In a move sure to dismay the people inside and outside China who hoped Xi Jinping would begin a new era of democratic reform, China’s president has “lurched” to the left, as the WSJ reports, promoting a revitalized version of nationalist Maoism across the country. “Our red nation will never change color,” Xi said during a […]

Faced with plummeting birth rates that threaten to undermine its economy, Germany is aggressively experimenting with new policies to reverse the decline. NYT: There is perhaps nowhere better than the German countryside to see the dawning impact of Europe’s plunge in fertility rates over the decades, a problem that has frightening implications for the economy […]

The student loan crisis has slowed down our economy and trapped young and old alike in vicious cycles of debt, but it may also be fueling the decline of institutional religion in America. The Atlantic has a mostly thoughtful and interesting piece profiling millennials who have decided to become Catholic priests or nuns, exploring their motivations and […]

We’ve spoken at length about the tough market for law school grads, but we’ve paid less attention to the reasons why so many aspiring lawyers are having so much trouble finding jobs. Part of it is simple over-saturation—in the boom years of the late 1990s, law schools proliferated and churned out more lawyers than the […]

Evidence that Obamacare is leading companies to restrict work hours for its employees has so far been mostly anecdotal, but Jed Graham dives into some statistics over at Investor’s Business Daily. He finds large, significant drops in average workweeks corresponding with the advent of Obamacare (i.e. from full time to below the 30 hour limit at which […]

If all you read is up-to-the-minute coverage of what’s been going on in Egypt over the past three days, you might be forgiven for assuming that what the Egyptian Army is doing somehow defies the wishes and desires of most Egyptians. With the caveat that the plural of anecdotes is not data, an article in […]

Whether it’s a matter of simple missed deadlines or deliberate executive secrecy, crucial data on federal health care experiments is being withheld from the public.Last month the Obama administration released data on the first-year performance of the Affordable Care Act’s primary cost-saving measure: accountable care organizations. The results were mixed, even worrying. But at least the […]

Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan—and even Iran. All are feeling the effects of the civil war in Syria. Let’s take a look at what’s happened the past few days.At least 34 people were killed in as many as eight car bomb attacks in Iraq yesterday. Hundreds were wounded. One bomb exploded just a few yards from the […]

Obama’s signature education initiative, the Common Core curriculum, may be in serious trouble. The New York Times reports that the Tea Party and a number of left-leaning parents have become unlikely allies in the fight against the rollout of the initiative, although they oppose it for slightly different reasons. For the Tea Party, the Common […]

Philadelphia’s public school system is scraping the bottom of the barrel just to keep going. Only weeks before the beginning of the school year, the city has been forced to borrow $50 million to open the schools on schedule, and many critical programs will be put on hold. Worse, this comes after Philadelphia closed about a tenth […]