Before taping the second-ever episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver implored members of the audience not to internalize their laughter like they do when watching comedy programs at home. The studio audience must laugh hard and externally, he explained, or the show will not work. He began with a quick recap of … Read more
By March 24, 2014, I had been embedded in the organization Divest Harvard for five weeks, and there was little sign the group was about to grow. Its members told me they’d congregated every Monday for a year in this sterile, broad-windowed room in Quincy House. Since mid-February, when I started attending, I’d seen no … Read more
In 1932, a money-minded showman named George Preston Marshall bought a team called the Boston Braves in the young, developing National Football League (NFL). His second head coach hired in his second year of ownership—the team began the tradition of new blood under the headset each season much longer ago than many believe—was a man … Read more
There are two very different narratives about Sri Lanka. There’s the kind you read in the New York Times, the story about how now, even four years after the civil war has ended, the international community persistently demands that the Sri Lankan government more effectively investigate and prosecute alleged war crimes that took place at … Read more
Alex Burns is a senior political reporter for Politico. He published this article about changes to the leadership of U.S. intelligence agencies after 9/11 in the Fall 2004 issue of the Harvard Political Review, when he was a contributing writer. Burns graduated from Harvard in 2008. On July 22, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks … Read more
October’s government shutdown revealed some troubling truths about the federal government’s ability to maintain operating capacity in essential public health functions. Particularly important to public health are the programs provided by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees everything from the Women, Infants, and Children program (WIC) to preventing and mitigating public … Read more
Most people in China never see the inside of a lecture hall. UNESCO reports that less than a third of the college-aged population attended school in 2011. Moreover, the government continues to control the flow of information, even in universities. Accordingly, China thinks what its elite thinks. However, even though the elite who control information … 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