Kill the Irishman, Jonathan Hensleigh. Anchor Bay Films, 2011. 106 min. Summer 1976 was not a pleasant time to be a resident of Cleveland, Ohio. Throughout the months, a series of 36 car bombs traumatized the city. These deaths capped a street war between the city’s long-influential Italian mafia and an Irishman seeking to break … Read more
Emma Sky is a Spring 2011 Fellow at the Institute of Politics. From 2007 to 2010, she was Political Advisor to General Raymond Odierno in Iraq. She previously advised the NATO Commanding Generals in Iraq. Harvard Political Review: What role should the outside world, especially the U.S., play in supporting recent revolutions in the Middle … Read more
President Obama is an excellent rhetorician—he displayed his oratorical gift once again during his speech on the state of the Middle East and North Africa last Thursday. However, I continue to be bothered by the seemingly arbitrary distinction President Obama drew between “good” Arab revolutions in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, and the “bad” revolution … Read more
Inspired by the recent debate between my colleagues Adam Kern and Sarah Siskind concerning libertarianism and public goods, this is the second installment of a multi-part series on various libertarian theories concerning government and the provision of public goods. Or, alternatively, the role of government in a free society. In the first part of this series, we briefly … Read more
Deep in theLacandon Jungle of Chiapas, Mexico, a balaclava-clad guerilla puffs on his pipe, spouting socialist rhetoric. “What we’re going to do is shake this country up from below, pick it up and turn it on its head,” he declares. At first glance, the insurgent might seem the emblematic Latin American revolutionary, with ideology from … Read more
The best thing ever written about Facebook was probably a single line in Lawrence Lessig’s review of The Social Network: “What’s important here,” Lessig says, in his characteristically vehement way, “is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) … Read more
Several weeks ago, a columnist for The Harvard Crimson announced that he’s sick of hearing other students blather on about their political opinions. “It requires a truly astonishing degree of presumptuousness,” Dhruv Singhal wrote, “for someone to believe that their particular insights on the appropriate balance between the cause of social justice and the prudence … Read more
In The Social Revolution, Karl Katusky warned that “there are few conceptions over which there has been so much contention as that of revolution.” This argument does not only exist within the body of scholars attempting to describe and define the phenomenon of revolution, but it is also shared with the revolutionaries themselves, as they … Read more
Why Marx Was Right, by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press, 2011. $25.00, 272 pp. “You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism,” writes Terry Eagleton in the preface to his new book, Why Marx Was Right. Eagleton is a literary theorist and an English professor at the … Read more
Harvard Political Review: President Obama recently announced that the United States would cut oil imports by one-third before 2025. Is his energy plan ambitious enough? Bill Richardson: It’s not ambitious enough, but it’s politically realistic. I believe it’s the best we can do under the present Congress and the mood of the country. My hope … Read more