Northern America

BY ASMA JABER “Drop me off here!” I nervously looked over my shoulder, ran from the glaring yellow taxi, and stealthily jumped the fence. This was my daily routine before walking through the main doors of my middle school in Travelers Rest, South Carolina. The driver was my late father, and the taxi was how […]

BY PETER GRUSKIN The financial crisis of 2007-2008 forced U.S. President Barack Obama and his administration to reconcile with the need to “re-regulate” the financial markets. According to the president, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act gave the administration much of what it was seeking, but the legislation has also left […]

BY DAVE COUGHRAN  On 20 October 2011, Mahmoud Jibril, the interim Prime Minister of the Libyan National Transitional Council, publicly announced the death of former Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi. Qaddafi’s overthrow was the culmination of months of intense effort from Libyan revolutionary militias, the United States, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The victory […]

BY ETHAN WAGNER “We must make our choice,” warned the American jurist Louis Brandeis nearly a century ago, writing on the state of American society. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few—but we can’t have both.”[i] A few years later, as Brandeis joined the U.S. Supreme […]

BY ANYA MALKOV In May 2012, eleven students of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University visited El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as part of a Leadership Service Seminar program sponsored by the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and the offices of the Academic Dean and […]

BY LAUREN PAER In September 2012, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced the third round of quantitative easing (QE3) since the onset of the financial crisis. Quantitative easing refers to the Federal Reserve’s policy of digitally printing dollars to buy long-term bonds and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) to drive interest rates down. In contrast to previous rounds […]

BY VIVEK CHILUKURI When President Obama announced an ambitious plan to reduce gun violence, he surrounded himself with children. By invoking their safety as his chief aim, the president imbued his efforts with our deeply felt and universal impulse to protect the young. When it comes to protecting their futures, however, Washington has shown no […]

BY MARK DIAZ TRUMAN I heard about the Connecticut shooting early in the day, but the full effect of it didn’t hit me until I got home late on Friday night. It was too much to process, too close to the Oregon shooting on Tuesday that left two dead and one wounded at a Happy […]

BY AHMED MOOR It was “one of these compressed moments, where an entire story is told in a headline,” says Harvard Kennedy School Professor Richard Parker. “The story narrative is so simple—and so powerful—that there is no way that Romney can easily escape.” To hear more of Professor Parker’s discussion of Romney’s “47%” comment, listen […]

BY CASEY SCHUTTE The law does not trust them to vote. It forbids them from watching certain movies in the theater or signing up for a credit card on their own. Consuming alcohol is certainly off limits, as is smoking cigarettes. Society proscribes certain activities for these people because, the thinking goes, they lack the […]

BY SEAN KATES The millennium could have started better for Americans. We saw the nation voluntarily enter two wars costly in terms both monetary and human. An ineffective government response exacerbated one environmental disaster, while private cupidity and stupidity caused another. Promises of universal home ownership crashed down around us, aided by slick financial creations […]

BY JAMES WALSH One of the painful lessons of the Great Recession has been that markets do not operate in a vacuum. They are influenced by a variety of external factors, including socioeconomic dynamics, norms of behavior, and institutions. Conversely, the market also has the capacity to shape our politics and society by creating and […]