BY CAROLINE GIMMILLARO It’s engagement season. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds around the United States are exploding with engagement announcements and offers of congratulations. A deluge of engagement pictures, engagement party invites, and Pinterest wedding boards are sure to follow. For most American women in heterosexual relationships, this excitement will be accompanied by the question […]

BY WILL EBERLE When the water started turning brownish-black, residents of Flint, Michigan knew they had a problem. But it would take months before they learned the truth; a truth which should serve as a wake-up call to communities across America. And just this week, Flint’s newly-elected mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency […]

Introduction This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first wave of Vietnamese Americans arriving in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Southern Vietnamese fled their homeland after the Communist North captured Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) on April 30, 1975. Over the next two decades, waves of political refugees breathed new life […]

BY JASON PEUQUET With all the rancor in the past few years about government shutdowns, debt ceilings, special budget commissions or committees, and fiscal cliffs, it is easy to think that U.S. budget policy is more about theatrical clashes of personality, and kicking the can down the road than about actual public policymaking. And it […]

BY JESSICA CUSSINS Now that we have the power to permanently alter humanity, should we? This was the question at the heart of the International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Washington, D.C., last week, an event co-hosted by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the […]

BY LAUREN WINDMEYER Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would take two months paternity leave following the birth of his first child. This announcement exemplifies a trend in the tech world towards improved benefits for new parents – this year alone, Amazon, Netflix, and Microsoft have all announced extended parental leave. This is of […]

    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 […]

Introduction The Middle East healthcare sector is experiencing dynamic growth. Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar are at the forefront integrating quality tools directed towards the development and implementation of policies related to healthcare reform in the region. Saudi Arabia is the first to establish a national hospital accreditation program setting itself as a leader and […]

Dr. Mamphela Ramphele gave a lecture in September this year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University titled “Can African Women Redefine Liberation for All?” The video of her lecture can be viewed here. Dr. Ramphele, a former World Bank managing director and political party leader in South Africa, sat down with the […]

Growing up in the 80’s, it was common for low-income households to visit the city once a month to buy their supply of groceries. The corner stores catered for their grocery needs throughout the month. For the business owner, your typical customer was not the most sophisticated. You knew your customers by name and you […]

The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, otherwise known as HERO, comes to a vote today during the city’s local elections. While the provisions of the bill itself are not solely focused on LGBT rights – but rather on categorical discrimination broadly – the protections it offers on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity have […]

Introduction Both French and post-independence Algerian rulers imposed a simplistic, narrow definition of identity on Algeria. These choices were dictated by ideologies associated with colonization and Pan-Arabism, marginalizing other key components of Algerian identity. In doing so, both the colonizer and the dictator were able to effectively maintain power in pitting cultural, linguistic, and ethnic […]