Big Brother and double-think on the peninsula The Hidden People of North Korea, by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. $39.95, 296 pp. The haunting portrait of everyday life under modern dictatorship offered in The Hidden People of North Korea should be vaguely familiar to most Americans, but the level of detail … Read more
The EU’s Islamic Identity Crisis President Obama’s address to the Muslim world in Cairo last June called for a new beginning between the United States and Islam, one based on tolerance, dignity, and mutual respect for religious differences. Just two weeks later, French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood before parliament to justify France’s infamous ban on … Read more
The value of the Western tradition in higher education The idea of a Western canon has become unfashionable. When I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2006, the university offered a course on celestial navigation but no survey course in British history. The English Department recently eliminated its required course in major British writers, … Read more
It’s Relay for Life time again, so I’ve been thinking a bit about how charities raise money and which charities I’d like to support with a college student’s meager donations. More than twice as many Americans participate in Relay each year (3.5 million) than get cancer each year (1.5 million); Relay has become so widespread … Read more
Last week was slavery week on the HPRgument (apparently!). We talked about “intern slavery,” twice, and then American slavery. But what about today? Slavery of course is still a very real problem; in absolute terms, by every estimate, there are more slaves today than there ever were in history, and the trade of human lives is … Read more
My Harvard Independent column for this week addresses the retirement of John Paul Stevens and the issue of picking his successor. Read the original here. If they made posters of Supreme Court Justices, I’d put John Paul Stevens on my bedroom wall. The man is a progressive hero — first and foremost, for his longevity. … Read more
In today’s Harvard Crimson, Daniel Herz-Roiphe has written an unusually articulate, well-argued entry in the perennial “Why Final Clubs Are Still Really Bad” essay contest. I’m glad he focused on gender discrimination and inequality, rather than also trying to tackle racial, hetero-normative, and class-based elitism. Those other forms of discrimination are equally important, but I … 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 … Read more
Today, I did something which went against the deepest instincts of my time at the Harvard Political Review: reporting. I heard two days ago that Sarah Palin was going to be in town for the Boston Tea Party rally, and I knew this was something that I simply had to see. So this morning I … Read more
Our three latest interviews are available here. Teaching the Teachers: Teach for America’s founder talks about education in America. Wendy Kopp is the founder and president of Teach for America, the national non-profit teaching corps. She also serves as CEO of Teach for All, an organization that works to introduce Teach for America’s methods around … Read more