Its been a wacky winter in Europe: snow in Naples, people freezing to death across Poland, Russia and Ukraine, and the daffodils and crocuses are in full bloom in Britain.The economy is just as confusing. Anybody who bet on Europe made tons of money in the last couple of months; yields on Italian bonds dropped […]

Travel is great, but there is no place like home. I’ve spent the last week in London at a conference hosted by the Legatum Institute and organized by a group of think tanks based in South Africa, India and Brazil. There was enough time for some long and leisurely walks through London, down along the […]

I never studied with Jim Wilson while getting my degree in the Harvard Government Department, though he was there at the time. My contacts with him came later, when we served together on the President’s Council on Bioethics in the early 2000s, and as fellow members of the Board of Governors of the Rand Graduate […]

Everybody wants to read good news from Africa, and Via Meadia is no exception. Any signs that democracy and prosperity are making progress are welcome. To find some optimism for Africa amid the many ominous signs, a recent article in The Atlantic is a good start, and The Economist a good next stop.As both point […]

In times of great uncertainty, with the economy recovery still wobbly and unemployment still at over 8%, the struggling rich are juicy targets for writers looking to score some easy points. Who can read about the exotic vacations and the lavish summer homes, $17,000-a-year dogs named Zelda and Duke and the $30,000-a-year adult study groups, and not […]

Beijing continues to up the ante in Asia with the latest in a string of double digit defense spending increases: 11.2 percent this year, according to new figures released by China’s government.China’s official defense budgets understate actual military spending; the Pentagon estimates total Chinese defense spending at around $160 billion a year, compared to $525 […]

Via Meadia reached some big milestones in the last few days: since our first posts went up in the fall of 2010, more than 2000 posts have gone up up on the site and readers have posted more than 25,000 comments as they logged 7,000,000 page views. The ratio of comments to posts continues to […]

In case you missed them, this week’s long-form essays took a critical look at President Obama’s Afghanistan policy, linked the rise of the Blue model with the ascent of self-indulgent consumerism and tried to parse Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy rhetoric in the run-up to the Russian elections.We outlined the challenges that “quangos”—NGO’s primarily funded by […]

According to a new study reported in Scientific American and published in Nature Medicine, it turns out that your biology textbook was wrong about the basic facts of the human body: A study led by Jonathan Tilly of the Massachusetts General Hospital overturns the decades-long idea that women are born with all the eggs they […]

This week Gallup released its latest polling on the Obama health care law and contrary to the rosy expectations of the law’s proponents, Americans have not warmed to the plan and remained deeply divided as to its merits. But perhaps most striking is this finding: Americans overwhelmingly believe the “individual mandate,” as it is often […]