Rhode Island is one of the bluest states in the country, and one where public sector unions have long worked with sympathetic politicians to create a true blue system of well paid public employees retiring comfortably on generous pensions with cost of living raises automatically thrown in. The only problem is that the state could […]

[A Vintage Via Meadia essay originally published one year ago, republished 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 my in-boxes […]

Pakistan is stuck fast in a crisis of governability.

Friend, foe or master of hedging? Pakistan may be all three.

The Italo-Ottoman War of 1911 haunts today’s Libya conflict.

Bad government is making the tsunami-ravaged northeastern Japan’s bad luck hard to stomach.

Looking back on the life of an extremely difficult woman.

With the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of American Special Forces on May 2, 2011, the 9/11 decade may be said to be psychologically over.1 Political decades, after all, do not have to fit neatly into the calendar.  Just as the Sixties began with the assassination of President Kennedy on November 2, […]

As I surveyed the photographs of people in Cairo and elsewhere in the Arab world, mostly young and brimming with enthusiasm, often with fingers raised in a “V” for victory, I was reminded of three similar moments in recent Latin American history, each of which I witnessed firsthand: the Dominican revolution of 1965; the Sandinista […]

To whom are we planning to hand off the war against the Taliban? An inside look at the Afghan National Army.