Commentary
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Maybe We Should Make Some Rules Here: A Framework for Social Media
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Article co-authored by Ellie Vorhaben. This piece comes as a follow up to a prior article concerning Facebook’s limited legal liability from the whistleblower. We’ve watched the same scene play out over and over. Reporters reveal another negative impact of social media. Outrage and handwringing ensue. Then a mix of…
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Anti-Asian Violence Is Not Random: Why Increased Policing Will Fail Us
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With the Atlanta spa shootings earlier this year, and the pandemic exacerbating incendiary rhetoric about Asian Americans, violence has become a regular conversation topic in my circles. My Asian-American friends share stories about street harassment, while my mother, in her native Chinese, always urges me to “stay careful” and “pay…
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Sweden’s Unconventional Approach to Covid-19: What went wrong
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While most countries endured harsh lockdowns during March 2020, Swedes went on with their lives largely as before, indulging in nightlife, visiting elderly relatives, and so on. Government officials hoped that a large enough portion of the Swedish population would gain immunity to COVID-19, making the diseases’ spread less consequential.…
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Towards A More Transparent Regulation for Online Targeted Ads
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Mohamed Suliman is a researcher at Northeastern University Civic AI lab with a degree in engineering he is also a regular contributor to Global Voices where he writes about tech issues. Big tech companies are notoriously secretive about how they operate online advertisements. Often they release only the minimal data…
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Reallocating Funds to Education: A Better Chance for Youth
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Carly Domicolo is a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board and an alumna of the Writing Persuasive Public Policy Credential Program at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Calls to defund the police are louder than ever since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis more…
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China-US Dispute On Clean Energy: Economic and Geopolitical Stakes
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Jean Vilbert is an academic in the La Follette School of Public Affairs and a Resident Fellow at the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program (University of Wisconsin). A recent report from the International Energy Agency shows that in 2020, renewable electricity production increased at its fastest pace in…
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Venezuela’s Shameful Secret
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Tamara Pilot is an Assistant Vice President at the University of Chicago, Global Initiatives and Strategy (Uchicago Global). The young woman covered her face with a shaking hand. She was exhausted and scared. The metal birthing chair did not have a cushion or vinyl covering, and she shivered in the…
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To Reclaim a Shared Reality We Need Storytellers, Not fact-checkers
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The antidote to a lie is the truth. The cure for fabricated news stories is fact-checking. Right? Of course not. If that were true, all the fact checking done over the past five years would have effectively established a shared truth, and fabricated news stories would spread only until debunked.…
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Transparency in Diversity Action at the University of Chicago
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Guy Whittall-Scherfee recently completed the Writing Persuasive Policy Program with the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. America’s universities are facing a crisis of their own creation. Despite a growing population and increased effort to support higher education, attendance at universities nationwide has decreased. This is not due…
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Managing India’s COVID Crisis through Human Capital Reform
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Abhishek Yadav contributed to this article. After soldiering through the first COVID-19 wave with a national lockdown and a relatively low death count, India lost a devastating battle with the second wave. Total deaths, which peaked in April, have climbed up to nearly 400,000, but are likely grossly under-reported as…
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Climate Change is Disproportionally Affecting Mental Health in Developing Countries
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Dharrnesha Inbah Rajah is a MA in International Development and Public Policy candidate at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Beyond witnessing one of the worst pandemics in modern times, 2020 was also the warmest year on record and saw horrifying wildfires from the U.S. to Australia.…