Today is the first day of the rest of Obamacare’s life: the online marketplaces have launched nationwide, and, theoretically, the uninsured should now be able to shop for coverage. Now what?The most obvious thing to note is that though the exchanges have “launched,” many aren’t yet fully functional. We can continue to expect similar glitches, […]

America has just reached an ignominious milestone: ten percent of recent college grads with outstanding loans have defaulted on their debt—the highest figure in nearly two decades.The two-year default rate, which measures the number of defaults for students who have been in repayment for less than two years, has risen steadily throughout the recession. The Department […]

Sanity and balance are hard to come by in the Obamacare debate, but Megan McArdle has just delivered both in a recent post, “11 Pieces of Obamacare Conventional Wisdom That Shouldn’t Be So Conventional.”McArdle is no fan of Obamacare—she’s outlined some of her problems with it here, and proposed an alternative here—so many of her eleven […]

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the federal gas tax (h/t National Journal). Implemented in 1993, the tax adds 18.4 cents per gallon to your total cost at the pump, and the revenue is used to maintain federal roads and bridges.  States levy their own gas taxes that add between 8 and 50 cents per […]

Buddhist mobs killed 4 Muslims, including a 94-year-old woman, and torched more than 100 homes this past week in the restive Burmese province of Rakhine. The Guardian reports: The latest clashes began in Thandwe on Saturday after a Buddhist taxi driver told police he had been verbally abused by a Muslim small business owner while trying […]

Now that the day has finally come, the media is excitedly enumerating all the ways the government shutdown will disrupt our lives. Yet if lists like these truly represent the worst the shutdown has to offer, it may not be so bad. Some early fall vacations to national parks will be disrupted, aspiring gun owners […]

Bard College, a small liberal arts college in the Hudson Valley and academic home of WRM, is trying a singularly ambitious new plan for college admissions. Rather than relying on high school GPAs and SAT scores, future applicants will have the option of completing four research papers, 2,500 words long, on topics ranging from 17th-century […]

If any Via Meadia readers are sitting on piles of cash, here’s a chance to do something important: save the City Opera of New York. Founded seventy years ago and once known as “the people’s opera” for its relatively cheap ticket prices and alternative repertoire, the City Opera is now sadly headed for the chopping […]

With the  Westgate Mall in Kenya still full of wreckage from the recent attacks, 50 college students were murdered in their beds by Boko Haram in Nigeria early Sunday morning. The AP reports: Provost Molima Idi Mato of Yobe State College of Agriculture told The Associated Press that there were no security forces protecting the […]

Adam Garfinkle has a few choice things to say about the Obama administration’s recent negotiating “successes”: For reasons both political and delusional, the Obama Administration feels great these days both on account of the U.S.-Russia chemical weapons deal over Syria that eventuated in UNSCR 2118, and on account of its “opening” to Iran. The broad […]