Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be arriving in Beijing at perhaps the diciest moment in US-China relations since Richard Nixon reached out to shake Chou Enlai’s hand on his historic visit to what American conservatives then still called Red China.Last fall, the Obama administration pulled off a diplomatic revolution in maritime Asia — the […]

In a truly disturbing blog post at TNR, Timothy Noah has identified one of those national trends that shows where this country is headed, and not in a nice way: internships for sale. As Noah points out, private schools are selling internships in charity auctions; obviously, this gives privileged kids a pretty good leg up […]

One characteristic the blogosphere shares with the legacy media is an endless fascination with itself; increasingly, academics are jumping into the conversation about the nature and the consequence of this dynamic new medium. According to a recent paper by Aaron Shaw (a PhD candidate in sociology at Berkeley) and Yochai Benkler (a Harvard law professor known for his writings on collaboration […]

Over at the estimable (but paywall protected) Financial Times, the admirable Gideon Rachman has a good column on the meaning of the French election for France and for Europe. Every serious investor and every serious student of international relations should take a look, because Gideon makes a persuasive case that whoever wins the French election […]

What passes for good news about healthcare costs came in recently: they grew by “only” 4 percent between February 2011 and February 2012, significantly faster than the overall rate of inflation, but less quickly than they’ve grown in the past. Health care now accounts for 18 percent of total US GDP and costs are rising […]

TS Eliot was right, if you are a high school senior: April is the cruelest month.This is the time of year when most college acceptances and rejections go out, the time of year when high school students all over the country worry about whether their incoming mail is fat (stuffed with information and forms for […]

When people think about what will happen to jobs as the blue model continues to crumble, most have a picture in their heads of the type of change that is happening, and it is based on the experience of the last thirty years. Manufacturing jobs are going away. Professional and white collar jobs will continue […]

For me, this is peak opera time in New York. Last Monday night I saw Verdi’s wonderful MacBeth, sandwiched between a Saturday performance of Rheingold and last night’s beautifully sung and acted Valkyrie. I’m halfway through the first cycle of the Met’s new production of the Ring, with Siegfried and Götterdämmerung still to come. Between […]

The blue social model was based on the political economy of the industrial age: an age of mass manufacturing employment in the US and other advanced countries. The shift from blue to post-blue, from industrial age to post-industrial age society, raises many questions that are at the core of our political debates even if they […]

One of the most important claims that the friends of the blue social model make is that it addresses the needs of the poor and the weak better than any other existing social system. This is a serious point that blue critics sometimes don’t think enough about, but the claim is more questionable than blues […]