Tongues are wagging at at least one head is rolling at Claremont McKenna College, a small liberal arts school in Southern California, following news that a member of the admissions department had repeatedly lied about incoming students’ SAT scores to boost the school’s ranking in the (in)famous U.S. News & World Report survey.  Further investigation […]

Bespoke shirts used to be exclusive. Describing the nightclubs of Paris, Evelyn Waugh defined the gold standard of style: “shady young men in Charvet shirts sit round the bar repairing with powder-puff and lipstick the ravages of grenadine and crème de cacao.” The House of Charvet has clothed the likes of Charles Haughey, Bernard-Henri Lévy, […]

Newt Gingrich’s moon colony may be crowded by trespassers soon after it is settled. Two Canadian teens(!), investing about $400 and under five months of work, recently launched a small Lego man 25 km (15.5 mi) above the earth, reaching the stratosphere.A hundred years ago, spaceflight was science fiction. Fifty-five years ago, the Soviet Union […]

India has announced two important decisions that underline an important theme in the emerging Asian order: even as India aligns its strategic approach with the US, it asserts its independence at every turn.The most recent signs: India’s decision not to cut oil imports from Iran, and its award of a multi-billion dollar jet fighter award […]

One World Trade Center, North America’s tallest building currently under construction at Ground Zero, is going to be by far the most expensive skyscraper ever built. The Port Authority now estimates the total cost of the building to be $3.8 billion, versus $220 million for the two towers the first time around. Even taking inflation […]

Hamas is on the move–and in more ways than one. Having uprooted its longtime Damascus headquarters for safer shores, the group’s leader just paid a landmark visit to Jordan’s King Abdullah, as the Financial Times reports (subscription required): The long-awaited meeting between Khaled Meshal and King Abdullah marked the first official visit to Amman by […]

Living in New York, as everybody knows, is expensive. But when it comes to educating the kids, no price is too high for NYC’s thriving but insecure and success-obsessed yuppie class. The New York Times reports that the price of private schools in the city has risen by nearly 50 percent in the past ten […]

Today Via Meadia has reached a new frontier: I’ve signed up for Delta’s in-flight internet service and am blogging from a jet between JFK and Phoenix.The service at least on this initial run, is pretty good; I’ve had slower and pricier internet in a lot of hotels. And it was blog in the air today […]

China may be the only country with a harsh “One Child” law, but it is not the only one where sex-selective abortion has caused unnaturally high numbers of male births in proportion to female ones. According to the highly respected demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, sex-selective abortion is much, much more common than thought.  Between 21 and […]

If you’re wondering how the United States could (slowly) let the air out of its higher education bubble, the Washington Post has a suggestion for you: look north. The Post piece describes an educational niche carved out by Canadian “colleges” (roughly the equivalent of America’s two-year community colleges).The chief difference between these Canadian colleges and […]