Sweat the Small Stuff
Lessons learned from a summer working at the White House National Economic Council
Articles By: Jonathan Yip 
Jonathan Yip '13 is the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Political Review. His favorite font is Gotham Condensed (see HPR logo).
The Bank Bailout in Perspective
Was the despised but ultimately profitable TARP program a success?
The Budget Wars
If the debt ceiling debate did nothing else, it plainly demonstrated Washington’s unhealthy tendency to punt tough fiscal decisions down the line. It was remarkable then, when on April 5, 2011, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, released a long-term budget with a serious and potentially unpopular plan to reduce the deficit and pay off [...]
Zombie IR
We were going to run a piece in the fall HPR on potential zombie threats, but Foreign Policy beat us to it! Shucks. A highlight: States could also exploit the threat from the living dead to acquire new territory, squelch irredentist movements, settle old scores, or subdue enduring rivals. The People’s Republic of China could use the zombie threat to justify [...]
The Media Doesn’t Get Apple
Pieces like this Newsweek one come out every so often. They compare today’s Apple to the Apple that lost against Microsoft, insisting that Apple is doomed to repeat history and stumble in the battle against Google: Meanwhile, Android is already outselling Apple, according to market researcher NPD…My sense is that today’s Apple event marks an important tipping point—the point where Android [...]
Icing Bros
James Taranto at the WSJ writes Best of the Web Today and occasionally adds a ruthlessly mocking section titled “Everything is Spinning Out of Control” (itself a snide poke at a dumb AP article, “Is Everything Seemingly Spinning Out of Control?”). Regardless, I’ve finally found evidence that everything is actually spinning out of control. Deepwater Horizon? War in the Koreas? [...]
Generational Inadequacy
I just finished watching Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ The Pacific, an HBO miniseries following a group of marines in WWII. And it was truly epic. Melodramatic and overwrought maybe, but the war in the Pacific was no jungle romp. As The Pacific vividly shows, it was unimaginably gruesome, traumatic, and relentless. The marines battled the unyielding and suicidal Japanese on malaria-infested, [...]
Kagan!
Sorry, Yale. No contest. I won’t go on about the nomination process, which has been covered to death. But, I just wanted to point out this particularly conspiratorial, but savvy, analysis at Above the Law about Deputy Principal Counsel (and Harvard law professor, again) Dan Meltzer: Also on Friday, Daniel Meltzer resigned as deputy principal counsel, to return to his post [...]
Print is Dead. Right?
For the first time in a long time, there’s serious newspaper competition in New York—actually, newspaper competition anywhere would be newsworthy… But, New York is the big leagues. NYT vs. WSJ, fight! David Carr says: The fight bears watching for a few reasons. This is New York, a crucible of city journalism, a place that has seen newspaper wars for almost [...]
Bono Saves Africa Again
Our cover here was a joke, but perhaps one not too far from the truth. Bono writes today as an op-ed guest columnist in the New York Times about the “rebooting” of Africa, and in his lilting prose, he’s actually pretty right. Development economics is a contentious and irreconcilable field; there are infinitely more questions than there are answers. In [...]
Rahm-ed Out
New York Times Magazine, I know you’ve probably been working on this magnum opus on Rahm Emanuel for weeks, but I feel like this take from the New Republic was more than enough. Oh, and this. And this. But, yes, I’m a sucker and read all of them anyway. PS. And this. Photo credit: spdpurtill’s flickr.
Billions for Nothing
Richard Thaler wrote an extremely important piece in the New York Times this past weekend on wireless spectrum auctions. This may sound like the stuff of fantasy or boredom, take your pick, but selling off archaic TV spectrum could net the US government $100 billion: Professor Hazlett estimates that selling off this spectrum could raise at least $100 billion for [...]
