Our children will have to deal with a more divided world. They’re going to grow up in a world where simmering racial tensions have boiled over into street violence, where a crowing xenophobe can become an elected President, and where religious fundamentalists are able to rouse thousands to perish in their name. To thrive in […]

BY JACK GAO AND DIANA ZHOU Imagine a world where cars operate on electricity alone. Cars are silent, engineless, odorless. Gas stations are replaced by individual electric charging stations located in homes, offices, and shopping mall parking lots. Roads and pavement use friction technology to charge cars as they drive. In dense urban metropolises like […]

BY MALIKA NOOR MEHTA “Birth. Marriage. Death. In India, these three landmarks are celebrated with zeal,” says Rajneesh Yadav, the India Country Director at Free the Slaves, an international NGO working to eradicate sex trafficking and debt bondage. “When families refuse to perform the rituals associated with each of these events, they are considered social […]

BY ANDREAS WESTGAARD For years, the Republican Party’s foundation has solidly rested on a three-legged stool of social conservatism, interventionist foreign policy, and fiscal moderation. Remarkably, the current Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, does not espouse any of these values, deviating from what the Reagan Revolution set in stone more than three decades […]

BY YAEL STERN AND GAL LIN “Will you answer a survey we are conducting to understand people’s values?” the surveyor asked the young Iranian man on the other end of the phone line. “Sure,” he answered. The young man answered the surveyor’s questions pleasantly and openly, even joking occasionally. They reached question twenty: How similar […]

BY MATTHEW E. SPECTOR The balloons dropped slowly, almost painfully so, to close last week’s Republican National Convention. A string of controversies and half-truths, the part-P.T. Barnum antics, part-raucous rally was something the American voter had not anticipated. This election has become at its core a battle between globalism and nationalism, and puts American democracy […]

BY MOCTAR ABOUBACAR For the past two years I have been working for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Sudan, in charge of analyzing how vulnerable Darfur’s Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are to food security and livelihood shocks. WFP and other humanitarian organizations have been supporting IDPs in camps since the height of the Darfurian conflict […]

BY SHANOOR SEERVAI The resounding victory of Hindu nationalists at India’s federal polls in May 2014 is attributed to one man: Narendra Modi. Fed up with the corruption and complacency of the Congress—the party that led India’s anti-colonial struggle and governed for much of its independent history—the world’s largest democracy voted for a leader who […]

BY JESSICA KAHLENBERG Last month, while I was sitting in a rocking chair overlooking the beautiful Lake Chautauqua, my uncle casually asked me about my summer internship. I responded that I was working to close the gender wage gap in Boston. When I asked what he, as a prominent businessman, was doing at his own […]

Since launching his presidential bid last year, Donald Trump has come under fire for promising to “take” Iraq’s oil, ban Muslims from entering the United States, and subject terrorism suspects to “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” So how does the Arab world – which is the focus of some of Trump’s most bellicose rhetoric – view […]

BY STEPHEN HAWKINS AND TOMMY FLINT It’s a troubling day when we have to admit that the TV pundits are right: America is politically polarized. From the halls of Congress, to news articles posted online, and even to our local neighborhoods, we’re increasingly sorting ourselves along ideological lines. But reality is not as simple as our liberal […]

Before the balkanization of the African continent into arbitrary pieces, it was one vast space made up of different cultures and identities. The Berlin Conference of 1884 – 1885 resulted in random demarcations being drawn across the continent to appease the European countries’ colonial interests. The arbitrary lines of yesteryears currently serve as the borders […]