The G-20 continues to fade as a serious arm of global governance: Tim Geithner says he won’t be attending the next meeting, the WSJ reports: The U.S. Treasury secretary Tim Geithner will skip a meeting of the world’s top finance officials in Mexico City next week, according to Treasury Department plans released Monday. One of […]

We know what you’re thinking, but the headline above isn’t meant to refer to that guy—you know, the guy with the “bunga bunga” parties and underage models. No, this is another Italian comic, Beppe Grillo, whose Five Star Movement is shaking up Italian politics in a big way. The FT reports: A new anti-establishment party […]

Ann Althouse listens to Glenn Reynolds interview Camille Paglia about her disappointment with President Obama’s first term and nods along vigorously to the points being made: You don’t want government agencies being empowered to intrude into people’s lives like this. The controlling force in Obamacare is the IRS! Okay? This flies in the face of what […]

A new liberal think tank is opening in Berlin. That is, it’s “liberal” in the European sense, which is to say mildly conservative in U.S. terms.“Open Europe Berlin” will cooperate with the original Open Europe Institute in London, an invaluable source of analysis, commentary and alternative ideas for the world’s largest (and by far most […]

Any possible intervention in Mali is weeks away, Xan Rice reports for the FT. Moreover, it is uncertain at this point who exactly would do the “intervening”, whether those forces will be prepared to face the jihadis, and what the situation on the ground in Mali really is. Under the French proposal, the European Union […]

Sandy’s devastating flood surge is the worst disaster in the 108 year history of the New York subway system, and it now looks as if much if not all of the system will be closed for the rest of the week and possibly longer.We can hope that it will take another 108 years till something […]

Why Nations Fail, by Professors Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson has deservedly gained right of entry to the pantheon of Big Books on economic development.Like the pantheon’s other occupants, most recently—Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules for Now, Acemoglu and Robinson’s work tackles one of the biggest questions […]

It was the summer of 2000, and the situation for Egypt’s fledgling civil society community was looking dire. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a prominent sociologist, had just been dragged from his home and jailed by longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. The 61-year-old academic was held without formal charges for weeks and then prosecuted for a nebulous array […]

While the lights went out across Manhattan tonight, and the city that calls itself the capital of the world was cut off from the mainland as flood waters thundered through its streets, many people around the world watched the spectacle and were reminded just how fragile the busy world we humans build around us really […]

The NYT has a long and interesting piece on the rise of part-time work in retail: While there have always been part-time workers, especially at restaurants and retailers, employers today rely on them far more than before as they seek to cut costs and align staffing to customer traffic. This trend has frustrated millions of […]