Here’s a thought experiment: if you were convening a national conference of public pension officials to discuss the country’s $766 billion unfunded liability (some have it as high as $2.2 trillion), where would you hold it? Providence, RI? San Bernardino, CA? Portland, OR?Try a beachfront luxury resort in Honolulu, the site of this year’s National […]

Surgeon-robots, apps that perform EKGs, wrist bands that monitor blood pressure, and predictive DNA sequencing. These are just a few of the new technologies poised to revolutionize the health care industry, says Jonathan Cohn’s excellent piece in this month’s Atlantic.Cohn notes that until very recently most medical innovations were about creating new drugs or surgical procedures. These advances have improved […]

The darling of the electric vehicle industry, the Israel-based Better Place, is struggling to stay afloat. Despite having raised a staggering total of $850 million from investors like HSBC and General Electric, the EV start-up has only sold 750 cars and has posted losses of $500 million. The firm’s founder was forced out last October, […]

New York City is taking a simple, even old-fashioned approach to reducing teen pregnancy: reminding teenagers in no uncertain terms that having a baby or getting someone pregnant will, well, ruin their lives. The $400,000 campaign, which includes posters in subways and bus shelters, interactive texting and video interviews with teen parents, has garnered sharp criticism […]

The euro crisis hasn’t gone away; it has metastasized. A cancer of the monetary system has spread to other vital organs throughout the body of the patient. Economies are collapsing across the zone, as people face year after year of recession, contraction, and unemployment. Policymakers offer no plans when confronted with what is entirely a […]

 Illinois’ troubles are about to get much worse. On Wednesday, Governor Pat Quinn unveiled what some are calling the state’s “worst-ever budget” and blasted legislators for doing nothing about the state’s $96 billion unfunded pension liability. Another two years of stasis and President Obama’s home state will officially be “spending more on public pensions than […]

Yesterday we wrote about the blue civil war that could rip the Democratic Party down the middle, but today Republican leaders faced a smaller civil war of their own. Around 1 a.m. some Senate Republicans, led by tea partier Rand Paul, ended a thirteen hour filibuster protesting the confirmation of John Brennan to the CIA. More […]

Tired of your commute? You’re not alone: the average American commute is 25.4 minutes each way. Working off data released by the US Census Bureau this week, WNYC threw together an excellent national map of average commute times by zip code. Find your city down below and compare your commute to the averages, and when […]

Obama’s call for universal preschool access, one of the few concrete proposals in an otherwise bland State of the Union Address, was the culmination of an idea inspired by the success of programs like the Perry Preschool Program. There has been some research to suggest that children who attend preschool regularly go on to lead more successful […]

Not every autocratic rogue state can threaten the US with a “pre-emptive nuclear attack” and have it laughed off. To make such a threat and incur so little concern from Washington requires a bizarre combination of psychosis, incompetence, and inanity that only North Korea seems to have mastered.But then again, this latest stunt likely isn’t […]