The Smartest Places on Earth

Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation

For nearly four decades, the manufacturing centers of the industrialized world have been in decline, their once mighty engines of mass productivity decommissioned and rendered into silent, rusting hulks. Waves of capital and (mostly white) people have streamed out of the central cities, leaving ruined landscapes in their wake. Recently ...

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The Smartest Places on Earth

How to Effectively Ban Abortion

On the Polish Black Monday Strike and its Consequences

This week saw a massive mobilization of women in Poland (and elsewhere) against a proposed total abortion ban in the country.  On Monday, women refused en masse to go to work or school, striking both economically and socially, in order to stop the proposal, which would have refused abortion to ...
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How to Effectively Ban Abortion

The Woman Who Might Have Been President

As former Goldwater Girl Hillary Rodham Clinton is poised to become the first woman president of the United States, it is worth asking: what prevented Elizabeth Dole -- Clinton's former Senate colleague -- from breaking that historic barrier?

Sexism, not just within the Republican Party but also in a larger political ...

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The Woman Who Might Have Been President

Against Exceptionalism, Beyond Triumphalism

A Review of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture

On 13 April 1943, on the 200th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial to the nation’s third president. Facing a sharp wind blowing in from the Potomac, the president admired the heroic statue and read the famous words that grace the interior walls of ...

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Against Exceptionalism, Beyond Triumphalism

Fearing the Foreign on Europe’s Streets

After last weekend’s local elections in Berlin, my more optimistic friends celebrate what they consider to be the victory of the left, while the pessimists (or realists, depending on who you ask) bemoan the ascent of the right-populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) who received 14.2% of the votes. At a ...
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Fearing the Foreign on Europe’s Streets

Thoughts on the Hungarian and Polish New Right in Power

Eviscerating the Constitutional Court and purging the judiciary, complete politicization of the civil service, turning public media into a government mouthpiece, restricting opposition prerogatives in parliament, unilateral wholesale change of the Constitution or plain violation of it, official tolerance and even promotion of racism and bigotry, administrative assertion of traditional ...

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Thoughts on the Hungarian and Polish New Right in Power