Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
A momentous new report took up just six pages in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The title had no spoilers: “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.” The authors were Anne Case of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Angus Deaton of …
audi Arabia has completed its first three months as Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Council. If anything exemplifies the irrelevance of the United Nations and the body’s seeming inability to put its collective foot down on human rights abuses around the world, it is having Saudi Arabia as the leader of the UN body that is supposed to …
The mortgage interest tax deduction is a garbage policy. It’s hugely regressive: 52 percent of the benefit goes to the richest 10 percent of Americans, and only 0.1 percent of the benefit goes to the poorest 20 percent. The deduction is supposed to encourage homeownership, but economists Edward Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro have found that it overwhelmingly goes to rich …
Those ratings that castigate Afghanistan and some other poor countries as hopelessly “corrupt” always imply that the United States is not corrupt. VOA reports : While it is true that you don’t typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America’s political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far …
When Edward Snowden in early June 2013 began to reveal classified data showing criminal collect-it-all surveillance programs operated by the U.S. government’s National Security Agency, former NSA professionals became freer to spell out the liberties taken with the Bill of Rights, as well as the feckless, counterproductive nature of bulk electronic data collection. On Jan. 7, 2014, four senior retired …
HOUSTON—Bryan Parrasstood in the shadows cast by glaring floodlights ringing the massive white, cylindrical tanks of the Valero oil refinery. He, like many other poor Mexican-Americans who grew up in this part of Houston, struggles with asthma, sore throats, headaches, rashes, nosebleeds and a host of other illnesses and symptoms. The air was heavy with the smell of sulfur and …
A new international survey has ranked German Chancellor Angela Merkel, US President Barack Obama and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as the world’s top three liars of 2015. The recent poll conducted by German web platform, Alles Schall und Rauch, asked more than 3,000 of its readers from Germany and 40 other countries to determine the world’s “liar of the …
A significant debate is underway in Russia since imposition of western financial sanctions on Russian banks and corporations in 2014. It’s about a proposal presented by the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church. The proposal, which resembles Islamic interest-free banking models in many respects, was first unveiled in December 2014 at the depth of the Ruble crisis and oil price …
For years, a sense of disillusionment has been growing on the right. Now, the refugee crisis has magnified that frustration. Increasingly, people from the very center of society are identifying with the movement — even as political debate coarsens and violence increases. By SPIEGEL Staff Martin Bahrmann, a local politician in the Saxon town of Meissen, was just preparing to …
We all know the narrative in which we (the West) are seized. It is the narrative of the Cold War: America versus the “Evil Empire.” And, as Professor Ira Chernus has written, since we are “human” and somehow they (the USSR or, now, ISIS) plainly are not, we must be their polar opposite in every way. “If they are absolute evil, …
