Japan’s conflicted view of its own history was again on display today when the internal affairs minister and more than one hundred other lawmakers visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The shrine, where the souls of Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals, are interred, is seen by Japan’s neighbors as a monument to […]

“Publish or perish” is the familiar exhortation to academics seeking tenure, but maybe “publish rubbish or perish” is more apt. A good number of the articles published in humanities journals are more like vanity projects than substantive contributions to a discipline. According to a recent article in The Economist, rubbish now is piling up in scientific […]

The man who may pave the way for solving America’s pension crisis is a Democratic mayor from California. San Jose’s Chuck Reed is mounting a campaign to roll back a ludicrous legal precedent, set by the California Supreme Court, which maintains that state and local pensions constitute a contract between worker and employer that cannot […]

The restive Spanish region of Catalonia has just taken its boldest step yet toward independence from Spain. Earlier this week, Catalan officials released a massive grievance statement, culminating with an estimation that the Spanish government owes it nearly 10 billion euros. Essentially, the region argues that as one of the wealthiest parts of the country […]

Police departments across Europe are putting down deposits on 3D printers to manufacture guns—not for their own use, but to test out whether a 3D-printed firearm could actually pose a threat to public safety. The jury is still out, but signs point to yes: After testing a gun made from blueprints found on the internet, […]

Obamacare has entered a second—and possibly, much more serious—phase of glitches. The first two weeks were characterized by load and registration problems on the front end of the site. But even during that time there were hints that more serious problems were lurking in the background. Early on there were reports, for example, that some applications […]

Christians have been fleeing massacres and persecution in the Middle East for more than a hundred years; now the largest remaining Christian community in the region may soon join the rush. The AP reports on Egypt’s beleaguered Coptic Christians, who are struggling to protect their traditions, churches, art, and lives amidst rising anti-Christian violence: The […]

Last May I launched a series of blog posts on “the Big Five,” the five domestic problems that Americans have to address if the next few decades are going to go well. I planned to go on and write about them all, but after writing a couple of essays about the job crisis and another […]

The national press has started to latch on to a new abortion story: Molly Anne Dutton has just become the new homecoming queen of Auburn University, and she’s used her position to talk about her mother’s decision not to have an abortion. The Blaze: The 22-year-old’s biological mother was faced with an extremely difficult situation. The victim of […]

More data on ACA enrollment figures is slowly trickling out, and, despite some initial promise, things are not now looking great for the Obama administration’s enrollment goals. WaPo has a neat graphic looking at how the numbers broke down for the first week of traffic on the federal exchange site. While more than nine million […]