BY ASMA JABER “Drop me off here!” I nervously looked over my shoulder, ran from the glaring yellow taxi, and stealthily jumped the fence. This was my daily routine before walking through the main doors of my middle school in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. The driver was my late father, and the taxi was how […]

BY PETER GRUSKIN The financial crisis of 2007-2008 forced U.S. President Barack Obama and his administration to reconcile with the need to “re-regulate” the financial markets. According to the president, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act gave the administration much of what it was seeking, but the legislation has also left […]

BY DAVE COUGHRAN  On 20 October 2011, Mahmoud Jibril, the interim Prime Minister of the Libyan National Transitional Council, publicly announced the death of former Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi. Qaddafi’s overthrow was the culmination of months of intense effort from Libyan revolutionary militias, the United States, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The victory […]

BY ETHAN WAGNER “We must make our choice,” warned the American jurist Louis Brandeis nearly a century ago, writing on the state of American society. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few—but we can’t have both.”[i] A few years later, as Brandeis joined the U.S. Supreme […]

BY ANYA MALKOV In May 2012, eleven students of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University visited El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as part of a Leadership Service Seminar program sponsored by the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and the offices of the Academic Dean and […]

BY LAUREN PAER In September 2012, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced the third round of quantitative easing (QE3) since the onset of the financial crisis. Quantitative easing refers to the Federal Reserve’s policy of digitally printing dollars to buy long-term bonds and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) to drive interest rates down. In contrast to previous rounds […]

By Amy Antonelli, MC/MPA’13, Correspondent In 2005, Steve Jobs offered the following words of advice to Stanford’s graduating class: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner […]

By Michele LoBianco, MC-MPA’13, Correspondent I grew up around mental illness.  I was taught not to talk about it and not to mention it to anyone outside of the family.  And, for most of my life, I thought this was normal.  It wasn’t until I came to HKS that I was able to open up […]

By Alexi White, MPP’13, Correspondent “All who work at Harvard, regardless of rank or position, contribute in vital ways to education and scholarship.” Former Harvard President Larry Summers used these words to inaugurate a new university-wide Statement of Values in 2002. With this Statement, the administration hoped to turn the page on the 2001 Living […]

By Jaya Bhagat, MC-MPA’13 & Mason Fellow  “You are sad,” said the White Knight.  “Let me sing you a song to comfort you. ….Everybody that hears me sing it.  Either it brings tears to their eyes, or else.” “Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause. “Or else it doesn’t, […]

By Jaya Bhagat, MC-MPA’13 & Mason Fellow  A bright sunny afternoon has given way to a brooding, overcast night in Cambridge.  Three people are dead, among them an eight-year-old child.  One hundred seventy people are injured, many grievously. Bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon finish line have transformed that joyous event into tragedy. A quicksilver […]

By Azum Z. Ali, MPP’13, Correspondent I give the Islamophobia Network some credit for identifying a new aspirational peer for me, as an American Muslim who aspires to serve the public.  Imagine my elation when I learned of the latest change on the national security team.  The appointment of John Brennan, formerly Deputy National Security […]