HPR’s Multimedia Team presents the first edition of HPR Talk, the official podcast of and behind-the-scenes look at the nation’s premier undergraduate political quarterly. In this episode, we interview a few writers about their articles that appear in our Spring 2017 magazine, “The Police State.”
Twenty-two years after the fall of apartheid, South Africa conceals a harsh reality: the country’s political elite is beginning to forget its promise that, as the country’s post-apartheid 1996 constitution guaranteed, “never again” would state-sanctioned violence against its people be witnessed. Despite the institutional achievements of the Mandela administration, including a strong constitution and government … Read more
Last September in Paris, four people filled an abandoned car with cooking gas canisters near the Notre Dame Cathedral, with the intention of setting off an explosion. Two of these perpetrators were teenagers, one was a married 29-year-old, and the final individual was nearly 40 years old. All of them were ISIS recruits, and all … Read more
For years, the enlarging East Asian sphere of influence has slowly threatened a once-stable Western economic and diplomatic hegemony, causing many in Washington to call for a restoration of American strength. Donald Trump embraced this attitude through his “Make America Great Again” campaign rhetoric, and more officially through his “America-First” foreign policy agenda, which seeks … Read more
The Department of Homeland Security has a motto: “If you see something, say something.” Well, we’ve seen quite a bit over the last month and Republicans in Congress have said next to nothing. The Russian government has interfered with our election. There is evidence that President Trump’s campaign team had unsavory discussions with Russian officials … Read more
Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy is the 19th Surgeon General of the United States and the first of Indian descent. He was appointed by President Obama in 2013 and confirmed in 2014. A graduate of Harvard College (’98), Vice Admiral Murthy has co-founded an HIV/AIDS educational organization, cared for thousands of patients, and trained hundreds of medical residents. … Read more
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a Republican pollster and author of The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials are Leading America (and How Republicans Can Keep Up). She has written for Politico and The Huffington Post, as well as appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and The O’Reilly Factor. The interview was conducted on February 22nd, 2017. … Read more
A street view of Harare, Zimbabwe. Worsening socioeconomic conditions have made many Zimbabweans targets for human trafficking. According to recent studies, most Americans associate the term “slavery” with the transatlantic slave trade that ended in the 1860s. The number of enslaved in 2016, however, totaled over three times the total number of those enslaved between the … Read more
On his way to the store in November 2004, Dutch politician Martin Bosma stepped outside of his house and stumbled upon the murder scene of Theo van Gogh. A filmmaker and close friend of Bosma, van Gogh had been shot and stabbed to death in the broad daylight of Amsterdam by a Dutch Muslim man. … Read more
In 2007, cyberwarfare nearly became real warfare when Russia waged a series of Distributed Denial of Service attacks against Estonia. A DDoS attack makes a website inoperable by overloading its servers with excessive traffic. “The attacks were aimed at the essential electronic infrastructure of the Republic of Estonia,” Estonia’s Minister of Defense told Wired shortly … Read more