Today marks the 20th anniversary of the federal gas tax (h/t National Journal). Implemented in 1993, the tax adds 18.4 cents per gallon to your total cost at the pump, and the revenue is used to maintain federal roads and bridges.  States levy their own gas taxes that add between 8 and 50 cents per […]

Buddhist mobs killed 4 Muslims, including a 94-year-old woman, and torched more than 100 homes this past week in the restive Burmese province of Rakhine. The Guardian reports: The latest clashes began in Thandwe on Saturday after a Buddhist taxi driver told police he had been verbally abused by a Muslim small business owner while trying […]

Now that the day has finally come, the media is excitedly enumerating all the ways the government shutdown will disrupt our lives. Yet if lists like these truly represent the worst the shutdown has to offer, it may not be so bad. Some early fall vacations to national parks will be disrupted, aspiring gun owners […]

Bard College, a small liberal arts college in the Hudson Valley and academic home of WRM, is trying a singularly ambitious new plan for college admissions. Rather than relying on high school GPAs and SAT scores, future applicants will have the option of completing four research papers, 2,500 words long, on topics ranging from 17th-century […]

If any Via Meadia readers are sitting on piles of cash, here’s a chance to do something important: save the City Opera of New York. Founded seventy years ago and once known as “the people’s opera” for its relatively cheap ticket prices and alternative repertoire, the City Opera is now sadly headed for the chopping […]

With the  Westgate Mall in Kenya still full of wreckage from the recent attacks, 50 college students were murdered in their beds by Boko Haram in Nigeria early Sunday morning. The AP reports: Provost Molima Idi Mato of Yobe State College of Agriculture told The Associated Press that there were no security forces protecting the […]

Adam Garfinkle has a few choice things to say about the Obama administration’s recent negotiating “successes”: For reasons both political and delusional, the Obama Administration feels great these days both on account of the U.S.-Russia chemical weapons deal over Syria that eventuated in UNSCR 2118, and on account of its “opening” to Iran. The broad […]

No city has embraced the school choice movement more than New Orleans. Yet over the past few weeks, the Wall Street Journal has been taking a close look at how the idea is working out, and the results have been decidedly mixed.The biggest problem is that there simply aren’t enough high-quality schools to go around. The […]

Say you’ve just finished building a house out of straw, but after stepping back to admire your work, you realize it’s listing dangerously to one side, ready to collapse. Do you look at the materials you used and acknowledge that maybe you’ve made a mistake? Not if you’re China. No, if you’re China, your solution […]

A wave of car bombs planted in predominately Shia Muslim neighborhoods throughout Baghdad killed at least 47 people today and injured dozens more. The BBC has the bloody details: Monday’s blasts struck during Baghdad’s morning rush hour, with reports of 13 bombs, most of them in Shia neighbourhoods.Groups of labourers gathering ahead of the working […]