Lyric Hughes Hale

I live about 30 minutes from O'Hare, the second busiest airport in the world. On Sunday nights I like to watch the endless stream of airplanes making their way across Lake Michigan in orderly single file, like pearls strung along an invisible necklace. A hundred years ago, this beautiful sight...

By now, tens of millions have seen the viral video about Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lords Resistance Army, but one has to wonder how much good this media attention will bring to the tragic lives of his Ugandan victims. Call me cynical, but it does amuse...

The U.S. Civil War, which was fought to abolish slavery, was not really that long ago. My father tells the story of visiting the Higginsville home for Civil War veterans near his childhood home in Missouri. The Missouri River was a dividing line between North and South, and so when...

After the U.S. experience during the Great Depression, and after inflation and rising interest rates in the 1970s and disinflation and falling interest rates in the 1980s, I thought the fallacy of identifying tight money with high interest rates and easy money with low interest rates was dead....

Our attention has been rightfully turned to the stomach-churning photos of women being dragged by the hair through the streets of Egypt and Bahrain, and reports of yet more deaths in Syria. As this year ends however, it is worth noting with a bit of apprehension that Iran has been...

"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been discovered, because it was properly executed." Balzac, Le Père Goriot

Conversely, when execution is faulty and failure occurs, crimes are exposed, and an effort to apportion blame and...

The US government spends $3 for every $2 it takes in in revenue. This would pretty much be our own business if our citizens owned the debt that the US incurs as a result, as is the case in another high-debt country, Japan. But our debt is bought by lots...

For me, the saddest stories are about needless human suffering, suffering caused by greed, hate, or more maddeningly, the inability of responsible people to act responsively. Minamata is that kind of story, encapsulated in a single and truly iconic photograph, by W. Eugene Smith. You might remember it as well,...

The received wisdom these days is that the West is in rapid decline, and China is on an upward trajectory that cannot be stopped. Sooner or later the pundits say, the two lines will cross-- perhaps explosively-- and China will rule the world. The latest evidence? Klaus Regling heading to...

Friday's news that retail sales were better than expected was good news for the US economy. But if employment has stalled, where is this money coming from? There is a possible dark explanation. With the slowdown in bank enforcement of mortgage defaults over the past year, people have simply been...