MOOCs are attracting resistance from professors across the country. In early May San Diego State’s philosophy department wrote an open letter to Harvard professor Michael Sandel, complaining that soon enough MOOCs like his popular online course on justice “will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.” The Duke faculty […]

Between crushing student debt and dim job prospects, the nation’s recent grads have every right to a bleak outlook on average. But their outlook isn’t actually uniformly bleak across the country. Here’s a list of ten cities where college grads are faring particularly well, with unemployment rates well below the national average. If you were reading us […]

Earth’s surface temperatures have defied the predictions of climate models for the past decade, coming in considerably cooler than expected. The climate science community is stumped about this. One possible explanation is that oceans are “storing” much of the heat that would otherwise have warmed the atmosphere. There are other possibilities as well. What this […]

The Obama administration keeps pressing that Russian reset button but the darn thing still won’t work. If Secretary of State John Kerry was hoping Russia’s recent transfer of weapons to Assad in Syria would be its last, he’s about to be disappointed. The Guardian reports that peace talks in Geneva jointly convened by the US […]

Are they extremists, as Erdoğan suggested? Are they activists organized by Turkey’s opposition parties? Are they “bums” and “looters”? Hippies? Kurds? Leftists? Anarchists? Soccer hooligans?What began as a peaceful sit-in to protect one of Istanbul’s last green parks has evolved over the past few days into huge street marches and battles between protesters and riot police. […]

Illinois has now officially blown its third chance in one year at fixing the worst state pension system in the country. After failing to pass pension reform bills in August and again in January, Illinois is now 0-for-3, having failed as expected on Friday to pass a bill before the legislature adjourned. The state may now have to […]

What happened to America’s nerve? The US has long prided itself on its gumption, its pluck, its dynamism. But risk-taking is out, the Wall Street Journal reports, and that doesn’t bode well for our economy: Three long-running trends suggest the U.S. economy has turned soft on risk: Companies add jobs more slowly, even in good times. Investors […]

Europe is mulling import tariffs on cheap Chinese solar panels to protect its own manufacturers; it could learn something from America’s attempt to do the same last year. Hint: it didn’t work.China heavily subsidized its own solar industry, which led to a rapid expansion in the supply of solar panels. Demand didn’t keep up with […]

News out of Asia was grim this week: a massacre and the slowest growth in a decade in India; Chinese hacking; and the battle lines between friends and rivals coming into sharper focus in Asia’s Game of Thrones.Europe didn’t fare much better. A horrific slashing in London put the UK in crisis mode over the possibility that radical extremism […]

Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem sparked a storm of controversy when it was published in 1963. Roger Berkowitz, a scholar of politics and philosophy and a colleague of WRM’s at Bard, writes that in the years since, it “has remained something to condemn or defend rather than a book to be read and understood.” A new […]