American public education may be in crisis, but teachers are fairly happy with their lives, according to a new Gallup poll: The nation’s teachers score higher than almost all occupational groups on life evaluations plus four of the other five areas of wellbeing—including emotional health, healthy behaviors, basic access, and physical health. In life evaluations, […]

Plenty of people have already chimed in about whether Google Glass, the high-tech mobile camera, video, and computing device welded to a pair of glasses, is an innovative work of staggering genius or, well, kinda dorky-looking, but we’re struck by something else entirely: Google’s decision to produce the device in Silicon Valley, USA. The FT reports: The […]

Millennials may be the first generation in American history to make less on average than their parents. “The average net worth of someone 29 to 37 has fallen 21 percent since 1983; the average net worth of someone 56 to 64 has more than doubled,” says this Urban Institute study. Meanwhile, average incomes for the 25–34 demographic […]

Obamacare will cost some restaurant chains much less than they predicted—in the case of Wendy’s, about 80 percent less than its original estimate. But dig a little deeper and you see how this is not an unqualified boon. Wendy’s and other companies will enjoy these savings because more workers than originally expected may choose to opt out […]

The social media king is extending his domain into politics. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is hooking up with a slew of tech titans to launch a political advocacy group focusing on education and immigration reform. The WSJ reports: Mr. Zuckerberg is working on launching the group along with close friend Joe Green, who was one […]

 Egypt’s steady slide toward economic ruin continues, as the Economist reports. Read the whole thing to absorb the magazine’s grim outlook for Egypt’s economy, and then consider an interesting question: What happens if the Islamists fail?Under Nasser, Egypt’s secular nationalists failed: they could neither build a modern economy nor defeat Israel. Over the past 200 years Egypt […]

One of the reasons we favored faster action on Syria in the past two years is that a sectarian war across the Fertile Crescent, perhaps pouring into Iran itself, would advance no US interests that we can think of, quite apart from the considerable costs in human life. Well, it looks like we’re on the […]

More evidence is in that we can make earthquakes now. Earlier this week researchers tied wastewater disposal in oil and gas production to the largest earthquake in Oklahoma’s history. Bloomberg reports: The earthquake near Prague, Oklahoma, on Nov. 6, 2011, was the state’s biggest and may be the largest linked to the injection of water from drilling […]

The flames of intolerance spreading to new areas of Burma are a reminder that the country’s “democratic reform” period is not a happy human rights tale.Just a couple weeks ago the town of Meikhtila was a peaceful, diverse place, where people calmly went about their lives without paying special attention to whether their neighbor was Buddhist or […]

Walmart is starting to look like a Soviet-era retailer. The prices are still low, but shelves are going empty for months while products sit unwrapped in storage, lines are interminable, and no one is around to help.Bloomberg reports that in-store service problems for the world’s third-largest corporation are so bad that people are willing to […]