Numerous articles and commentaries from inside and outside of academia are raising the alarm that American public higher education faces an unprecedented financial crisis.

Doc, you’ve got to help me. I miss the presidential campaign.

When watching the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, many have held on to a profoundly mistaken idea. I heard it again just recently from an otherwise well-informed observer. The conflict, this acquaintance confidently declared, will not be resolved until Israel lifts the blockade of Gaza.

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL – I went to synagogue Saturday not far from the Syrian border in Antakya, Turkey. It’s been on my mind ever since.

It was very good news for some Massachusetts families in Fall River and Lawrence, but Monday’s front-page Boston Globe story also underscored an important reality about improving urban education. Although that reality will make teachers’ unions and their allies uncomfortable, it’s one policymakers will soon have to reckon with.

We have all heard about the dramatic changes in the American electorate and how, because he spoke to the concerns of the growing numbers of Hispanic, black, female and younger voters, President Barack Obama was re-elected despite adverse economic conditions.

DARKUSH, Syria – The scene is almost biblical. You step down through tall reeds, cross the Orontes River from Turkey in a small rowboat and are received by a local contingent of the Free Syrian Army, outside the Syrian town of Darkush. One of them shows you the picture on his cellphone of a Syrian girl who was just taken across the river to Turkey with what turned out to be fatal wounds from a Syrian army helicopter attack on her village. The helicopters, the rebel soldiers say, dropped barrels with nails and explosives on her house. Meanwhile, over here in the mud are three fresh graves with bodies that just floated down the river. Some days it’s just an arm or leg that washes up.

In the eternally recurring debates about whether some rival great power will knock the United States off its global perch, there has always been one excellent reason to bet on a second American century: We have more babies than the competition.

They say confession is good for the soul, so here it is: I am a white male.

‘The only pledge I’d sign is a pledge to sign no more pledges.” That bit of wisdom came from Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, during his successful run for a U.S. Senate seat. Now a few of his more courageous colleagues are taking the same path and renouncing the politics of purity.

In a report speculating that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush may run for president in 2016, The New York Times observes, “When Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida held a strategy session here to discuss his own political future last week, the question of Mr. Bush, a mentor, hung over the room; a decision by Mr. Bush, 59, to seek the Republican nomination would almost certainly halt any plans by Mr. Rubio, 41, to do so or abruptly set off a new intraparty feud.”

It may turn out that the editors of the English language edition of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, People’s Daily, were only kidding when they ran a 55-image slideshow based on “Kim Jong-Un Named The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2012.”

As if a peaceful Thanksgiving dinner wasn’t enough of a challenge, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had to spend her holiday chasing an even more unattainable ideal: peace in the Middle East.

Is democracy in Egypt over before it started? Skeptics abroad and protesters in Egypt think so after President Mohammed Morsi’s unilateral decree that his decisions are not subject to judicial review by the nation’s constitutional court.

Should women be fighting alongside men in Afghanistan? That’s hard for me to say, because I think it’s long past time that men, too, came home. Four female warriors filed suit against Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Tuesday, demanding that the Pentagon suspend a policy that keeps women out of most combat units – officially, anyway – yet there’s still considerable disagreement even among women in the military.