Opinion

  There is a certain tragic irony in the fact that a crackdown on U.S. colleges with low graduation rates was announced during the very week when the Times Higher Education Supplement published its annual list of the world’s best universities. The coincidence provokes the thought that there is too much of this going on. By “this” I mean the ...

  A recent survey by Datincorp, a Caracas-based pollster, found that some 57 percent of Venezuelans wanted to leave the country. That number, up from 49 percent just four months ago, is just one facet of the rolling collapse in South America’s most benighted nation, which has gone from oil powerhouse to global exporter of people in a little over ...

  Donald Trump has few supporters in liberal Silicon Valley — even Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and Facebook board member, who spoke for the Republican nominee at the Republican National Convention, hasn’t given a cent to the campaign. Yet the tech world doesn’t unanimously favour Democrats. Consider, for example, the financial support that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has given ...

  It’s hard to be a Bush these days. Liberals still condemn the most recent President Bush for “lying us into war” in Iraq. Even if you credit George W. Bush with benign intentions, his record is undeniably grim. In foreign policy, fiscal policy and much else — including its catastrophic inattention to the aims and capabilities of Osama bin ...

  The federal government will shut down at the end of the month unless Congress can pass a continuing resolution to keep the doors open. And Congress just left for the weekend with things looking bleak indeed. Unresolved is funding for efforts to fight the Zika virus, to help Flint, Michigan, deal with its drinking-water crisis, and to aid in ...

  If global aviation were a country, it would be the 7th highest carbon emitter in the world, suggests a recent study. Another indicates that the greenhouse gases that airplanes spew are equal to the amount that Germany emits. Currently, airline carbon emission is around 2% of the global total. And if this is not checked, it might triple by ...

  The Harvard Management Co., which oversees Harvard University’s endowment and other investments, just released its 2016 annual report. It’s grim reading: The fund had a negative return of 2 percent and was worth about $2 billion less than a year earlier, underperforming its benchmarks by a significant margin. At $35.7 billion, the university’s endowment is the biggest in the ...

Imagine an entirely plausible scenario for the effects of climate change in 2045. The Greenland ice sheet has melted entirely, adding 20 feet to the oceans. Unprecedented outbreaks of pests have ruined crops of corn, wheat and rice around the world, causing food shortages and riots. In the U.S., the army patrols major cities. In such a desperate situation, could ...

  Lawyers, beware. Robots really are coming for your jobs. Exhibit A: Venture-capital firm Invoke Capital just made a multi-million-dollar investment in Luminance, which is developing artificial intelligence to automate the legal drudgery involved in corporate mergers and acquisitions. The robot lawyer is just one of many — including offerings from Ross Intelligence and Kira Systems — aiming to replace ...

  The conversation — or argument— we’ve been having on immigration has been remarkably skewed. It’s been all about the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, otherwise known as the “undocumented.” Actually, what counts far more are the estimated 31 million immigrants who are here legally and the roughly 1 million who gain legal entry every year. Of course, the question ...