People love guys who write constitutions. Their genius is celebrated by historians, their intentions debated by judges, their names attached to poorly performing middle schools. I figured I would never know that glory. Because no matter how good my columns may be, they will never cause people to stop drinking and then start drinking again shortly afterward, except for me while I write them. And not always. But after the financial crash in Iceland, the new Prime Minister decided to ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde. While the rest of Europe may be tormented by the thought of having to cough up ever more money to bail out Athens, the once carefree Greeks are getting more depressed by the day. Psychiatrists say that the economic crisis has triggered a 25% to 30% increase in ...

When Christopher Wartmann set his heart on going to the University of Dayton, a private Catholic college in Ohio, he was less worried about getting in than about how his family would come up with the more than $20,000 a year it was going to cost. Thomas Wartmann, Christopher's dad and a route salesman in the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo, earned just $38,000 last year, and Christopher's mother Eva earned $17,000 as a tennis coordinator at a country club. They ...

Tis the season to be selfish. Right after the global financial crisis exploded in 2008, many economists fretted that countries looking to hold on to their share of a shrinking pie would become more self-interested and protectionist, plunging the planet into an even sharper downturn, just as happened in the 1930s after the Great Depression. Thanks to panic-fueled crisis management by policymakers, it didn't happen. But after three years of pain and very little economic gain, it may be happening ...

On Monday, May 16, Chris Epps, commissioner of Mississippi's department of corrections, sat at a long conference table, grasping a mound of financial documents. He was preparing to head to the state's penitentiary, an 18,000-acre old cotton farm in the Mississippi River Delta, for the execution of a man convicted of murder nearly two decades ago. Since the mid-1990s, Mississippi has become one of America's most aggressive incarcerators — a difficult feat, in a nation of jailers. ...

After a 15-year economic eclipse, a stream of good news is finally brightening the outlook for Japan. Banks have started to lend again, companies to hire and invest, and consumers to spend. Things are so good, in fact, that the Bank of Japan has just declared victory in its epic battle with deflation. The country has the world's second largest economy; its recovery will have implications around the globe. It's worth remembering how Japan got to where it is now. The ...

After months of political wrangling, the U.S. Department of Education finalized on Thursday its highly contentious "gainful employment" rule, a crucial element of the Obama Administration's crackdown on the rapidly growing for-profit career-college industry. The rule will strip federal financial aid dollars from vocational programs that load students with more debt than they can realistically repay. When it goes into effect in July 2012, it will join a batch of other previously announced regulations set to begin ...

PRO Absolutely. Government has no business interfering with what you eat By RADLEY BALKO Nutrition activists are agitating for a panoply of initiatives that would bring the government between you and your waistline. President Bush earmarked $125 million in his budget for the encouragement of healthy lifestyles. State legislatures and school boards have begun banning snacks and soda from school campuses and vending machines. Several state legislators and Oakland, Calif., Mayor Jerry Brown, among others, have called for a ...

The people who pay attention to weekend box office reports usually have some financial stake in what comes out on top. While I have zero prospect of gaining monetarily from the success of director Paul Feig's raunchy, smart Bridesmaids, I will nonetheless watch the weekend numbers with bated breath. I'm vested because I want to know how America feels about women both defecating on screen and discussing it. This might be a turning point in feminism and ...

It was the lawyers of ancient Rome who came up with the modern definition of fatherhood: Mater semper certa est; pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant . The Romans, however, didn't have access to genetic testing. Dylan Davis did. A few months after his divorce in 2000, Davis, 36, a software engineer in Denver, took a DNA test to confirm a nagging suspicion that he was not the biological father of his 6-year-old twins. The negative test results led him to give ...