Author: nick

[ad_1] Austin Sarat ScheerPost My college, Amherst College, held its Commencement on Saturday, May 23. Like similar events across the country, our ceremony marks a new beginning for the graduates. But it is an ending for the teachers who have worked with them, seen them struggle and grow, and come to care deeply about them. Being left behind is just part of the job. And what choice do we have? Our students graduate and get on with their lives. There is, however, no handbook about how to let them go with grace. Letting go of students who have come to…

Read More

[ad_1] The collapse of both the ’90s tech bubble and the ’00s housing bubble had a devastating impact on the lives of tens of millions of workers. And with the collapse of the housing bubble, millions also lost their homes and their life savings. When something causes so much damage, it would be nice to see the people responsible pay some price. In the case of the 1990s bubble, there were some instances of fraudulent accounting where the perps did get nailed. Enron and Worldcom are two that stand out, where the people most responsible did get prosecuted and face…

Read More

[ad_1] In January, police in Alabama arrested a Florida man (yeah, that guy) for allegedly transporting 81 gallons of moonshine. He certainly isn’t the only player in that business. Bootlegging has a long and storied history in the United States. In a country that has a love/hate/really love relationship with alcoholic beverages, innovative entrepreneurs seeking to evade high taxes on distilled spirits illegally manufacture the stuff for sale, and the authorities justify a ban on home distillation in the name of collecting those taxes. People also smuggle from low-tax to high-tax states. The result is a game of cat-and-mouse that…

Read More

[ad_1] Photo supplied courtesy of Kathy Kelly. On May 23rd, in Poulsbo, WA, hundreds of people joined several dozen pacifist Buddhist monks from the Japanese-based Nipponzan Myohoji religious order to install a Peace Pagoda immediately adjacent to the Kitsap Bangor U.S. naval base. An estimated 1,700 Trident nuclear weapons housed at the base have an annihilatory capacity unimaginably more terrible than the destruction and suffering the U.S. inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. The foundational mission of the Nipponzan Myohoji monks calls on them to engage in worldwide pilgrimages urging the abolition of nuclear weapons. They have been acutely…

Read More

[ad_1] In May 1891, Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical – “Rerum Novarum” – that gave the industrial-age West a moral vocabulary that socialist forces would never match. Exactly 135 years later in May 2026, his namesake did it again. A different civilizational rival, a different technological revolution, but the same gift. Based only on compute, manufacturing output, or the speed of state-directed deployment, the U.S. narrowly edges out China in the AI race, as those are areas where the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian centralization has inherent structural advantages to competition. What America and its allies can offer the world…

Read More