Northern America

BY ADAM GIORGI     Adam Giorgi is a proud Minnesotan seeking the intersection of government service and comic book superheroics. He is a master in public policy student at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and he swears he doesn’t draw cartoons during lectures (most of the time).   Edited by Neil Thomas

BY AUSTIN DAVIS US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has unchecked authority over thousands of people seeking asylum in the United States. The NAACP, among others, has also condemned Sessions’ history of “racist comments,” and he has spoken out on multiple occasions against asylum seekers as a group. So how has Sessions used his power? To […]

As Asian American students at Harvard, we do not support the Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) lawsuit. We also condemn the recent decision by the Department of Education and the Department of Justice to rescind federal policy guidelines on affirmative action. Our racial identity and experiences are being used to dismantle civil rights protections, but […]

BY MICHAEL AUSLEN In the weeks since the Supreme Court term ended and Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the bench, many progressives, myself included, have felt the same collective unease. We don’t yet know all that President Trump’s appointment of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court will mean for civil liberties, but […]

BY REED SOUTHARD “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”[1] So said Benjamin Franklin at the very birth of the American experiment. Yet Americans today, more and more, hang separately. We no longer collectively tune in to fireside chats, Walter Cronkite, or even Seinfeld. Instead, like a modern […]

BY ANDREW POULIN AND PARTICIPANTS IN THE DUBIN FIELD LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE “A natural disaster does not create crises, it reveals them.” When Tropical Storm Harvey hit the greater Houston area on August 26, 2017, it dropped over 50 inches of rain—more than Houston’s total annual rainfall—in only 36 hours. Roads, shops, and homes were quickly […]

BY SASHA RAMANI President Trump’s long-promised trade war against China has begun. In March, President Trump unveiled tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, and later targeted China directly with tariffs on $60 billion worth of imports on technology and energy industry components. In April, he launched a further 25 percent tariff on Chinese industrial technology, […]

BY BEN MCGUIRE On Friday, May 25, 2018, the Republic of Ireland may be one of the first nations in history to legalize abortion by referendum. If the motion passes—recent polling has tightened to a very close race—Ireland will join much of the world over the last few decades in a trend toward relaxing abortion […]

BY MOUNIR MAHMALAT Imagine a young couple at a boring dancing party. While one tries to animate and initiate the dancing, the other remains seated, complaining, finding excuses. Suddenly, the party ends, and both go home – frustrated. Reforming the European Union (EU) might be less appealing than a dance party. However, the current political […]

BY QUINTON MAYNE For many Americans, cities have become a beacon of hope. The can-do, eye-level politics of our city halls is increasingly viewed as an antidote to what seems like a culture of top-down, self-serving, and polarizing party politics inside the Beltway. An important question then is whether city leaders will live up to […]

BY LINA HIDALGO In Harris County, Texas, the third largest county in the nation and home to Houston, the “education gap” is something that tens of thousands of families struggle with daily. One-in-five children in Texas is born in Harris County, and nearly 35 percent of them live below the federal poverty line. Low-income students […]

BY ALISON COLLINS AND BAR PELED The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has done very little over the years to prioritize women—not at its founding, not during its transition to a professional and international institution, and certainly not today. The administration’s failure to address the gender imbalance among the faculty and in the curriculum, as well […]