Ryan Cooper

In case you weren’t aware, the Washington Monthly is now and always has been a labor of love, not money. We’re a nonprofit, and we keep expenses cut down to the bone. Even so, we rely to a large degree on reader support. So what’s the Monthly worth to you? Read Editor-in-chief Paul Glastris’s appeal. […]

Education reform is a topic coverage of which has been largely despairing for the last several years. To be sure, it’s easy to whip up a litany of failures: compared to other developed countries our system is lagging badly, educational outcomes are lousy by international standards, national-level reform has been controversial and slow, and the […]

The Washingtonian has an interesting look behind the curtain at the vicious cloakroom backstabbery going down as the Brothers Koch try to take control of the Cato Institute (a libertarian think tank). It’s got a lot of great background (I particularly liked the bit about Charles Koch’s nutty “market-based management” scheme), but the meat of […]

Hello, Ryan here again, just helping Mr. Kilgore out with a post or two today. Anyway, my post from Friday about the FDA got a lot of responses. (To summarize briefly, Rand Paul got a proposal passed saying the FDA should accept science performed outside the US, while Alex Tabarrok went further, proposing to automatically […]

Well folks, that’s it for me. Thanks for reading and commenting. This was the first time I’ve ever guest-hosted at such a big place, and though I was super nervous at the start, it seemed to go reasonably well. I hope I wasn’t too big a letdown for people expecting their Kilgore fix. You can […]

So reports Brad Plumer. He explains: The IEA offers up three reasons for the decline: First, many U.S. power companies have been swapping out coal for somewhat cleaner natural gas, since the latter has become so cheap. That’s helped. The United States also had a mild winter in 2011, which meant less energy was needed […]

I mentioned earlier how Why Nations Fail is one of my favorite books of the last few months. It’s not perfect, but I’ve found its ideas to be very useful in clearing away some of the ideological shrubbery from around various issues. Briefly, the thesis of the book is that countries succeed or fail in […]

I’m late to this particular party, but the news out of the Eurozone keeps getting worse and worse: The eurozone crisis has led to the region’s economy contracting at the fastest pace for almost three years and sent German business confidence tumbling this month. Matt Yglesias notes the implications of the continuing “bank jog” (currency […]

1. Ezra Klein explains why neither Romney nor Obama want to talk about Romney’s time as governor of Massachusetts. 2. Michael Kinsley explains what he found on a junket to China. 3. Keith Humphreys gets slightly cranky about the lights and animation in a David Frum video. I thought it was pretty good! He would […]

Alec MacGillis was giving Robert Caro some grief about his “great man” fetish and support of the filibuster the other day: The Senate’s problem is not a lack of “genius.” (After all, it has Chuck Schumer.) As Caro surely knows, the problem goes deeper than that—and has a lot more to do with what these […]