John McWhorter at The Root has an interesting piece on the recent flash mobs in Philadelphia. Rather than viewing the violence as a result of poor parenting or institutional racism, McWhorter sees the root of the problem as the relationship between Black communities and the police in the war on drugs: Cops trawling their neighborhoods […]

Dan Drezner has a post up that gives a pretty gloomy outlook on the global political and economic climate. He also links to the study (pdf) by the Center for Economic Policy Research that analyzes the link between economic austerity and social unrest. Budget cuts, conclude the authors of the study, lead directly to social […]

David Cameron has vowed to get tough with rioters, and the usual suspects complain. What about the rights of the looters, they ask.  What about the freedom to tweet #fire in a crowded theater?A legitimate democratic government fighting looters and rioters (as opposed to peaceful demonstrators) has the right to restore social order by all […]

The Republican straw poll in Ames is an excellent example of a story that serious people should ruthlessly ignore.  For Republican political operators and people trying to figure out which candidate to back in order to get a government job in 2013, perhaps Ames matters.But for most of us, following the Iowa straw poll is […]

In an interesting new piece in The Atlantic, Edward Tenner discusses the rapid increase in musical virtuosity over the past generation, to the point where bygone masters would have trouble simply gaining acceptance to Julliard today. There is a downside, however — the flowering of new talent has been accompanied by a contraction in job […]

Butcher Assad as history will probably name him has had a good first week of Ramadan.  Yes, scores and maybe hundreds of innocent Syrians died in the streets, the Assad dynasty is now cordially hated throughout the Sunni Arab world, violence at home is continuing, the diplomatic isolation of Syria deepens by the day, sanctions […]

James Peyser, a partner at NewSchools Venture Fund, a non-profit education grant-making fund, has some interesting thoughts on education reform and charter schools over at educationnext.org: Our analysis suggests that most of the CMOs [charter management organizations] in our “portfolio” are outperforming the local districts, especially for low-income students. Nevertheless, there is significant variation across […]

John Ellis at Business Insider suggests we all take a look at this depressing report from Zerohedge.  It is scenarios like this that drove markets crazy last week and pushed the price of gold past $1700 an ounce.  We are by no means out of the woods. One of the key catalysts for Wednesday’s market […]

China continues to surprise; the latest shock — to foreign observers and to Chinese authorities — is the new boldness of what used to be a lap dog press.  Nobody quite knows where this is headed, but at the moment some Chinese journals and journalists seem to be defying official direction and getting away with […]

There’s been a lot of news about the epidemic of piracy off the coast of Somalia — and about the expensive and not very effective efforts to quell it by the navies of various countries.  Now piracy is popping up off the West African coast near Benin, reports the BBC.This is potentially an even worse […]