It’s no one thing: Rapid global economic change, institutional deficiencies in governance and plutocratic smarm have reinforced each other to create one huge tangle of a problem.

A new kind of bipolarity is returning to global politics. At one pole stand states invested in a rule-based international order. At the other stand those intent on unconstrained raison d’état. And America is stuck in the middle.

The tendency of America’s highly educated elites to oppose war and assume an adversarial posture against the government turns less on principle than it does on sociology.

The student loan bubble may very well be about to burst, but a college education is itself still more than “worth it”—especially for a democracy.

For decades, both Democrats and Republicans have been invested in governance schemes that have eroded the Constitution’s separation of powers.

The higher ed revolution is coming. Just a few decades hence, half the colleges and universities in the United States will have disappeared, but schools like Harvard will have millions of students.

This is the one time of year when I’m ready to declare war on Christmas myself. It’s impossible to venture into a store without Christmas music and Christmas displays. Christmas catalogs are over stuffing mailboxes all over the land.At this time of year this seems like anything but a religious holiday. Our commercial society’s wildly […]

My last two posts had the quality of academic mini-lectures. I don’t want my readers to suspect that I have gone into the business (a growing one, judging by ads all over the place) of long-distance education, so this post will break the pattern. It is somewhere between an intuition and a meditation.There were two […]

Truth be told, there is very rarely a slow news day in what our government types referred to as the MENA region (MENA standing for Middle East and North Africa). But some days really stand out above the average for action, avarice and atavistic behavior. Yesterday was one of them. The place is really hopping, […]

“All the balls are in our court now,” quipped one Japanese pundit. Rightly so. Now that U.S. President Barak Obama has been reelected, he says, all the alliance issues, including the stalled plan to relocate a U.S. Marine Corps base in Okinawa and delayed participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks, must be taken off […]