In the beginning, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah condemned the Syrian uprising. Then, when things started getting violent, he tried to help moderate a ceasefire between government and rebel forces. Now, ever so subtly, he is hedging his bets, voicing tentative and vague support for the Syrian rebels, careful not to antagonize his second-greatest patron. But is […]

The U.S.-Pakistan relationship is fraught in the best of times, but we may be approaching a new low. Pakistani politicians of all stripes have united in denouncing the $10 million dollar U.S. bounty on Hafiz Saeed, the man behind the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, who is currently living openly in Pakistan. Pakistan’s refusal to cooperate […]

Last weekend we predicted a sea of trouble for the democracy quangos—quasi-NGOs that support democracy in foreign countries and receive a significant portion of their funding from the federal government. Understandably, many foreign governments, particularly those not favorably disposed to American-style democracy, have taken umbrage at these groups’ close ties with domestic opposition, characterizing them […]

If the great recession has spelled doom for traditional employment sectors like manufacturing and construction, that doesn’t mean that new jobs across the board are nowhere to be found. Via Meadia has looked into new growth in many unconventional job fields; today the New York Times profiles another: veterinary medicine: Dr. Suter, at North Carolina […]

Last week Via Meadia took up a question that it seems high time to mull over: What will Afghanistan look like when America leaves?Extending this question beyond Afghanistan to all of Greater Central Asia, Rajan Menon has taken a crack at an answer in The American Interest. The results are far from heartening. A weak Afghan regime with […]

Will America’s next great university be online? That’s the ambitious aim of the Minerva Project, an education startup/university that just received $25 million in seed funding and has already snared former Harvard President Larry Summers to chair its advisory board. Minerva’s founder, Ben Nelson, says that “by creating an educational experience that is built from […]

Since the beginning of the recession in 2007, it has become a fashionable among intellectuals to predict a future of slow growth and gradual economic decline in America. Yet America has a way of confounding the predictions of the intellectuals, and there are many things going its way which may allow standards of living to […]

Last month, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority, the Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Shaikhit, announced it is “necessary to destroy all the churches in the region. There are not to be two religions in the [Arabian] Peninsula.”This fatwa was met with dismay in the Western and Christian worlds. Via Meadia and others picked up the story. Now […]

For three decades the rising cost of attending American colleges has far outpaced inflation. As this higher education bubble continues to inflate, a university degree, which used to be a ticket into the middle class, is increasingly coming to resemble a ticket to decades of debt. And what are students, whose loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion, […]

Would He wear a pinky ring, would He drive a fancy car Would His wife wear furs and diamonds, would His dressing room have a star? If He came back tomorrow, there’s something I’d like to know Would Jesus wear a Rolex on his television show?These questions were asked in a song by Chet Atkins […]