BY MELISSA SANDGREN There is a scene in The Iron Lady film where the actress who plays Margaret Thatcher is walking defiantly down a marble hall; the camera zooms in on her solitary pair of high heels amidst a sea of squeaky parliamentarian loafers. Thatcher pushes open the door to the lady’s restroom only to find a […]

BY JANE ZHU AND IAN METZLER Susan Tomkins will graduate from Harvard Medical School in May 2012 with $196,000 in loans. As a first-year student she had hoped to carry her father’s worn black medical bag into the rural Oregon community where she was born. But faced with the burden of high debt—totaling nearly $500,000 […]

By Shloka Nath, News Editor, MPP ‘13 In May this year, Malcom Gladwell wrote a piece for the New Yorker on what it means to innovate. He painted the picture of a 24-year-old entrepreneur named Steve Jobs who, in 1979, visited the legendary headquarters of Xerox in Silicon Valley, staffed at the time with the […]

BY DAVID SHEPARD In February 2011, Teach For America’s 20th Anniversary Summit convened the cast of all-star education reformers of our generation. Although these leaders left us inspired, their rhetoric raised more questions than it answered. In the opening session, former Washington, DC, public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee initiated an ever-quickening series of rallying cries, […]

BY EDMUND CONWAY Walking down the street with a friend one day, you spot a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. You stoop down gleefully to pick it up when your friend, who happens to be an economist, grabs you by the shoulder. “Stop,” he says, “That note isn’t really there.” “What?” you say. “If […]

BY TRACEY L. STARK We could end the tragedy of divorce in one fell swoop. Nearly half of marriages in the United States end in divorce. All divorces are the result of marriage. End marriage; end divorce. Marriage is a health hazard. Married people are twice as likely to become obese as single couples. No […]

Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual By Michael Pollan 112 pp. Penguin, 2009 U.S. President Barack Obama spent a good bit of 2009 struggling to pass health care reform, sapping considerable political capital. While the historic bill is now law, the U.S. has a long way to go before it achieves truly comprehensive health care reform. […]