First came reports that Egypt had flooded the Gaza tunnel network with water; then last week, the NYT updated the story with a nasty new detail: “Awful,” said Abu Mutair Shalouf, 35, a Palestinian smuggler on the Gaza side, watching workers haul buckets of sewage-soaked soil from the shaft of a tunnel flooded by the Egyptian military 15 days ago. […]

WRM has been teaching a class on the public intellectual in the age of the internet at Bard College, and has been helping his students to hone their writing chops: In the last couple of classes we’ve been looking at a strategy that many writers used at that time: writing about political and other non-lyrical […]

The ongoing success story in Mexico is one of the most important that the American press has missed in the last few years. We keep seeing Mexico as nothing but trouble—drug cartels, illegal immigration—when in fact a new reality is taking shape. In his most recent must-read column for the NYT, Friedman sheds some much-needed light […]

According to Dante, the last pope to resign couldn’t even make it into Hell. Pope Celestine V, a 13th century monk whose brief elevation to the papacy ended with resignation, is found among the ‘neutrals’ who neither God nor the Devil wants anything to do with. Dante was hardly an objective observer; he blamed Celestine’s […]

Too good to be true? Earlier this week, we heard rumblings of a potential revolution in agriculture, as a farming method developed by a Jesuit priest in Madagascar, called System of Rice (or root) Intensification (SRI), reportedly was producing world-record yields in India. But not everyone is convinced. The Guardian reports that a Chinese scientist is pouring […]

The UK economy has been dealt another blow, as Moody’s Investors Services downgraded the UK from its triple-A credit rating—which it had held since 1978—to one notch below, at Aa1.  The WSJ reports: The Moody’s decision was based on “the increasing clarity that, despite considerable structural economic strengths, the U.K.’s economic growth will remain sluggish over […]

After defying UN bans and proceeding with nuclear tests earlier this month, the Norks are now threatening the US against performing its own joint military drills with South Korea. Pak Rim Su, a chief North Korean military delegate, issued a rare direct warning to Gen. James Thurman, according to the AP: “You had better bear […]

This semester I’m teaching a class on the public intellectual in the age of the internet; we are thinking about how the rise of the internet does and does not change the relationship of writers and thinkers to society. The students are also learning to write short blog-type post that we workshop together in class.One […]

American hospitals are getting away with charging patients outrageously inflated prices, according to an excellent piece by Steven Brill on our broken health care system. Writing in Time magazine, Brill goes deep in depth to examine six (typically) expensive hospital bills to figure out why health care costs so much in America. He found that hospitals […]

PhD students are in serious trouble, and not only because the job market for professors is shrinking more every day. Over at the Daily Beast Megan McArdle offers some penetrating insights about the attempt of PhD programs to prepare their students for jobs outside academia (called “alt-ac” jobs, alternative to academic): Unfortunately, in many cases a […]