Northern America

Only days before the February 1st beginning of Black History/African-Heritage/Black Future month, the internet– or should I say black Twitter, erupted in fiery chatter when it was revealed that not all black people agree on its necessity. Why dedicate an entire month to celebrating the contributions of Africans and African-Americans to the world? Rather than entertain […]

BY JENN MENN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here. Introduction to the foster care crisis In the whirl of a brief phone call, a social worker’s car doors shutting in the driveway, and signing a custody paper like a FedEx package, I became mom to three little strangers. […]

BY KAVI PATEL Backed by a 10-0 vote at the December 2015 Federal Open Market Committee Policy meeting, the Federal Reserve decided to increase the target Federal Funds interest rates by .25 percent for the first time since 2006. Chair Janet Yellen reaffirmed her confidence in the U.S. economy in a press conference that followed, and […]

BY WILL EBERLE When the water started turning brownish-black, residents of Flint, Michigan knew they had a problem. But it would take months before they learned the truth; a truth which should serve as a wake-up call to communities across America. And just this week, Flint’s newly-elected mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency […]

Introduction This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first wave of Vietnamese Americans arriving in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Southern Vietnamese fled their homeland after the Communist North captured Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) on April 30, 1975. Over the next two decades, waves of political refugees breathed new life […]

BY RYAN COHEN Playing on the fears that President Obama decried in his public address earlier this month, Donald Trump proposed that the United States bar Muslims from entry, including re-entry of Muslim U.S. citizens traveling abroad. It’s easy to deride this proposal as intolerant, unconstitutional, and abhorrent, as many have done. What’s more difficult—and […]

BY JESSICA CUSSINS Now that we have the power to permanently alter humanity, should we? This was the question at the heart of the International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Washington, D.C., last week, an event co-hosted by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the […]

BY LAUREN WINDMEYER Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that he would take two months paternity leave following the birth of his first child. This announcement exemplifies a trend in the tech world towards improved benefits for new parents – this year alone, Amazon, Netflix, and Microsoft have all announced extended parental leave. This is of […]

BY CAITLIN RYAN The scene is familiar. Fresh snow coats your grandparents’ front lawn. The smell of turkey permeates. Your aunt beams as she collects obligatory compliments that her stuffing, once again, is a hit. Finally, your family members find a place at the table and your grandfather asks each of you to name something […]

This morning at Harvard Law School we woke up to a hate crime. The hallways of Harvard Law School are lined with portraits of every tenured professor in the history of the university. As a first-year law student, the first time that I walked down those hallways I was painfully aware of the white men […]

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction; A Gesture Life; Aloft; and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Selected by the New Yorker as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century,” Lee is professor […]

On October 21st, 2015, the first round of the first parliamentary elections held in Egypt since 2011 came to a close. A majority of available seats were won by loyalists to President Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi, in an election in which approximately one-fifth of the electorate voted. The election has been hailed by Al-Sisi as the […]