Financial markets have never been shakier, the Middle East is riven by so many crises and conflicts that Iran has been pushed off the front page, and the European Union could be headed for the definitive crisis of its history, but art goes on — and in particular in New York, the Metropolitan Opera opens […]

Good news from California.  The NYT has the story: So, using a new state law known as the parent trigger, organizers at an underperforming school here in Compton collected hundreds of signatures from parents who said they were fed up. Parents were eager, they said, to turn it into a charter school, where students would […]

That is the dire prediction of Dr. Atul Gawande, a noted writer and surgeon who practices at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and who Boston.com calls one of the most powerful and influential people in the medical community.  This is the story he told at a recent speech as reported by the Boston Globe‘s Chelsea […]

Argentina is a textbook case of a country telling foreign investors to stay away.  That isn’t the official message, of course, but it is the only possible way to interpret recent events. According to the New York Times: A judge has subpoenaed six newspapers for the names and telephone numbers of all reporters and editors […]

The Solyndra scandal threatens to blow up into the first truly major scandal of the Obama administration. This is, as Via Meadia readers know, bad news for the administration on several levels; besides the obvious ethical issues, the Solyndra scandal makes the President appear incompetent or worse when it comes to job creation.  The scandal […]

Judging from my Twitter feed, there were many people who still thought that there was a real chance that Prime Minister Putin would let President Medvedev run for re-election in Russia and are disappointed that Putin will return to the big job for the next presidential term.I’m surprised by the surprise; it’s been clear for […]

The latest OECD report on education results in rich countries is out, and as usual there is little good news for the US.  The Economist tells all: Many of the 20 leading economic performers in the OECD doubled or tripled their education spending in real terms between 1970 and 1994, yet outcomes in many countries […]

Debates over the ongoing Euro crisis tend to be focused on a few familiar faces: Germany’s Merkel, France’s Sarkozy, Italy’s Berlusconi, Greece’s Papandreou. Notable in his absence in the nominal head of the E.U. Herman Van Rompuy, President of the European Council.When the post was created in 2009 and the eurocracy made it known that […]

The ever-insightful urbanist Joel Kotkin has a must-read piece out on the limitations of the Blue Social Model in New York City. The Big Apple has been touted as the archetypal new Blue city and has experienced a revival of sorts as a “luxury city.” But the luxury city model is rapidly approaching its demise, […]

Ireland, the US, the UK, Spain, China: now there’s a real estate bubble bursting in India.  Real estate firms, badly affected by the central bank’s efforts to fight inflation, could trigger a string of defaults with repercussions beyond India’s borders.  The FT has the story: The Indian real estate sector, once the realm of high-risk […]