BY JOHANNA BOCKMAN In 1975, Soviet economist Leonid Kantorovich and American economist Tjalling Koopmans jointly won the Nobel Prize in Economics “for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources.”1 How could an economist of socialism and an economist of capitalism share this prestigious prize? Michael Bernstein, historian of the United States and Provost [...]
BY DAVID W. HAINES As Senator Edward Kennedy began hearings on the bill that would become the Refugee Act of 1980, he commented for the record that “I believe our national policy of welcome to the homeless has served our country and our traditions well. But we are here this morning to explore how we [...]
BY GITANJALI GUTIERREZ In the wake of September 11, 2001, the United States parted from its traditional adherence to fundamental legal principles, including domestic and international prohibitions against torture, kidnapping, disappearances, and arbitrary detention without trial. Legal memorandum from the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and other government documents disclosed through the Freedom [...]
BY ALAN CHEUSE Here’s an obscure moment, that when it first happened, seemed to me to be an example of I didn’t know what, but now shines through the fog as a precursor of some news to come: about ten years ago I served on a jury that decided one of the largest international literary [...]
BY TOM C. OWENS As the United States stood poised to take a more prominent political and cultural role as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century, debate raged over the formation and character of distinctively American artistic forms and traditions. Within the art or classical music tradition, this conversation was particularly [...]
BY DAVID WILSFORD When you think about public policy issues that are not working well, it does not take a rocket scientist to identify the health care system in the United States as one of them. For those who study public policy and particularly those who look at how other countries do it, a central [...]
BY RANDA KAYYALI Supply and demand has fuelled the circuits of production at the global level for many years now. Like other products, the offerings from higher education institutions have changed over the years. From the 1960s on, student exchanges were the dominant form of international education, but there are newer forms of global outreach [...]
BY DAVID R. IRVINE Not far from Stratford, on the river Avon, stands Warwick Castle. This thousand year-old relic is one of Britain’s premier historical attractions. The dungeons and torture chamber, with the rack and press, the thumbscrews and iron maiden, are popular tour stops as visitors ponder the dark barbarity of the age of [...]
BY DAVID W. HAINES In 1939, as the St. Louis sailed first to Cuba and then along the east coast of the United States, the U.S. government refused to land the Jewish refugees on board—even though some 700 already had affidavits of support. They and many other Jews over the next several years would be [...]
BY EMILY FRYE The Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Program began its work with a focus on protecting domestic infrastructures. However, many critical infrastructures are international in nature, and protection issues cross national boundaries. Banking, for example, now enjoys broadly interoperable systems across most developed economies; telecommunications are facilitated by undersea cables and satellites. Our energy [...]