Last week, one of the world’s biggest, most expensive, and technically fraught oil fields produced its first barrel of oil. Kashagan, as the field is called, is located in Kazakhstan, in the North Caspian Sea, and was developed by a consortium of energy giants that shared the massive risk of pouring in $50 billion and […]

If blue policies worked in practice the way their defenders say they do in theory, then San Jose, the self-proclaimed capital of Silicon Valley, one of America’s most dynamic and regions, should be the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. It should be a place where the overwhelming “excess” of riches from a relatively large, elite […]

A new study on wage levels brought renewed attention to income inequality last week, but there’s another inequality that we should be focused on, according to our TAI colleague Adam Garfinkle. Pivoting off of yesterday’s NYT article on the Affordable Care Act, he notes that our health care system is becoming increasingly unequal:  We are slowly (or […]

For the second year in a row, more illegal immigrants were caught entering the country than the year before, mostly along the US-Mexico border. The numbers are nowhere near their pre-recession peak, but they are unmistakably trending upward. This has heightened the battle between Republicans and Democrats over whether immigration reform should focus first on […]

AI Executive Committee member Joe Joffe tells you what you need to know in the Wall Street Journal: The deeper meaning of this strange election, triumphal as it was for the once and future chancellor, is of a watershed in postwar German history. For the first time since 1949, the liberals—the Free Democratic Party—will not be […]

As the death toll from Sunday’s deadly suicide blasts at All Saints Church in Peshawar rises to 83, Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician, is coming under increasing criticism. After the parliamentary elections this past May, his party, the PTI (Movement for Justice) is now the third largest in Pakistan and the biggest in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, of […]

As the home of the three largest MOOC companies (Coursera, Udacity, and EdX), America remains the undisputed leader of the fledging industry. But the rest of the world will surely try to catch up. Several Asian universities have flirted with creating their own programs, and it wouldn’t surprise us to find that schools in the […]

Puerto Rico’s debt crisis has just been moved up to DEFCON 1. The WSJ reports that a number of financial firms are taking the radical step of limiting investor access to the island’s debt and warning smaller brokers to stay away. As the Journal notes, this is an extreme measure that is rarely ever used. The fact that […]

President Putin’s point man for bringing Ukraine to heel is really yanking on the choke chain these days, threatening to support the dismemberment of Russia’s neighbor if it votes to move closer to the EU. The Times of London has the eyebrow-raising scoop: Sergei Glazyev, one of Vladimir Putin’s top advisers, said that Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority might […]

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a letter to the editor extolling the virtues of telework, as well as a host of responses it prompted. Many readers chimed in with positive anecdotes, but there was also plenty of criticism. One reader made a well-worn managerial complaint: [I]t’s difficult for an employer to ascertain the productivity […]