There’s a nice Annette Idler item at the Monkey Cage on what’s at stake in Venezuela that answered some questions I’ve been thinking about as a non-specialist. Call me naive or a foolish optimist, but I suspect that the most likely end to the North Korea “crisis” is that it will fizzle out. Yes, Donald Trump is capable of irrational …

With figures ranging from 33-year old Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg to 90-year-old Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith endorsing a universal basic income, the idea may soon enter the US political mainstream. But Americans are being sold on a dangerous version of the UBI, designed as a resource rent rather than a product of social consensus. Smith recently penned …

Google is scrambling to distance itself from one of its engineers, who has gained infamy for publishing a 10-page criticism of the company’s “authoritarian” approach to achieving gender diversity. If the goal was to confirm the author’s thesis, Team Google is doing a great job. Titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” the anonymous memo sets out a well-intentioned goal: Find non-discriminatory …