REVIEWED BY SAM WINTER-LEVY This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  In April 1897, just months after Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State and launched the Zionist movement, a steamer containing twenty-one dreamers docks in Jaffa. They are a delegation of upper-class British Jews, and they have traveled to […]

BY TYLER S. THIGPEN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  The conversation that most haunted Marshall Chambers—former director of strategic initiatives for Barrow County Schools, a rural district in Georgia—happened in 2001 at one of the district’s high schools. Chambers, himself a graduate of Piedmont College in Demorest, […]

The Obergefell decision is a case that defines a generation. Marriage equality and LGBTQ rights are poised for a victory untenable for generations past. Just twelve years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Lawrence v. Texas and, as Justice Scalia argued in the dissent, doomed the “end of all morals legislation.” Lawrence […]

A global response will be the next test of civilization. BY DEREK PHAM In July 1979, Vice President Walter Mondale addressed 65 countries’ delegation heads at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. They had convened to discuss the Indochinese refugee crisis, which, earlier that year, had reached a breaking point. The then-five members of the […]

As civil strife and conflict have curtailed the reach of Baghdad and Damascus, a popular notion has emerged suggesting that the artificial colonial-era boundaries of Iraq and Syria are collapsing. The popular and mistaken refrain is that the Sykes-Picot Agreement is unravelling. This has engendered a number of misguided suggestions that the borders of the […]

How the politicization of the debate over public education hurts the teaching profession.  BY ALEX MEADOW Like many young adults, my twenties have featured family and friends asking me, “Alex, what are you up to now?” When I said that I was teaching, specifically at a school in a low-income neighborhood of Brooklyn, they would […]

BY MICHAEL ALTER Pope Francis was resolute in his opinion about the toll climate change is exacting on the planet when he released his encyclical on Thursday, June 18. Francis laid out his feelings quite bluntly: “the Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” While this […]

BY ALEXANDER W. SMITH Greece now stands at the edge of an economic and political precipice. By allowing the country to miss a €1.55 billion loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras demonstrated that he is no longer negotiating for Greece’s future. He is gambling with it. Greece’s effective default is […]

BY RUFINA PARK This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  On the surface, South Korea’s education system has notable merits. In the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, which measures the cognitive skills of fifteen-year-olds from sixty-five participating economies […]