Recruiting season comes every year at Harvard. In fact, I think it might come twice a year. Truth be told, I don’t really know when recruiting season is. There comes a day every autumn and/or spring when, strolling down Plympton Street at dusk, I see an army of well-dressed undergraduates hurrying past me into the New England night, and I [...]
The Ec 10 walkout is misguided and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the course's goals.
Sorry to spoil the midterms for anyone who has TiVoed them and will be watching later, but the 112th U.S. Congress will consist of a House controlled by the Republicans and a Senate controlled by the Democrats. This got me wondering: When was the last time under a Democratic president that the House has belonged to the Republicans and the [...]
The most populous state in the Union went to the polls on Tuesday, and as Californians were voting, the Supreme Court issued a bizarre ruling that put an immediate halt to a crucial provision of Arizona’s public financing program. What do the two have in common? I’ll get to that later, but first, here are my thoughts on the California [...]
In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill,there has been no shortage of finger-pointing. There’s plenty of blame to go around, no doubt, but there is one group that the Right has mysteriously implicated in this disaster: environmentalists. In an editorial in the Washington Post last Friday, Charles Krauthammer wrote that environmentalists are partially to blame for the spill [...]
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell decided to stir up some controversy when he declared April “Confederate History Month,” reviving a state tradition that his Democratic predecessors had ignored for the past eight years. Generally, I think our society has become too politically correct, and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with having a Confederate History Month. (Indeed, there’s nothing wrong [...]
This hasn’t made the front page of The New York Times (yet!), but I thought it was important to get the word out: Topeka, Kansas has changed its name to “Google, Kansas — the capital city of fiber optics.” This move is part of Topeka’s (I mean Google’s) push to be chosen as one of Google’s experimental cities in its [...]
I remember the day when John McCain used to be that Republican that we Democrats kind of liked. Then came the 2008 presidential campaign. I can’t exactly fault McCain for steering hard to the right; he was, after all, trying to win the Republican primary and then energize the party’s base in the general election. Still, there are plenty of [...]
Harvard Weatherhead fellow Martin Kramer’s recent remarks on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have created some controversy in the blogosphere. Media Matters’ M.J. Rosenberg insinuated in blog posts on The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo that Kramer was “advocating Palestinian genocide” when he suggested that “the West [should stop] providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status.” Rosenberg concluded, “This is [...]
The other day, my girlfriend (who’s not a math fan) sent me a link to a new New York Times post by Steven Strogatz, an applied math professor at Cornell who is writing a blog that will, over the next few weeks, give readers a quick tutorial on math, “from pre-school to grad school.” Strogatz starts slowly; his first piece [...]
Politicians' Self-Interest and the Future of Campaign Finance Reform
The silenced economics of legalization In 1998, the satirical newspaper The Onion boldly declared “Drugs Win Drug War.” Satire aside, the headline embodied the increasingly prevalent view that America’s War on Drugs is unwinnable, and that it has been ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. Still, the dominant view in American politics is that prohibited drugs are dangerous and ought [...]
Concerns over the role of the poll are misguided The high number of public opinion polls was impossible to miss during the 2008 election, and, though the horserace is on break, professional pollsters are keeping busy. Polling is no longer a part-time business, and a wide variety of opinion polls, covering everything from congressional and presidential job approval to health [...]
How Obama is riding out the Democratic storm of scandals From Tom Daschle’s taxes, to Charlie Rangel’s apartments, to Rod Blagojevich’s hair, scandals have recently shaken the Democratic Party. Yet polls show that President Obama and the Democratic brand remain relatively untarnished by this long train of embarrassments. His widespread pre-existing popularity has certainly helped Obama limit the fallout from [...]
