The Harvard Political Review has joined with other college political publications to form the Alliance of Collegiate Editors (ACE), hoping to generate cross-campus dialogue on political issues. Rebiya Kadeer, a prominent Uighur rights activist currently living in exile in the U.S., agreed to answer some of our questions. You can read Ms. Kadeer’s biography in … Read more
Dylan Matthews* has a post up on his blog called “How Not To Write About Policy” — it’s a takedown of an essay by Mark Greif entitled Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution, and a sort of mini-lecture on how to write like a wonk. It’s a pretty entertaining post. But it’s also, in my estimate, pretty far off the … Read more
In an op-ed this morning, Crimson columnist and HPRgument blogger Eli Martin argues that “wind energy is not as perfect as it might appear; a closer inspection reveals that it does not meaningfully reduce our reliance on non-renewable energy sources.” The gist of Eli’s argument is that the “unpredictability of wind power” requires about 80 … Read more
The role of federal funding for public education Click for full graphic Public education is dominated by non-federal money. Ninety cents of every dollar comes from state or local sources, derived largely from property taxes. But what federal spending on education lacks in size it makes up for in considerable influence over education policy. While … Read more
Reining in Earmarks Won’t Reduce Spending Much, But It’s a Good Place to Start Harvard political economy professor Benjamin M. Friedman was seated at a meeting at Boston’s Emmanuel College in what he considered a “terrific, new state-of-the-art building” when Congressman Michael E. Capuano (D-Mass.) shared a surprising fact about the facility in which they … Read more
The high deficit preys on the minds of federal financiers; as “recession” and “downturn” become everyday terminology, talk of diminishing and cutting programs increases. While other areas of the federal budget hit the proverbial chopping block, one sector remains relatively safe from the discussion: scientific and medical research spending. While a few projects, such as … Read more
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Here’s Bill Gates from a Wired magazine interview about the state of computer hacking: If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop … Read more
Here’s Teddy Roosevelt talking to some undergrads at the University of Paris in 1910: It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy … Read more