On Sunday, WRM and Prof. Roger Berkowitz, from Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, will be having a conversation with General Stanley McChrystal at the New York Historical Society.You can buy tickets to the event here, or call (212) 485-9268. Hurry before they sell out!

College administrators have found an interesting new way to strike it rich: quitting their jobs. Upon leaving his role as executive vice president of NYU for a job with Citigroup in 2006, Jacob J. Lew (the current Secretary of the Treasury) took a $685,000 bonus from the university. Harold S. Koplewicz, an executive at the […]

Nineteen-year-old Ghulam Mustafa was executed on remote stretch of a mountain highway outside Gilgit in Pakistan, when 40 heavily armed men, clad in camouflage fatigues, stopped a convoy of buses and ordered all Shiite passengers to identify themselves. Ghulam was Sunni. He said to the men, “Why are you doing this? Why do you want to kill […]

Here’s a thought experiment: if you were convening a national conference of public pension officials to discuss the country’s $766 billion unfunded liability (some have it as high as $2.2 trillion), where would you hold it? Providence, RI? San Bernardino, CA? Portland, OR?Try a beachfront luxury resort in Honolulu, the site of this year’s National […]

Surgeon-robots, apps that perform EKGs, wrist bands that monitor blood pressure, and predictive DNA sequencing. These are just a few of the new technologies poised to revolutionize the health care industry, says Jonathan Cohn’s excellent piece in this month’s Atlantic.Cohn notes that until very recently most medical innovations were about creating new drugs or surgical procedures. These advances have improved […]

The darling of the electric vehicle industry, the Israel-based Better Place, is struggling to stay afloat. Despite having raised a staggering total of $850 million from investors like HSBC and General Electric, the EV start-up has only sold 750 cars and has posted losses of $500 million. The firm’s founder was forced out last October, […]

New York City is taking a simple, even old-fashioned approach to reducing teen pregnancy: reminding teenagers in no uncertain terms that having a baby or getting someone pregnant will, well, ruin their lives. The $400,000 campaign, which includes posters in subways and bus shelters, interactive texting and video interviews with teen parents, has garnered sharp criticism […]

The euro crisis hasn’t gone away; it has metastasized. A cancer of the monetary system has spread to other vital organs throughout the body of the patient. Economies are collapsing across the zone, as people face year after year of recession, contraction, and unemployment. Policymakers offer no plans when confronted with what is entirely a […]

 Illinois’ troubles are about to get much worse. On Wednesday, Governor Pat Quinn unveiled what some are calling the state’s “worst-ever budget” and blasted legislators for doing nothing about the state’s $96 billion unfunded pension liability. Another two years of stasis and President Obama’s home state will officially be “spending more on public pensions than […]

Yesterday we wrote about the blue civil war that could rip the Democratic Party down the middle, but today Republican leaders faced a smaller civil war of their own. Around 1 a.m. some Senate Republicans, led by tea partier Rand Paul, ended a thirteen hour filibuster protesting the confirmation of John Brennan to the CIA. More […]