Kennedy School Review

BY ELORM AVAKAME, PANGYRUS One day last fall, at a small campus in the heart of New England, I stood on an arena floor no more than 20 feet from the front of the stage on which Barack Obama would speak. Hundreds of people stood on the floor around me. Hundreds more were packed into […]

BY ANN CRAWFORD-ROBERTS & SIDRA BONNER Congressional Republicans have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as their first priority in the new Trump administration. Even before Trump takes office, the Senate and House have voted to initiate the process to gut major parts of the law commonly referred to as Obamacare. Following the […]

BY HAIYANG ZHANG In Europe, when the daughter of an aristocratic family reached the age of maturity, a debutante ball was traditionally the perfect occasion for a girl to present herself to the society as an adult. On Tuesday, January 17, President Xi Jinping became the first Chinese head of state to address the World […]

BY GRANT TUDOR A World Bank country manager referred to Uganda’s progress in reducing poverty as “an African success story.” This was a common refrain a decade ago, when extreme poverty fell sharply and the HIV epidemic ground to a near halt. Strangely, though, the comment came last year. Uganda’s income inequality is now among […]

BY MARIE LAWRENCE Every year around this time, when we are happiest to open our wallets, NGOs overwhelm our inboxes with slick year-end infographics. Retailers launch multi-media campaigns to push their gotta-have-it widget of the season. Nonprofits and businesses spend millions proving their worth to would-be donors and consumers. Yet from the federal government, which […]

BY MATTHEW E. SPECTOR The most critical activity at Trump Tower last week was not the selection of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as the president-elect’s secretary of state or the appearance of Kanye West for a short meeting about “life,” but a small, closed door meeting with 25 tech leaders with potentially dramatic implications for […]

BY MARYROSE MAZZOLA It’s now been over a month since Election Day. If you’re a progressive voter like me, you’ve probably cried (potentially on public transportation), read at least a dozen think pieces about how this happened, and rage donated your heart out. All of that is cathartic – and necessary, given the role that […]

In one of India’s most far-reaching decisions since it gained independence, Prime Minister Modi suddenly announced on November 8th that the country would be withdrawing the legal status of its 500 and 1000 rupee notes. Equivalent to about USD $7.40 and USD $14.70 respectively, these two bills alone comprise over 80% of the currency in […]

BY DAVID PAYNE Spaceship! Spaceship! Spaceship! –The Lego Movie   It is an exciting time for spaceships, both Lego and otherwise, with an unprecedented number being developed. Using a video post-it note storybook with narration, this piece explores the relationship between the US Government, specifically highlighting the US Military, and the rapidly growing and innovating […]

BY HAMADA ZAHAWI It was 9:45pm on election night. Still avoiding the news, I boarded my flight back to Boston, after several days of canvassing and protecting the vote with a team of lawyers in a coveted area of a key battleground state – Broward County, Florida. By the time I landed in Boston, Donald […]

“I’ve never felt anything like it.” So shell-shocked are the students and faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, according to a friend of mine, following the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States. Students wept openly the next day as we watched Hillary Clinton’s concession speech and President Obama’s […]

BY CAITLIN RYAN Stepping into a makeshift convenience store in Hanoi peddling toiletries and cleaning products, I immediately felt uncomfortable. In a shop smaller than a two-car garage with several rows of tall shelving, a dozen teenagers milled around as if waiting for a task. Numerous security cameras captured the room from different angles and […]