Until now I’ve resisted commenting on the controversy that was created last week when Harvard 3L Stephanie Grace’s private email saying she “does not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent” came to light. But now I see that Andrew Sullivan is having a related conversation about race and intelligence, and ... Read More
Alex Copulsky’s reporting on the Tea Party is hilarious. If you haven’t seen his post yet, go check it out. But his sightings of ”trolls” — people unsympathetic to the Tea Party movement who are there just to make it look bad – corroborate the reports we’ve been hearing about left-wing activist groups mobilizing to crash the Tea Party events and frame them as ... Read More
No — that would be a tasteless joke. But they do perform a lot of work for free! As The New York Times explains in a piece that should have been, in retrospect, pretty obvious: Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say “If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going ... Read More
This is the last part of Obama’s closing argument for health care reform to the House. It’s rather stirring. I’ve always regarded the heath care debates as something of a litmus test for our democracy, and here Obama gets at the heart of it: does America still have what it takes, as a polity with old institutions like the senate ... Read More
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 ... Read More
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 ... Read More
Google’s court case in Italy is a big deal. As everyone is saying, if Google can be held accountable for the content it syndicates on its site, that would change the way that information flows through the internet forever. It could close the whole thing down. I thought I’d take this opportunity to throw out some loosely connected ideas on ... Read More
Last weekend, Harvard’s Model United Nations conference for college students took place for the 56th time, drawing thousands of students from all over the world to Boston Park Plaza. As an uber-important (or not) Assistant Director to the E.U. committee, I got to observe first hand how students acted as delegates from countries they didn’t come from and to debate ... Read More
The New Republic has reprinted a wonderful Depression-era essay by John Dewey about the collapse of what he calls the “romanticism of business”: But it was just at this point that the new romanticism of business so cleverly came in. Human imagination had never before conceived anything so fantastic as the idea that every individual is actuated in all his desires ... Read More
Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic’s politics editor, just gave us a glimpse of his daily reading regime, and it surprised me. There’s an astonishing reliance on Twitter, something I’ve purposefully not used as just another source of news (I don’t want really important tweets, like what my friends had for lunch, being lost in the news shuffle). First thing in the ... Read More
I spent this past week complaining about government dysfunction — so I’d be remiss not to mention the Citizens United ruling. Of the many bad things that happened last week Citizens United is probably the most significant. The ruling will make our government worse. How much worse? It’s not clear — some argue that risk-averse corporations won’t be inclined to ... Read More
Nicolas De Torrente on how humanitarian aid organizations can be more effective and helpful in a world of global politics. Dr. De Torrente is the former Executive Director of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. He is currently a board member for the Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative. Harvard Political Review: You have written in the Harvard International Review about the ... Read More
For an allegedly “grotesque” (but, thankfully, “innocuous”) confusion, Sam Barr’s equation of liberty and equally is pretty well-founded empirically. Think about the history of America. Think about the struggle to integrate non-land-owners, Catholics, Jews, women, blacks and now gays. Surely, as Sam notes, all this expanded both liberty and equality at once. One way to understand the relationship between liberty ... Read More
The Australian government announced last week a massive 8-year, $31 billion investment in broadband that would leave the land down under with the most impressive internet infrastructure in the world. Not only does the plan promise tenfold faster download speeds (imagine streaming multiple HD movies at once), but promises to bring that speed to over 90% of Australian households. The ... Read More
The NYT came out with Part IV of its “Remade in America” series. It’s a great series, full of the cool graphics that the NYT does so well. But the thesis of the piece, I suggest, is rather obvious (at least to anyone who’s walked around Harvard’s campus lately): immigration really, really helps America. “Every American I’ve talked to says: ... Read More
