Northern America

Thirteen days ago, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics offered a visiting fellowship to Chelsea Manning. Two days later, Doug Elmendorf, Dean of the Kennedy School, rightfully withdrew the fellowship. But the invitation should never have been extended in the first place. In 2013, Manning was convicted of espionage for leaking 750,000 sensitive military […]

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement that President Trump has decided to rescind DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, came as a shock to some and is disappointing to us. Although DACA recipients come from places as wide-ranging as Jamaica and the Philippines, the vast majority of them are from Latinx communities. (Latinx is […]

BY NATALIA COTE-MUÑOZ, MEREDITH DAVIS, AND KRISTELL MILLÁN This piece was written by the Co-Chairs of the Harvard Kennedy School Latinx Caucus and can also be found on the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy blog here. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement that President Trump has decided to rescind DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, came […]

Agile, iterative, pilot, scrum—these phrases may be common in the world of software development, but one would hardly expect to hear them tossed around the austere marble corridors of state government.  Yet they are common parlance in the Massachusetts Governor’s Office, where a nimble squad of problem-solvers is using every cutting-edge tool in the toolbox […]

Paul LePage (R-ME) is America’s most conservative governor, and a reliable headline. For ten weeks this summer, he was also my boss. After years of talking the bipartisan talk, I was ready to walk the bipartisan walk as Maine’s inaugural Dukakis Fellow. Beyond building a résumé that joins Michael Dukakis (D-MA) and Paul LePage in […]

On July 26, 2017, President Trump took to Twitter to proclaim that transgender individuals are prohibited from serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. The directive caused a flurry of activity at the Pentagon. LGBTQ news sources began reporting on Friday, August 4, that a guidance document was on its way to Secretary of Defense Mattis […]

In 1867, Karl Marx famously declared, “It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labor out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of laborers, if the cost is about the same.” Since then, the phenomenon of the “reserve army of labor,” or the existence of structural unemployment […]

Last spring brought a glimmer of hope to an issue that Canada neglects: bereavement leave. Facebook announced an unprecedented leap forward, providing employees with 20 days paid leave to grieve the loss of an immediate family member, and 10 days for extended family members. It has been much discussed that this policy was at least […]

Donald Trump achieved what many considered unthinkable. He is president of the United States, having won 304 Electoral College votes in the 2016 election. In addition, the Republican Party won majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives. “Why did the electorate do what they did tonight?” Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, posed […]

Ninety-one percent of Internet users feel they have “lost control” of their personal information, Pew Research Center found in a 2016 poll.[1] The exponential increase in the capacity of firms to collect, store, and analyze data raises significant privacy concerns. But the most significant challenge for policy makers is not the risk that personal data […]

This piece was published in the 27th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. The forces of gentrification have reached the gates of Chinatowns. Across America, upscale property developments threaten to encroach on venerable ethnic enclaves that happen to sit on very valuable real estate. While Chinatown gentrification in some ways repeats a pattern played […]

This piece was published in the 27th print volume of the Asian American Policy Review. Abstract This paper examines wealth distribution and ethnically structured inequality among Asian American elderly. This paper uses three different datasets—the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), Health and Retirement Study (HRS), and micro-level data from the American Community Survey (ACS)—to […]