Florida’s Supreme Court just dealt a major blow to public sector unions, upholding a law requiring public employees to pay three percent of their salaries toward their pensions. The law, an effort by Governor Rick Scott to get the state’s pension costs in line, has wended its way through the state’s court system, being struck […]

France is angry that Uncle Sugar won’t pick up the Mali bill. After decades of defense cuts and penny pinching, the French cannot support their North Africa ambitions without a lot of help from the US. But the US isn’t willing to sign on automatically to fund whatever campaign France has in mind. The WSJ: […]

Boris Johnson, the often-controversial mayor of London, muses in the Telegraph about the unusually heavy snow swirling down on London these days, and whether the weather means the sun is cooling and an ice age is coming: I remember snow that used to come and settle for just long enough for a single decent snowball fight […]

David Sanger of the New York Times has written a thoughtful analysis of what the Obama administration has and has not accomplished in its first term, and what it plans to accomplish in the second in U.S. foreign policy. Short description of accomplishments in the first term: not much. Short description of hopes and plans […]

We just posted the latest installment in series of essays exploring what might follow the currently decaying blue model. Before you tackle it, however, we advise you to chew over the introductory essay we posted last week. We today find ourselves facing a serious policy deficit from both the right and the left, and that’s […]

Americans like to think we are pragmatic, results oriented people, but many of our political disagreements are argued in terms of abstract theory. In particular, Americans like to argue about the proper role of the state: how big should it be and how its responsibilities should be divided between state, local and federal levels. Often, […]

From Tyler Cowen comes Bruce Sterling’s interesting answer to the 2013 Edge symposium question: What should (or shouldn’t) we be worried about? Since his response is a short one, and since there are a lot of responses in the symposium that are worth reading, we’ll quote Sterling in full below, but we encourage you to […]

The hostage crisis seems to be winding down after a final assault by Algerian forces killed or scattered most of the remaining jihadis occupying the gas processing plant in the south of the country. As of this morning, 23 hostages were reported killed, with the number likely to rise as authorities begin to identify the […]

When the Affordable Care Act passed in early 2010, many in academia—faculty and students alike—cheered on. But now that its provisions are going into effect, some of these same people are learning firsthand that Obamacare has some nasty side effects.A new piece in the Wall Street Journal reports that many colleges are cutting back on the number […]

The Jerusalem Post recently ran an excellent feature on the Tikvah Fellowship, a New York-based program for which I’ve served as a lecturer on issues of war and morality and foreign policy.A project of the Tikvah Fund, the Tikvah Fellowship provides fellows with a one-of-a-kind paid opportunity to:(1) Study the great ideas of classical and Jewish thought in areas such […]