“Criminal” is a strangely flexible word. It is a label that has been applied to individuals representing the extremes of human character, from murderers and petty thieves to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion of crime itself mirrors this malleability, with its definition shifting across eras and cultures. While crime has been … Read more
The Harvard Political Review has long dealt in the currency of ideas. For the past 46 years, the HPR has consistently delivered incisive political analysis. We have dedicated ourselves to addressing and highlighting the ideas that underlie events across Harvard’s campus, the United States, and the world. With the third annual Literary Supplement, we take … Read more
After a midterm election turnout of abysmal proportions, amid grinding government gridlock, it may seem strange to say that this moment feels like an especially exciting time to be covering politics. Two well-known trends—disengagement and disappointment with politics and other traditional institutions, in the United States at least, along with rapid changes in the news … Read more
“No, you can’t touch my hair.” Last month, a page on the social networking and blogging site Tumblr featuring pictures of black Harvard students holding whiteboards exploded in national media outlets. The page, a project of the “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign, cast in stark relief some of the off-hand, often unintentional, racialized remarks and behaviors black students encounter on Harvard’s campus. From assertions … Read more
[ZUNYI, CHINA] It was the start to another sweltering day in the little Chinese town of Zunyi. I ambled to a nearby food stall for breakfast, where a vintage TV buzzed lazily in the background. A reporter was reciting updates from the Korean Asiana Airlines crash at San Francisco. Suddenly, the clink of chopsticks and … Read more
In a recent New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof called on scholars, particularly social scientists, to decode their cryptic disciplinary tongues and reenter the political debate. Where in the Kennedy era stood a “brain trust” of Harvard faculty at the center of policymaking, he argues, one now finds some economists and virtually no other academics. … Read more
Dear Readers, “Anything Could Happen at Harvard.” It’s the latest viral video sweeping campus, and it is generating all kinds of buzz among the student body. Students, feeling everything from disillusionment to unbridled optimism, look to the video as either a serious misportrayal of the Harvard experience or spot-on encapsulation of undergraduate life. After watching … Read more
Dear Readers, This November has been a month of momentous change. The world’s two largest economies chose their newest leaders. At home, 131 million people went to the polls and cast ballots, an event unique only in its ordinariness. For the 1.3 billion Chinese citizens, such an occurrence is unfathomable. Instead, the Central Committee of … Read more
Dear Readers, More than any other university, Harvard lies at the nexus of American public policy, politics, and academia. Eight presidents have graduated from Harvard, and on Nov. 6, the nation will choose yet another alumnus to be commander-in-chief. Similar statistics hold for Supreme Court justices, senators, and members of Congress. For these astonishing numbers, … Read more
Dear Readers, Given that I proposed a food issue more than two years ago, it is my great pleasure to finally present to you the Politics of Food. While the culinary and gastronomic—the world of foie gras and Big Macs—might seem out of the norm for the Harvard Political Review, this cover in fact epitomizes … Read more