ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
The Israeli campaign in Gaza began as a response to the October 7 attack and its particular brutality. It is wrong, however, to view the Israeli fighting as a case of reciprocal brutality. Prominent among the issues at stake in the war in Gaza is the scope of civilian fatalities. This is only natural. Whatever …
A misleading story After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, many political scientists and pundits came forth with a simple explanation. Trump had won, they said, because of white Americans’ racial resentment. These analysts looked at surveys and argued that the voters who had allowed Trump to win were distinguished not by social class, …
ABSTRACTContemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes. We offer an analytical framework to explain why. Contrary toheated political rhetoric, election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to targetsmall shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect …
A few years ago, a troubling phenomenon began to spread in U.S. education: Students were not showing up to school. This was not particularly surprising. Schools had shut down in the spring of 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and some did not fully reopen until fall 2021. Quarantines for Covid symptoms and exposures …
Peer pressure The political scientists Chryl Laird and Ismail White used a creative strategy several years ago to study the voting patterns of Black Americans. Laird and White took advantage of the fact that some surveys are conducted through in-person interviews — and keep track of the interviewer’s race — while other surveys are done online. In …
March 11, 2020 Four years ago today, society began to shut down. Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid — or “the coronavirus,” then the more popular term — to be a global pandemic. Stocks plummeted in the afternoon. In the span of a single hour that night, President …
Though the timing and details of the COVID-19 pandemic caught governhough the timing and details of the COVID-19 pandemic caught governments around the world by surprise, the possibility of a new pathogenemerging to cause a deadly pandemic had been long understood by expertsin public health preparedness. Even in the months prior to the outbreak of …
The evident failure of the United States to deter Iranis manifest in the concurrent aggressions of its threeTwelver Shia militias in Lebanon (Hezllah), Syria, andIraq, which have wounded many American troops andkilled three; the aggression of the Fiver Shia Houthimilitia of Yemen that has attacked U.S. as well as otherships in the Red Sea with …
NATO celebrates the 75th anniversary of its founding on 4 April 1949. Much of the coverage of this momentous occasion will focus on the strength of NATO’s famous Article 5 guarantee that “an armed attack against one [NATO ally] … shall be considered an attack against them all.” Faith in this bedrock principle of the …
Finn: The country needs some shared understanding of what it means to be an American and what’s changed — and hasn’t — over these several centuries. How about a ceasefire in the civics wars? Possibly even a peace treaty? This could turn out to be easier to achieve than pausing the conflict in Gaza (or …