The Economist has embraced the Via Meadia perspective on the futility of a global climate treaty. Once a believer in the global approach, it appears to have given up: Each round of intergovernmental talks on cutting emissions and compensating victims seems to achieve less than the one before. [ . . . ][A new] study reveals […]

“A decade of war is now ending,” President Obama proclaimed today in his second inaugural address. Meanwhile in North Africa, a U.S.-assisted French surge in Mali continued into its second week. It’s not unusual for the President to be tight-lipped on the wars the U.S. is fighting, but as he moves into his second term […]

A remarkable photo taken just before dawn in Tehran on Sunday is making its way around the web. In it, a 23-year old man sentenced to death for armed robbery lays his head on the shoulder of his executioner; the hangman, masked and covered in black, embraces the condemned with his arm. The stirring scene comes […]

Florida’s Supreme Court just dealt a major blow to public sector unions, upholding a law requiring public employees to pay three percent of their salaries toward their pensions. The law, an effort by Governor Rick Scott to get the state’s pension costs in line, has wended its way through the state’s court system, being struck […]

France is angry that Uncle Sugar won’t pick up the Mali bill. After decades of defense cuts and penny pinching, the French cannot support their North Africa ambitions without a lot of help from the US. But the US isn’t willing to sign on automatically to fund whatever campaign France has in mind. The WSJ: […]

Boris Johnson, the often-controversial mayor of London, muses in the Telegraph about the unusually heavy snow swirling down on London these days, and whether the weather means the sun is cooling and an ice age is coming: I remember snow that used to come and settle for just long enough for a single decent snowball fight […]

David Sanger of the New York Times has written a thoughtful analysis of what the Obama administration has and has not accomplished in its first term, and what it plans to accomplish in the second in U.S. foreign policy. Short description of accomplishments in the first term: not much. Short description of hopes and plans […]

We just posted the latest installment in series of essays exploring what might follow the currently decaying blue model. Before you tackle it, however, we advise you to chew over the introductory essay we posted last week. We today find ourselves facing a serious policy deficit from both the right and the left, and that’s […]

Americans like to think we are pragmatic, results oriented people, but many of our political disagreements are argued in terms of abstract theory. In particular, Americans like to argue about the proper role of the state: how big should it be and how its responsibilities should be divided between state, local and federal levels. Often, […]

From Tyler Cowen comes Bruce Sterling’s interesting answer to the 2013 Edge symposium question: What should (or shouldn’t) we be worried about? Since his response is a short one, and since there are a lot of responses in the symposium that are worth reading, we’ll quote Sterling in full below, but we encourage you to […]