Fairness and Justice

BY WILL EBERLE Democrats have long prided themselves on being the big tent party, representing minorities and women to a greater degree than Republicans. It has become such an ingrained part of the party mentality that it is hard to conceive of an alternate future in which Democrats lose the support of such groups in […]

    As public awareness has risen about the dismal state of sexual assault prevention and response on college campuses, American universities have scrambled to improve their policies and programming. As administrators at a university in Iraqi Kurdistan with an American-style educational system, we decided to be proactive and create a sexual misconduct policy laying […]

This morning at Harvard Law School we woke up to a hate crime. The hallways of Harvard Law School are lined with portraits of every tenured professor in the history of the university. As a first-year law student, the first time that I walked down those hallways I was painfully aware of the white men […]

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Selected by the New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Lee is professor […]

In telling your friends you’ve “discovered” a new restaurant, you imply to have found something you like; something your social circle is not yet “hip” to; something that should be on everyone’s radar but – because of your keen Googling skills or happenstance stroll down Massachusetts Avenue — has in it just a few more […]

BY DAVID PAYNE This is part of a student series stemming from a discussion at the Harvard Kennedy School on gun control. If you would like us to include your voice, send your pitch to harvardksrpitches@gmail.com. Ten die in a mass shooting. The shooter was impressively well armed. President Obama takes the podium to offer […]

BY MICAELA CONNERY This is the first of a two-part student series stemming from a discussion at the Harvard Kennedy School on gun control. If you would like to respond, send your pitch to harvardksrpitches@gmail.com. On Wednesday, 15 Harvard Kennedy School students with differing opinions, backgrounds, and nationalities sat around a table to discuss gun […]

BY TANIA DEL RIO Things have not been quite the same in Mexico since Sept. 26, 2014. It is hard to know for sure what happened that day, and with the release of a report on Sept. 6, 2015, almost a year after, it became painfully obvious that we may never know. What is certain is […]

BY SHANOOR SEERVAI This essay is excerpted from the single ‘Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai’s Brothels.’ I am seated cross-legged on a brothel floor on a hot April afternoon. The door is ajar. Just beyond it, a disheveled man in a grey pinstriped shirt appears at the top of the […]

The Obergefell decision is a case that defines a generation. Marriage equality and LGBTQ rights are poised for a victory untenable for generations past. Just twelve years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Lawrence v. Texas and, as Justice Scalia argued in the dissent, doomed the “end of all morals legislation.” Lawrence […]

BY WILLIAM WERKMEISTER In 2007, I became the crime victim of a drug addict offender. My case involved a “drug court,” a radical new form of justice, known to very few Americans, but financed to a significant extent by our federal, state, and local tax dollars.  Drug courts are specialty criminal dockets that handle substance-abusing, […]

BY SEBASTIAN JOHNSON This piece is cross-posted from Pangyrus, Boston’s new journal of literature, perspective, arts, and politics. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude – except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted – shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. –13th Amendment to the […]