Northern America

BY VANESSA CALDER It’s the day of the 2016 presidential election, and only a matter of hours before the next President of the United States is revealed. There’s not a phone call left to be made, or a door left to be knocked on in pursuit of our favored candidate. Instead, there’s only a quiet […]

BY AROHI SHARMA At 5:52 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, November 3, I put down the phone with the Los Angeles County Registrar’s Office, devastated. After spending more than forty minutes waiting for someone to answer my call, I was told that the registrar’s office had not received my vote-by-mail application. I mailed my application […]

BY LISA FEIERMAN When Madeleine Albright arrived at the Democratic National Convention to see Hillary Clinton accept her party’s presidential nomination, she dressed for the occasion: She wore a brooch made of shattered glass to symbolize the historic nature of her friend’s achievement—putting “the biggest crack in the glass ceiling yet,” as Clinton said. The […]

BY MELISSA BENDER I was a 19 year-old college sophomore in November 2008. I had never voted before, let alone organized my classmates around anything bigger than the boundaries of our campus. But the tension between my civic duty as a voter and my academic duty as a college student was called into question, and […]

BY JILLIAN RAFFERTY Since August, I’ve travelled to New Hampshire to canvass for the Democratic Party half a dozen times. I’ve knocked on doors in Rye, in Nashua, and in Londonderry. I’ve spoken to folks from across the political spectrum, from age 19 to 86. From all those conversations, no voter left a deeper impression […]

BY SEBASTIAN LANGER Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) announced it’s 2017 election budget: 20 million Euro (around $22.1 million) on October 21. This is not the full sum needed for the campaign—every district’s candidate has to raise another 6,000 to 10,000 Euro for his or her personal campaigning. But that’s all. […]

Embed from Getty Images “Turkey is at a crossroads!” has become the rallying cry for commentators as the country grapples with terrorism, a coup attempt, and a reshaping of its domestic and international stances. The cliché has long described Turkey as a country straddling two continents, torn between East and West – its imperial history tied to […]

BY ALEXANDER SMITH Gone are the days of American criminals like Al Capone, John Gotti, and Bonnie and Clyde. Recent prosecutorial practices of US regulatory agencies suggest that modern America now confronts an entirely new class of “criminal.” They are listed on national stock exchanges, occupy flashy corporate headquarters, and are run by individuals adorned […]

BY SEBASTIAN LEAPE We’ve heard a lot about Trump’s past recently, but less about what the future of a Trump presidency would actually look like. I went to a Trump rally in Laconia, New Hampshire on September 15 to hear his pitch in full to try and figure it out. Behind the bluster, there is […]

BY NYASHA WEINBERG Sex education at my school was a joke. It consisted of an awkward encounter between a bald geography teacher, a banana, and a condom. There was no mention of consent. The class didn’t tackle any of the problems that arise in relationships: resolving differences of opinion, dealing with emotions, or what to […]

Every year, National Hispanic Heritage Month is observed in the United States between September 15 and October 15. This 30-day period is symbolic because it encompasses the independence days of several Latin American countries –Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Chile. During this time, Americans honor and celebrate the cultures, histories, and […]

By Zouhair Mazouz, MPP 2017 Full disclosure: That night, I meant to stir the pot. In the 2015 academic year, I had made a point out of boycotting meetings organized by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Arab Caucus. As an Arab myself, I was outraged to learn that the Caucus explicitly described its events as “intended […]