Few things are more puzzling and disconcerting for an economist, and much of the American public, right now than the unemployment rate. From late 2008 to the end of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate jumped by 3.1 percentage points. What was so shocking about this was that the relationship between une...

WASHINGTON — A wit once said, “Finish last in your league and they call you Idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you Doctor.” Pass this baseball quiz and they will call you Doctor of Baseball:  (1) Which two players hold the record for the most seasons (23) played for the sa...

BOSTON — We became friends long after we had known each other as candidate and journalist. Long after the grit that Geraldine Ferraro showed facing down press and politicians had been transformed into the grit she showed facing multiple myeloma. I met Gerry in 1984 when we were being teased by rum...

That class size should be small is revered like an article of faith in this country. Its adherents include parents, education groups, politicians and, of course, the unions whose ranks it swells. In many states it is even required by law, which has lead to millions of dollars in fines against school...

Ten years ago, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics proposed that teams should be ineligible for postseason play if they failed to graduate at least half of their players. Today, more than 90 percent of intercollegiate athletic teams meet that minimal academic benchmark, with one notab...

  Back in 1988, I left a job on Wall Street to write for a living. Amazed that magazine editors would pay me to travel anywhere in the world so long as I could convince them there was a story to be told about the place, I began casting around for stories about places I wanted to go. The first p...

WASHINGTON — On paper, Tim Pawlenty may be the most formidable Republican challenger to President Obama in 2012. Too bad he’s running as somebody else.  At the first cattle call of the GOP presidential primary, hosted by the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition, Pawlenty, a former Minnesota g...

NEW YORK — How can we help? That’s the first question that comes to American minds as the size and scope of Japan’s disaster unfolds. Click on PayPal to send money for emergency shelters. Sponsor a child from Sendai. Encourage General Electric Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt to send nuclear eng...

WASHINGTON — It was another important moment in the education of Barack Obama.  He began his presidency with a pledge to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year. Within months, he realized that was impossible. And now he has essentially formalized George W. Bush’s detentio...

WASHINGTON —When I watched, as you did, the sickening pictures of the beating of Rodney King and the burning of Los Angeles, my mind went back to the seemingly different world of Marburg 2 — the corridor at Johns Hopkins Hospital where I spent some time last month....