Tag / United States

  • China’s Impossible Environmental Dilemma

    China’s pollution problem has eclipsed the allegations of its human rights violation. In recent years, the international community has harshly criticized China’s worsening pollution and overuse of fossil fuel. It is of no doubt that China’s enormous carbon footprint and industrial pollution heavily strain the environment. Yet, contrary to what many would believe, this current…

  • Memories From Micronesia: Driving Chuuk’s Ghost Fleet

    Imagine, if you will, traveling over twenty-four hours on three different planes from the Eastern United States, observing one sunset through your jetlag while somehow landing nearly two days later. Your final destination is a small airport, barely four rooms large. Dazed and discombobulated, you haul your bags from the baggage bin to the airport’s…

  • Venezuela: It’s Complicated

    When Juan Guaidó, the previously unknown leader of Venezuela’s legislature, invoked a constitutional clause to declare himself president, he set off an international firestorm. Almost immediately, American Vice President Mike Pence called sitting president Nicolás Maduro “a dictator with no legitimate claim to power” and affirmed American support for Guaidó. The last months have seen…

  • India’s Balancing Act

    India has one of the largest populations in the world. With a country this size, many aspects of development and growth in the economic sphere become complicated. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, India is the third largest carbon emitter, behind the United States and China. However, its per-capita emissions are far lower than…

  • Sorting, Polarization, And Gridlock: Policy Finds A Way

    [su_pullquote align=”right”]Legislative gridlock hasn’t stopped policy from being made, it’s now just being made outside of the normal channels in ways strain our constitutional and political system.[/su_pullquote]American government is broken. Supermajoritarian institutions in the United States, most notably the Senate, have created legislative gridlock and frustrated majorities. The Senate effectively requires 60 votes to pass…

  • What’s Next?

    One of my friends recently spoke to me about a family vacation to Russia. It happened a few years ago, or in her words, “before everything got weird.” She hit on something strange that is happening all around us. We are eighteen years into the 21st century, and there is a feeling that something undefinable…

  • Two Slaps, Rogernomics, and the Unpredictability of Historical Eras

    Through years of studying history books and essay, a person can come to view certain times in history through the lens of historical models. Perhaps they might see things through economic, moral, religious, or pragmatic lenses, but the lenses can be omnipresent in the thinking of many people. For instance, the end of the 1960s…