The blue vision of the future, as I wrote in my last essay, is a bleak one in many respects. If the establishment liberals of our time are right in their future vision, most of the population will be economically surplus; globalization and automation will empower a creative class on Wall Street and in Hollywood […]

Two decades ago, the Commandant of the Marine Corps declared that women serving in the infantry “would destroy the Marine Corps.” General Robert Barrow explained that, “in three wars—World War II, Korea and Vietnam—I found no place for women to be down in the ground combat element.” He cited the 1950 fighting retreat from the […]

[As regular VM readers know we have been writing about the decline of the “blue social model” — which you can read more about here and here.]While many ask whether the blue social model has a future, it may be more interesting to ask what kind of future the blue social model offers. Blue opinion […]

The Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University publishes a very informative electronic newsletter about religious developments all over the world. On January 12, 2013, the newsletter carried a story originally published in the Buffalo News, about Joelle Silver, a high school science teacher in a community in upstate New York […]

Over the past week or so, I have had recourse to critique the American mainstream, elite press for not doing justice to the situation in the Sahel on behalf of their readers. Over the past few days, the Algerian angle of the evolving situation has come to the fore, and here the MSM has done […]

Americans like to think we are pragmatic, results oriented people, but many of our political disagreements are argued in terms of abstract theory. In particular, Americans like to argue about the proper role of the state: how big should it be and how its responsibilities should be divided between state, local and federal levels. Often, […]

When I wrote about the situation in Mali a couple of days ago, little did I know just how much get-up-and-go this story would acquire. In just about fifty hours, from the time I left off writing on Tuesday to the present, at least five significant developments have widened the aperture of this episode—some of […]

Novelist Salman Rushdie, famously, is something of an expert witness on the menace of blasphemy laws. On February 14, 1989, recall, Iran’s fanatical ruler Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa suborning the murder of Rushdie, a foreign citizen, for the crime of writing a work of fiction, The Satanic Verses. Agents of militant Islam from London to Lahore […]

A year ago, the world was abuzz with talk of the euro crisis and the feared disintegration of the European Union. By the end of 2012, the discussion has shifted to the crisis of the liberal democracy model itself. The debate is no longer “Keynes vs. Hayek” or expansionary vs. austerity fiscal measures. At the […]

After every mass shooting, the talk of the nation turns to gun control, and the particular horror of the Newtown tragedy has made the conversation louder than ever.New York lawmakers passed the strictest gun laws in the country on Tuesday, and yesterday President Obama released a set of executive orders that marked the strongest action […]