The data scientists at the social media company in Palo Alto had previously produced a beautiful map of the global friendships captured by Facebook, but several more rigorous questions still remained: “how, really, is the world of Facebook connected? How strong are the ties between different segments of society, across geography and demography?” More specifically, how can […]

Despite the hubbub over China’s slowdown, Ecuador has scored big points by taking advantage of China’s undiminished hunger for natural resources. But the experience of neighboring Peru points to the pitfalls ahead.Ecuador’s leftist president, Rafael Correa, has signed away the exploitation rights for his country’s first large scale mining project, the Mirador copper mine, to a […]

In recent years the king of Saudi Arabia has won plaudits around the world for promoting interfaith dialogs. Those efforts recently received a dramatic setback when the top religious official in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa earlier this month calling on the faithful to destroy all churches in the Arabian peninsula.The ruling came in response […]

Between rampant misconduct among some professional athletes and what sometimes seems to be a culture of winning at any costs, it sometimes seems that good sportsmanship and character are vanishing from American life. A recent article by Brad Herzog makes the important point that character and honor are still found on the country’s athletic fields.  […]

While the Arab Spring has seen dramatic changes in countries from Tunisia to Syria, in many ways, no country’s changes are more interesting than the ones in neighboring Turkey. The rise of the AKP, the end of the “zero problems” policy and a newly assertive Middle East policy are only the most obvious developments. In […]

Earlier this week, Australia passed the Minerals Resource Rent Tax, a tax of 30 percent on profits of the largest iron ore and coal mining companies operating in Australia. The first, tougher version of this initiative was  introduced by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and it ruined him. Unremitting attacks on his environmental policies helped drive […]

New York State held several special elections this week, and the New York Observer took the occasion to point out that one in four members of New York’s state legislature have been elected through these special channels, ushered into an election by closed-doors party selection instead of through a primary process.New York’s machine politics thrives […]

The New York Times carries good tidings from Cambridge: Harvard announced on Wednesday that it would open a campus office for the Army R.O.T.C. later this year, a move the Army believes will lead to greater participation in the program by Harvard undergraduates…Under its agreement with the Army, Harvard will provide office space for the […]

One of the biggest intellectual failures of the global green movement against climate change is the persistent failure of its leaders and spokespeople to grasp the way their own advocacy fatally undermines their credibility. They blame cunning, unscrupulous and well funded enemies for disasters that their own inaccuracies, overstatements and disingenuous advocacy have brought on […]

In a front page story on Friday, the New York Times covered a surprising new development that could revolutionize the way America powers itself and conducts foreign policy: The US is surprisingly close to becoming self-reliant on energy. With oil and especially gas production booming due to fracking, deep-water drilling, and new oil discoveries, American […]