Political inequality drives economic inequality, not the other way around.

Large cities in poorly and misgoverned lands have problems dis- tinct from those in more affluent, better-institutionalized democracies. The denizens of the latter fail to appreciate what ails those of the former even as they produce “wasteful waste” of their own.

Russia’s tumultuous and mostly regrettable post-Cold War history is paralleled in some ways by an earlier time, one that provided the setting for the incomparable émigré journalist Alexander Herzen.

This piece is third in a series on the challenges facing the U.S. Armed Forces. Previous entries discussed the Army and the Air Force. As the U.S. Marine Corps winds down its operations in Afghanistan, it faces a different kind of battlefield back home, where the challenges take shape as numbers, ideas and purposes. This operational theater […]

In his reluctance to brandish America’s world leadership credentials at every turn, President Obama is tapping into an interesting if frustrating strain of American history—and it just might help America learn the wisdom of great power prudence and humility.

The errant 2002–03 U.S. intelligence estimate of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on the Iranian nuclear weapons program are two of the most controversial judgments in the history of the U.S. intelligence community.

American passivity has already helped ensure that the fall of Bashar al-Assad will be worse than it might have been. What will Washington do with Syria when it can no longer do nothing?

A lot of official Republican discourse tries to skate past the failures of the Bush years, but this won’t do.

American colleges have a lot of practice by now at rationalizing their annual tuition increases, often by blaming the bad economy or state budget cuts. Slate’s Matt Yglesias breaks down these explanations. While it’s true that state support for public universities has fallen over the past few years, universities have increased tuition by more than is required […]