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A global response will be the next test of civilization. BY DEREK PHAM In July 1979, Vice President Walter Mondale addressed 65 countries’ delegation heads at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. They had convened to discuss the Indochinese refugee crisis, which, earlier that year, had reached a breaking point. The then-five members of the […]

As civil strife and conflict have curtailed the reach of Baghdad and Damascus, a popular notion has emerged suggesting that the artificial colonial-era boundaries of Iraq and Syria are collapsing. The popular and mistaken refrain is that the Sykes-Picot Agreement is unravelling. This has engendered a number of misguided suggestions that the borders of the […]

How the politicization of the debate over public education hurts the teaching profession.  BY ALEX MEADOW Like many young adults, my twenties have featured family and friends asking me, “Alex, what are you up to now?” When I said that I was teaching, specifically at a school in a low-income neighborhood of Brooklyn, they would […]

BY MICHAEL ALTER Pope Francis was resolute in his opinion about the toll climate change is exacting on the planet when he released his encyclical on Thursday, June 18. Francis laid out his feelings quite bluntly: “the Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” While this […]

BY ALEXANDER W. SMITH Greece now stands at the edge of an economic and political precipice. By allowing the country to miss a €1.55 billion loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras demonstrated that he is no longer negotiating for Greece’s future. He is gambling with it. Greece’s effective default is […]

BY RUFINA PARK This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  On the surface, South Korea’s education system has notable merits. In the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, which measures the cognitive skills of fifteen-year-olds from sixty-five participating economies […]

A proposed plan for the development of Mumbai, India’s financial capital, misses the opportunity to create affordable housing. BY SHANOOR SEERVAI You can judge a city by how its poor live, architect Kamu Iyer writes in his recent book tracing Mumbai’s development since the 1940s. By this measure, India’s financial capital fares dismally. The price […]

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 JOSHUA C. FIVESON This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  In September 2013, the most active branch of the Al-Qaeda terror franchise—Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP— kidnapped a British-born American citizen. His name was Luke Somers. Raised in the United States, Somers pursued a degree in […]

By Fayrouz Saad, MC-MPA 2015 (To the theme of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) Now, this is a story all about how Our lives got flipped turned upside down This will only take a minute So don’t you move Here’s the story of the mid-career students at Harvard Kennedy School All around the World born and […]

By Justin Hartley, MC-MPA’ 2015 My Father instilled in me the virtues of public service from a young age. He exemplified qualities I can only aspire to have and taught me that it is a privilege to serve and that resilience – unrelenting determination – can make dreams come true. In 1992 I was an […]

BY ANDREW DEYE This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  POLICY ISSUE OVERVIEW The United States, once a global leader in infrastructure competitiveness, now ranks 16th.1 The decline shows no signs of abating as federal, state, and local funds for infrastructure remain constrained, and government resources remain centered on […]