Too good to be true? Earlier this week, we heard rumblings of a potential revolution in agriculture, as a farming method developed by a Jesuit priest in Madagascar, called System of Rice (or root) Intensification (SRI), reportedly was producing world-record yields in India. But not everyone is convinced. The Guardian reports that a Chinese scientist is pouring […]

The UK economy has been dealt another blow, as Moody’s Investors Services downgraded the UK from its triple-A credit rating—which it had held since 1978—to one notch below, at Aa1.  The WSJ reports: The Moody’s decision was based on “the increasing clarity that, despite considerable structural economic strengths, the U.K.’s economic growth will remain sluggish over […]

After defying UN bans and proceeding with nuclear tests earlier this month, the Norks are now threatening the US against performing its own joint military drills with South Korea. Pak Rim Su, a chief North Korean military delegate, issued a rare direct warning to Gen. James Thurman, according to the AP: “You had better bear […]

This semester I’m teaching a class on the public intellectual in the age of the internet; we are thinking about how the rise of the internet does and does not change the relationship of writers and thinkers to society. The students are also learning to write short blog-type post that we workshop together in class.One […]

American hospitals are getting away with charging patients outrageously inflated prices, according to an excellent piece by Steven Brill on our broken health care system. Writing in Time magazine, Brill goes deep in depth to examine six (typically) expensive hospital bills to figure out why health care costs so much in America. He found that hospitals […]

PhD students are in serious trouble, and not only because the job market for professors is shrinking more every day. Over at the Daily Beast Megan McArdle offers some penetrating insights about the attempt of PhD programs to prepare their students for jobs outside academia (called “alt-ac” jobs, alternative to academic): Unfortunately, in many cases a […]

A jarring cover fronts next week’s Economist: “Syria: The Death of a Country” is the headline article inside. The whole piece is worth the read, but here’s a juicy bit that backs up what Via Meadia has been arguing for some time now. … President Barack Obama has suggested that saving lives alone is not […]

Now here’s a sign of the times in Asia: Bloomberg reports that Toyota, a Japanese carmaker, is on track to produce more vehicles in Thailand by 2015 than it does in China. Here’s the story: Thailand’s total vehicle output may rise 30 percent to 3 million units by the end of 2015, according to Macquarie […]

Can a drug and the many people who use it really explain the problems of an entire country? That’s the thrust of Peer Gatter’s photo series over at Foreign Policy and, presumably, his $160, 900-page book Politics of Qat: The Role of a Drug in Ruling Yemen (which VM has not yet read). Qat, if […]

China lashed out angrily at Japan after Japan’s hotheaded Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made incendiary comments about China in an interview with the Washington Post, which was published yesterday.“It is rare that a country’s leader brazenly distorts facts, attacks its neighbor and instigates antagonism between regional countries,” said China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei. “Such […]