Washington / AFP The US-led military effort against the IS group started exactly two years ago, aimed at halting the extremists as they swept across Iraq, leaving a trail of human butchery and destruction in their wake. It was supposed to have been a swift and narrow campaign that would help local forces deal a “lasting defeat” to IS …

  There’s no question that mainstream academic macroeconomics failed pretty spectacularly in 2008. It didn’t just fail to predict the crisis — most models, including Nobel Prize-winning ones, didn’t even admit the possibility of a crisis. The vast majority of theories didn’t even include a financial sector. And in the deep, long recession that followed, mainstream macro theory failed to …

  Mac Margolis I have a confession: The other day I went sailing in Rio de Janeiro. I took the whole family, in fact, on a blustery, pre-Olympic afternoon. And we enjoyed it. There were no shoals of garbage, no bodies bobbing in brine, as so many alarming pre-Olympic dispatches have warned. True, my daughter didn’t feel so well, but …