So what exactly happened with Syria yesterday? Was Secretary Kerry’s off-the-cuff quip exploited by a wily Putin? Or was it a lucky break that helps defuse a major rolling disaster for President Obama? (We’re ruling out the variant suggested by the President’s most fawning admirers, some of whom affected to see a deeply laid master […]

A majority of American workers have jobs that do not require a college degree, according to a new Gallup poll. This finding wouldn’t be particularly surprising if it were only blue-collar workers saying this, but the poll also found that four in ten college grads agreed that they don’t need a college degree for the work they do.It’s not […]

Late last week Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper reportedly wrote to President Obama with an offer to draw up a joint emissions reduction plan in exchange for White House approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. The offer was followed up by a visit from Canada’s top energy official Joe Oliver, who informed reporters after meeting […]

Joel Kotkin has an insightful piece that breaks America down into “seven nations and three quasi-independent city-states” and looks at the economic prospects for these ten sub-units. He makes a number of interesting arguments, including that the Northeast will cede cultural, intellectual, and economic power to the so-called “Left Coast” and that Houston will soon be […]

One of the most commonly asserted objections to MOOCs is that there’s only so much you can learn by passively sitting in front of a screen watching bite-sized video clips of a talking professor. Without a lecturer and classmates to bounce ideas off of, to push each other to new discoveries, the criticism goes, no […]

Here’s a graph, based on work by Colorado University’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, that shows the extent to which the world’s mainstream media covered climate change over the past decade:Notice the spike in late 2009—a result of the disastrous Copenhagen climate summit—and the gradual tapering off over the past four years. Here’s […]

Thanks to Detroit’s bankruptcy, the state of Michigan has just seen its lowest level of bond sales in more than a decade, says Bloomberg. More and more municipalities have joined Saginaw County and Battle Creek in postponing bond sales for more favorable times, and interest rates are climbing for the cities that are still borrowing. The […]

As we all watch events unfold today regarding the possibility of intervention in Syria, it’s important to keep a bigger regional strategic picture in mind. And taken as a whole, Western policy toward the Middle East in almost complete disarray.Take this nugget, for example: Last Friday, the EU’s general court struck down sanctions against a […]

It’s tough to top Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post when it comes to eye-catching media purchases, but Politico publisher Robert Allbritton is making a push of his own with his purchase of Capital New York, an online news site based in NYC. Like Bezos, Allbritton has ambitious plans for his new purchase; he […]

Getting rid of biofuel programs would cut Europe’s food costs in half by 2020, and lower global food prices by 15 percent. That’s according to a new report, commissioned by the EU’s own Joint Research Center (JRC), released ahead of a critical European Parliament vote on Wednesday to cap biofuels’ contributions to the EU’s 2020 […]