The story ends on a leafy side street in northern Virginia, but it began with a killing machine in Auschwitz. The Washington Post magazine has a great Sunday read this week: Brigitte Höss lives quietly on a leafy side street in Northern Virginia. She is retired now, having worked in a Washington fashion salon for more […]

Fears of insurgency are spreading in Egypt. After Thursday’s failed car-bomb assassination attempt on him, the country’s foreign minister Mohamed Ibrahim ominously predicted that the attack was “not the end but the beginning.” That vague warning echoes a growing fear that Egypt is once again heading towards a protracted fight against Islamic insurgency forces. The FT reports: […]

Andrew Sullivan thinks we’re in a “panic” when we say that a “no” vote from Congress on Syria will destroy the President’s foreign policy credibility.He doesn’t seem to understand how serious it would be for the president’s Syria policy to be repudiated by Congress. Quoting Ezra Klein he tells us that foreigners will still know […]

[A Vintage Via Meadia essay originally published three years ago, republished and retweaked 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 […]

Fellow TAI blogger Peter Berger is back with an intriguing discussion of religious constitutions. After looking at proposed changes to the Egyptian constitution, Berger analyzes how nations ruled by “religious principles” differ from those ruled by specifically defined religious doctrines. He reaches an interesting conclusion by way of contrasting Britian and the Middle East: Grace Davie, […]

Do what the robots tell you, and you’ll succeed. That’s one of the messages of Average is Over, the latest book from TAI board member Tyler Cowen. The book explores how America’s economy, culture, and politics will be transformed in age in which computers and robots can increasingly do a lot of traditional human tasks. Cowen has […]

America’s pension crisis may be much worse than we thought. A new report from State Budget Solutions looks at each state’s pension liabilities using a lower estimate of the rate of return than the states use themselves, and found that the country’s plans are underfunded by $4.1 trillion, and only 39 percent funded overall. The state-by-state breakdown […]

John Kerry has been making the rounds claiming that Obama can bomb Syria even if Congress votes against it. The legalities are disputed among constitutional lawyers, but telling the world that the Obama administration reserves the right to bomb Syria regardless of what Congress says is probably not the smartest way to lobby for votes.Some […]

Under Australia’s complicated counting system, final results of the country’s general election will not be known for some time, but it is already clear that Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party have lost. Rudd has conceded defeat and announced that he will not fight to stay on as leader of the bitterly factionalized party. Outside […]

The Democratic National Committee has launched a new Obamacare publicity campaign with a neat but misleading infographic meant to show that the ACA is working. Two of the graphic’s claims bear closer examination. First, it says that, in every state with approved ACA premium rates, we’re seeing lower premiums. Given that only 13 states have […]