My mother insisted I wear my Harvard sweatshirt on the flight home to Bombay. “If you get lost, which you probably will, people will know you’re a college student and help you!” she had said, beaming. So, clothed in crimson, I waited along the aisles to disembark at the Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport. A boy … Read more
The United States is unique among nations worldwide in its system of “trust votes” to elect its president. This system, known as the Electoral College, involves bestowing states with a certain number of “electors” who, if elected, cast their ballots in turn for the nation’s two highest offices. By empowering the Electoral College to elect … Read more
The Roadmap to South Africa’s Constitution At the time of its creation, the South African Constitution was hailed as a landmark success for young democracies, especially in Africa. The New York Times in a 1996 article described the event as “What was once nearly unthinkable became nearly unanimous… as South Africa adopted a new Constitution … Read more
How Hungray’s Conservative Wing Wrote a New Constitution for Itself In 2010, Hungary embarked on one of the most important tasks for the survival of their government by beginning to draft a constitution. Members of the parliamentary drafting committee wrote the document on their iPad. The “iPad” constitution attempts to completely undue the nation’s communist … Read more
The radio waves are heavy with the sound of presidential attack advertisements, and nobody seems able to escape unscathed. Over the past few weeks, President Obama has faced a whole wave of criticism calling his presidency failed and his leadership ineffectual. Others have attacked Newt Gingrich as unreliable, undisciplined, an embarrassment, and “chaos.” Ron Paul … Read more
Proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline On Wednesday, January 18, in a move fomenting consternation within Republican circles and celebration within environmentalist ones, President Barack Obama announced the rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline. Though there is debate over how many jobs the pipeline’s construction and maintenance would actually create—Keystone builder TransCanada posits that 20,000 jobs … Read more
The response to SOPA and Protect IP, two pieces of proposed legislation aiming to curb online piracy, has been intense and highly reactionary. In October, Yahoo attracted public attention by leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for its support of SOPA. In November, tech giants including Google and Facebook wrote a joint letter to key … Read more
With “Search Plus Your World,” Google finally tips the hand it’s been holding since the summer. Eric Schmidt said it clearly enough from the beginning: Google+ was never really about social networking; it’s a data-mining project. The goal was to break the back of Facebook’s monopoly on our personal information — to coax us into telling Google whom we’re … Read more
With “Search Plus Your World,” Google finally tips the hand it’s been holding since the summer. Eric Schmidt said it clearly enough from the beginning: Google+ was never really about social networking; it’s a data-mining project. The goal was to break the back of Facebook’s monopoly on our personal information — to coax us into telling Google whom we’re … Read more
Despite a formal alliance between Pakistan and the United States, the interests of the two governments are often in perfect contradiction. Pakistan’s spy agency, the ISI, has been accused by Mike Mullen of supporting the jihadist terror cell Haqqani in its October attack on the American embassy in Kabul. Furthermore, Osama bin Laden managed to … Read more