[A Vintage Via Meadia essay originally published two years ago, republished and retweaked as a new cohort of first year students tries to figure out how to get the most out of college — and a new cohort of parents tries to figure out how to pay for it.]The anxious emails from students are hitting […]

A suicide bomber attacked an armored vehicle carrying U.S. diplomats in Peshawar yesterday. The New York Times reports: There were conflicting reports about the number and nationality of the casualties. Pakistani officials said that at least two people were killed and at least 13 were injured, including two police officers. The United States Embassy in Islamabad […]

There’s been an even more sinister turn in the story of the illiterate Christian girl accused of blasphemy by a Pakistani imam: the imam himself was arrested and accused of tampering with evidence and desecrating the Koran. “The imam was arrested after his deputy Maulvi Zubair and two others told a magistrate he added pages […]

Have we all been underestimating the gravity of the European crisis? That deeply unsettling question threatens to wreck the world’s peace of mind in what could just be a much more turbulent fall than people expect. The American election and much else could be wrenched out of shape by new and much more dangerous developments […]

As regular readers know, we have tried to stay away from the all consuming horse race journalism over the US presidential race while taking a look from time to time at where the two horses actually are. Our method belongs to the quick and dirty school of political analysis rather than the painstaking model crafting […]

One of the advantages of extended overseas traveling in an election year is that you get to see just how pointless most of the daily election commentary and news reporting in the United States really is. The interminable US presidential election cycle (with people already beginning to speculate about 2016, heaven help us) has bequeathed […]

As regular followers of Via Meadia will know, WRM recently returned from his trip to India. He and AI staffer Peter Mellgard took photos while traveling.

A public notary in Brazil is attempting to push Brazil across a new frontier in family arrangements by “accepting a civil union between three people”, reports the BBC: Public Notary Claudia do Nascimento Domingues has said the man and two women should be entitled to family rights.[…]Nathaniel Santos Batista Junior, a jurist who helped draft […]

An article in the Financial Times illustrates an important theme we follow here at Via Meadia: the geopolitical and economic shifts as the new energy realities of the 21st century sink in.As the FT puts it, Experts are convinced that Tamar and Leviathan will not be the last big Israeli discoveries. They point to the […]

Most of us take a pretty simple and straightforward view of economic conditions: expansions are good and recessions are bad. But the reality is more complicated. More than 300 years of capitalism have taught us a few things. One of them is that recessions are a normal part of the business cycle. You have winter […]