The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the business lunch is slumping of late: The new trend, it seems, is for workers to eat meals at their desk brought from home instead, a development the Journal endorses as being healthier, less expensive, and more efficient to boot.
For politicians, giving away money is fun, but telling others to give away money is even better. That's what the Washington, D.C., government is contemplating as it debates a new rule that would have employers subsidize people who neither take the Metro nor drive to and from work. They want to give…
I recently regaled WEEKLY STANDARD readers with tales from my Florida biking adventure—eight days, 650 miles, and two college friends pedaling the east coast of the state to reach Key West—but I haven't yet told you how we got back home. The return trip was an adventure in its own right, best…
A photograph of 14-year-old Emmett Till's mutilated face snapped during his open-casket funeral in Chicago made international news in the fall of 1955. For supposedly flirting with a white woman (the woman finally admitted this year that she'd lied in her testimony) while visiting Southern…
A few years ago I wrote a piece where I asked whether or the '00s had been worse than the '70s. At the time, I thought it was a close call, one that could go either way. Today, I'm not so sure.
Signs inside in this season's hot-ticket exhibit encourage visitors, or "viewers," as art critics still insist on calling them, to be the show. It's a concession, common nowadays across the art world, to the fact that most people's vanity overwhelms their interest in fine art: Museums might as well…
During a recent break home from school, a friend and I biked the east coast of Florida. Leaving our car in a Wendy's parking lot, we began in St. Mary's, a town straddling the Georgia border, and in eight days traveled 650 miles to reach Key West, the end of the panhandle and the southernmost point…
I don’t know about you, but I get a lot of laughs watching people on the left trying to climb the pyramid of grievances.
Almost fifty years ago a professor at the University of Geneva formed a group that would become the World Economic Forum (WEF). You probably know it as "Davos," named after the Swiss city that hosts its invitation-only annual meeting that draws 2,500 of the famous that want to be leaders like…
A weekend Wall Street Journal story examines the interior design trend of maximalism, roughly defined as, if it has the properties of matter, screw it (and hang it up):
Accusations that French bureaucrats are insufficiently innovative are simply untrue. With Brexit forcing American bankers to reconsider maintaining their presence in London, the French finance minister hastened to New York to persuade Wall Street leaders that Paris is the city best positioned to…
In late December 2015, Japan and South Korea reached an agreement regarding Korean sex slaves taken during World War II—the thousands upon thousands of rape victims whom the Japanese imperial forces euphemistically referred to as "comfort women." After decades of denial, obfuscation, and…
There were two stories before Christmas that pointed to the possibility that we are now living in an alternate universe, or have diverged onto a new timeline, or pick your Fringe metaphor.
Have you ever heard of Marc Goodwin and Mikhail Gallatinov?
Something to remember 75 years after Pearl Harbor: The United States Navy is the best in the world, by an order of magnitude. No other navy is remotely as powerful. There are 40 in-service aircraft carriers in the world; 19 of them are ours. (Russia has just one, and it's in bad shape.) By a…
American life expectancy has fallen for the first time since 1993. Here's the Washington Post:
I want to share a fantastic Bloomberg Businessweek piece on the Medallion Fund by Katherine Burton.
Montreal
The next big new thing is here—Black Mirror—and you have to watch it now. The British television series, created by Charlie Booker, has recently begun its third season on Netflix and it deserves our limited attention spans. Why? Because Black Mirror theorizes the consequences of future technology…
To help her reach a decision on who to pick as a running mate, Hillary Clinton's team separated three dozen Democrats into seven "food groups," according to hacked emails recently released by WikiLeaks.
It is, as my sister put, the epitome of #BarringtonProblems. In Barrington, Rhode Island, a ritzy suburb of Providence, a letter to the editor chastising women who wear yoga pants has spurred mass protests.
Here's an interesting stat brought to you by Ana Swanson of the Washington Post: "A survey of 33 Japanese restaurants in the Washington area revealed that 12 were owned by Chinese Americans and 12 by Korean Americans. Only six were Japanese owned." And it's not just in the Washington area, mind…
As doubts have grown over the accuracy of polling, many have argued that there's a better gauge for predicting electoral outcomes: betting markets. The idea is that the wisdom of crowds—especially when those crowds are putting their money where their mouths are—trumps surveys that are hobbled by…
I live in a little homogenized exurb about 30 miles outside of Washington. Way outside of the Beltway. Out in the "real Virginia," as George Allen once unfortunately put it. And over the weekend my little town had two craft breweries open. That's in addition to the brewery that opened last year.…
Last January at Liberty University, Donald Trump told the audience that as president he would "protect Christianity." Since then he has reiterated that promise. And last week, at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit, he declared his intention this way: In "a Trump administration our…
"Hello, I'm looking for the Hirst exhibit?"
Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson recently ruffled professorial feathers with an impassioned anti-academic screed. His call for "destructive" reforms in higher education smacks of Freudian slippage. (Good ideas, according to the ruling tech paradigm, are "disruptive"—their "destructive" effects only…
Last summer, workers removing chalkboards from a high school in Oklahoma City discovered another set of boards hiding underneath. They had last seen the light of day in 1917. The boards were still chalk-marked with drawings, a calendar, and mathematics. But perhaps most striking were the…
No doubt, the "computer glitch" that caused Delta Air Lines to shut down for six hours on Monday morning, canceling some 300 scheduled flights, was a great inconvenience to many summer travelers: People make plans based on estimated times of arrival; connecting flights require a combination of luck…