the NYT noted that Chicago could be next in line. Now Salon is weighing in with an even more expansive warning that Detroit’s and Stockton’s attempts to discharge their pension obligations […]

Yet another crucial provision of the Affordable Care Act will be delayed. After giving employers an additional year to comply with the employer mandate, the Obama administration has now announced that insurers will have until 2015 to conform to the cap on annual consumer costs. NYT: The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, […]

The Northern Sea Route has captured the imagination of sailors and explorers through the ages, as well as bringing some unlucky souls to their early deaths in frigid waters. The crew of the Yong Sheng, a 19,000-ton Chinese cargo ship, almost certainly won’t risk that fate in its voyage from Dalian in northeast China, around Norway, to […]

Back on July 1, just a few days before the military ousting of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, I wrote a politically incorrect post about the pre-modern character of much of the Muslim Brotherhood cadre. I did so because it was directly relevant to the fact that a very large number of Egyptians were in the […]

With the current crop of Via Meadia interns moving on, we’re looking for the next batch of ambitious young people to help us research and write for the site. Former interns have gone on to jobs in journalism, tech startups, the State Department and the US military, and have gotten their own clips at The American […]

Here’s another California first: it’s the first state in the nation to pass a law protecting transgender kids from discrimination. At long last they can use any bathroom they want: State Assembly Speaker John Perez said it put “California at the forefront of leadership on transgender rights”.Massachusetts and Connecticut have state-wide policies granting the same […]

British Prime Minister David Cameron made an appeal to the British public in Monday’s Telegraph to embrace fracking, outlining the benefits of exploiting the UK’s shale gas reserves and seeking to dispel what he called the “myths” surrounding the polarizing topic. No. 10 has been mounting a public relations campaign this summer to convince Brits that fracking is in […]

Damir Marusic, The American Interest’s associate publisher and general web wizard, has created a Javascript version of my program Creatures.

American higher education is older than the nation itself and a magnet to aspiring students at home and throughout the world. Millions enroll in its institutions, learn from its professors, and benefit from its energy, research findings and intellectual sophistication. It affords employment to more than 3.8 million people, full and part-time (with about three-quarters […]

Twelve people were injured and three remain hospitalized after a mob of Sri Lankan Buddhists attacked a mosque in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, on Saturday night. The mosque was built only a month ago after local unrest and sporadic attacks against Muslims forced the mosque leaders to relocate. Now the new mosque will close […]