Jordan is a valuable American ally in more ways than one, yet the US has been slow to show its appreciation. Lending the desert Kingdom a helping hand would be a good move for both countries.

California has pulled itself back from the brink of bankruptcy, but it’s not out of the woods yet. For the first time in a long time, California’s budget boasts a surplus, politics in Sacramento aren’t as dysfunctional as they are in Washington D.C., and Standard & Poor’s recently upgraded the state’s outlook from ‘stable’ to ‘positive’. All of that is good news for one of the largest economies in the world, but California must do more to protect itself against dangerous vulnerabilities.

Late last year the Economist’s Adrian Wooldridge predicted 2014 would bring a “peasants’ revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace,” and not even a month in we’re already seeing forceful expressions of this backlash on Big Tech. At 7am on Tuesday morning, a group of angry protestors marched to the Berkeley home of a Google X developer, unfurled a banner reading “Google’s Future Stops Here” and handed out flyers featuring the above image and a message to “Fight Evil…Join the Revolution.”

Self-driving cars could be the future of public transportation, but at the very least they will change the logic of and in many ways supplant the need for large public transportation projects. A fleet of robo-cars could one day deliver personalized, decentralized public transportation. But what does that mean for our cities’s buses and trains?

A new report out of the USIP is debunking the popular idea that social media and democracy are natural allies. The media heralded social media tools as saviors of democracy, when in fact they were nothing but mere tools.

A new study has found that US social mobility isn’t declining. But there’s a catch: for the last fifty years social mobility in the land of the American dream has been consistently lower than in other countries. We desperately need a smart national conversation about poverty, inequality, and mobility; much of this is going to involve demolishing simplistic shibboleths on both sides of the political divide.

In Spain, academia’s ivy tower is colliding with popular Catalan unrest. The Catalan Parliament voted earlier this month to hold a referendum on independence from Spain, and though Spain has said the referendum would be unconstitutional, six leading Catalan academics are throwing their weight behind the secessionist movement.

We knew that Narendra Modi was divisive; his controversial role as Chief Minister during the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat continues to be a sore point in the elections this year. What we couldn’t have predicted was that it would be a sore point in American elections.

If you’re having a child in California, it could cost you anywhere from $3,296 to $37,227 just for a routine delivery—or as high as $71,000 for a cesarean section. The expense of childbirth is still enormous, especially when paired with the after-birth costs of diapers, formula, daycare in two-earner families, and other baby memorabilia like cribs and strollers. Add all those costs to the enormous amount spent at an average wedding, and you start to get a sense of the large financial disincentives young adults contemplating marriage and children face.

A Florida hospital chain is being sued for using “sophisticated software systems, financial incentives, and threats” to inflate its profits. Big hospitals are getting more and more powerful even as we’re learning more than ever how much they distort the U.S. health care system.