Kennedy School Review

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 […]

If you want to learn a thing or two about business, just ask Leah Mugure Mwaura. Leah is a charming Kenyan grandmother and owner of a clothing wholesale business in Gikomba, a sprawling, dusty, crowded place on the outskirts of Nairobi that is now East Africa’s largest market. Every day, tens of thousands of Kenyans […]

By William Werkmeister This article was originally published in the 2012 edition of the Kennedy School Review. Entering 2012, the world finds itself in a precarious financial position. In January of this year, the World Bank released its new economic outlook, warning of a global, double-dip recession. “An escalation of the crisis would spare no […]

BY HANNA SIEGEL The American political system is exhibiting cracks. The approval rating for Congress has reached a record low of 13 percent, and more than 2.5 million voters have left the two major parties since the 2008 election (Washington Post-ABC News Poll 2012; Wolf 2011). Yet many Americans want change, and they are organizing […]

BY SANJEEV BERY On January 1, 2011, few would have predicted that Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak would soon be removed from office. But just three weeks later, thousands of Egyptians gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to begin the push for change. In the aftermath of Tunisia’s political shakeup, Egyptian citizens called for an end to […]

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 KATIE FROST A 10-kiloton nuclear blast in New York City’s Times Square would instantly annihilate everything within half a mile. The shockwave would crumble buildings from Union Square to Central Park, breaking windows up to ten miles away from ground zero. Fires would rage for at least a mile in all directions, indiscriminately destroying […]

BY NATALIE BLACK “Tell me this,” Mohammad says. “Why, when NATO has the best technology in the world, does it allow its bombs to kill innocent Afghan civilians?” I do not get the chance to answer. He continues, “Why does NATO go into people’s houses at night? Why does it kill people when they are […]

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. […]