Many readers of this post probably just went through this process: after sending a quick work email from a smartphone while riding the train or subway, or sitting at home on the couch, they then opened up a news reader app to thumb through articles.First, thank you for coming to Via Meadia. But secondly, did […]

Via Meadia’s sixth big trend of the decade — the rise of hot religion — has been very much in the news. As the final results of Egypt’s parliamentary elections, announced yesterday, only reconfirmed, faith is on the march – in the Middle East, as in most parts of the world.When the Arab Spring burst […]

Christine Lagarde, the French head of the IMF, has joined Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti and most of the rest of the world in piling the pressure on Germany.  Her message is simple: give more money to Europe, and stop this austerity talk before you wreck the global economy.Of course she puts it more politely […]

Over the past decade the mantra in both development studies and comparative politics has been “institutions matter”—that is, you aren’t going to get economic growth or other human development objectives in the absence of institutions like rule of law, transparent and accountable governments, low levels of corruption, and the like.The empirical basis for this assertion […]

Via Meadia readers have been following the progress of Scotland’s push for a referendum on secession from the UK. Evidence that the English want the Scots out may dampen the ardor for independence north of the Border; now comes the news that Spain may block any effort by a newly independent Scotland to join the […]

Over on his Foreign Policy blog, Dan Drezner skewers the newly fashionable notion that America is in decline.  It’s a refreshing and badly needed corrective to the chorus of naysayers who start at every shadow.  There is a kind of hypochondria of power that is all too prevalent among US pundits; part of it is […]

While a compromise solution to the Nigerian fuel crisis seems to have been found, the deeper and more dangerous regional and religious crisis is getting worse.  Significantly worse.Even as estimates for the bombings in Kano rose from 150 to up to 250, new attacks left churches burning in one part of the northern Bauchi state, […]

For a literature and history buff like me, teaching political studies has been an eye opening experience. For one thing, I’ve slowly come to realize that students trained in political studies and philosophy approach what people my age used to call “books” and what my younger colleagues call “texts” in different ways.Back in the stone […]

Last week Via Meadia began a recap of the “Ten Trends to Watch” — a series of posts from 2010 that made predictions about the future of our complicated and connected world. So far, we have posted updates to the first five trends: “Disaggregation and Death of the West,” “Small ‘d’ democratization,” “Panopolis,” “Proliferation, Great […]

That advice comes not from Gordon Gekko and his friends on Wall Street, but rather from James Hamilton, a prominent academic economist and observer of the petroleum market. Hamilton writes: If you can figure out a way to find resources whose value in their current use is not very great– in other words, if you […]