Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage by Michael R. Veach University Press of Kentucky, 2013, 224 pp., $24.95 I began reading Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage, by Michael R. Veach, with a hangover manifesting itself as a throbbing headache, courtesy of the titular drink. I hoped that by the time I finished the book, […]

In a better world, the horrible travails of the Duke lacrosse team would have led colleges and universities across the country to do more to protect young men from having their reputations destroyed and their lives ruined by false accusations of sexual misconduct. But if anything, young men have been losing procedural safeguards and the […]

Scotland will vote on whether it wants to leave the UK in September 2014, but a new report from UK’s Commons Foreign Affairs Committee wants the country to know this would be a very bad idea for both sides. We’ve noted before the tremendous difficulties that an independent Scotland could face, including possibly negotiating its entrance […]

Fortunately, President Obama’s Syria policy is becoming clearer. Unfortunately, the policy appears to be to dither fecklessly for years as extremists come to dominate the Syrian resistance and vicious fighting radicalizes the country, only to get deeply involved just as our ability to influence the future of Syria has largely disappeared. The WSJ reports on […]

Good news: The city of Los Angeles has solved all of its urgent problems, including underfunded pensions, poor quality education, budget deficits, debt, gang violence, and drugs. Having dispensed with these important issues, the LA city council turned to the most pressing issue at hand: a resolution to condemn the Koch brothers, the libertarian billionaires […]

Unions are starting to make a serious push into a segment of the education system from which they have been heretofore largely absent: charter schools. In mid-April we noted that the American Federation of Teachers was planning to organize employees of the United Neighborhood Organization, which runs 13 charter schools in Chicago. The vote has […]

Japan is on the verge of restarting a nuclear processing facility that could push angry neighboring countries into an arms race, the WSJ reported last night. The Rokkasho facility, in Japan’s northern Aomori prefecture, is purely civilian in nature, Japan’s leaders assert. But it is capable of producing nine tons of weapons-grade plutonium each year, enough for 2,000 […]

President Obama is in Mexico today, above all else to deepen economic ties. Mexico has come very far in a relatively short amount of time, and President Enrique Peña Nieto will greet President Obama with the reputation of a capable reformist determined to turn Mexico into the prosperous North American power it has long sought […]

Is Egypt on the brink of an even bigger catastrophe than has already befallen it? The FT has a story this morning about the unprecedented crime rates plaguing Egyptians of all walks of life: armed robberies are up twelvefold, car thefts are up fourfold, and homicides have tripled. The roots of the criminality are complex: […]

We commented before on Uber, the app that lets users quickly and easily hail cabs. After almost a year of delay, the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission finally agreed on Tuesday to start a pilot program for the app. Now the NYT reports that, on Wednesday, a judge from the appeals court issued an injunction that will once again […]