schoolinfosystem.org
Betsy Morris and Tawnell D. Hobbs: The uncertainty is feeding alarm among some parents already worried about the amount of time their children spend attached to digital devices. Some believe technology is not doing much to help their kids learn, setting up a clash with tech advocates who say technology is the future of education. […]
Tiffany May and Amy Qin: HONG KONG — They are sitting in orderly rows, wearing neatly pressed uniforms. But in this class, as they debate the merits of democracy and civil rights, Hong Kong high school students are prompting Beijing to worry that they are increasingly out of control. The mandatory civics course known here […]
Lauren James: WWalls sprayed with slogans, stencils and scenes don’t just affect the aesthetic value of a city – they can also inspire cultural shifts. Just as the original “Lennon Wall” sprang up in Prague in the 1980s, as citizens behind the iron curtain voiced their dissent through art, Hong Kong now has its own […]
John Gramlach: Americans believe trust has declined in their country, whether it involves their fellow citizens’ faith in each other or their confidence in the federal government, according to a wide-ranging new Pew Research Center survey. And adults ages 18 to 29 stand out for their comparatively low levels of trust in a number of […]
Jasmine Lane: School is a place of preparation, a place where you learn the codes of the mainstream not necessarily because the mainstream is better, as I believed, but because if you want to make significant changes to any systems, you have to be able to first get in by the gatekeepers’ standards. We can […]
Noah Rathman: Thirty years ago, defying Mao Zedong’s invasive gaze, pro-democracy demonstrators armed with foam and paper-mâché cobbled together an icon. Combining the aesthetics of Soviet statuary with Western classicism, the 33-foot Goddess of Democracy was not intended to evoke the Statue of Liberty. Indeed, the student protesters who designed it were self-conscious about the […]
Neal McCluskey: It’s nearing back-to-school time, and that means in addition to lots of yellow buses, we’ll be seeing the annual spate of education polls. The first one just came out—the 2019 Phi Delta Kappa poll—and it furnishes some interesting information illustrating why it’s so hard for public schools to inculcate values. Short answer: we […]
Mckenna Kohlenberg: My concern stems from recent Board actions that I find concerning enough to warrant this stern message. As local press has noted (here too), the Board’s recent activities suggest a troublesome pattern of skirting, if not outright violating, open meetings and public records laws. Wisconsin law requires school boards, like other local public […]
Yael Grauer: Last year, West Virginia did something no other U.S. state had done in a federal election before: It allowed overseas voters the option to cast absentee ballots for the midterm election via a blockchain-enabled mobile app. According to Voatz, the company West Virginia worked with, 144 individuals from 31 countries successfully submitted ballots […]
Sophie: The UK authorities made illegal copies of the #Schengen Information System, incl photos & fingerprints of EU citizens and gave access to US companies
Citizen Stewart: Ravitch, by contrast, has fallen irreparably into polemics so much that her daily blogs put her in league with Alex Jones’ made-for-YouTube Info Wars. Along those lines, her blog-fart today ties “the charter industry” to the “infamous pedophile and “super-rich” Jeffrey Epstein. “In 2013, his foundation issued a press release announcing that he […]
David French: Here’s perhaps the most astounding fact: The officer fired when the boy was only 18 inches away. What an astonishingly reckless and unreasonable use of a firearm. So the boy’s family sued. They lost. The reason? An unjust doctrine called “qualified immunity.” Here’s the essential legal background. Since 1871, federal law has allowed […]
Xinhua: The Communist Party of China Central Committee and State Council Monday published a new guideline for advancing education reform and improving the quality of compulsory education. The guideline aims to develop an education system that will foster citizens with an all-round moral, intellectual, physical and aesthetic grounding, in addition to a hard-working spirit, according […]
Dave Zirin: Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has […]
Frederick Hess and Grant Addison: Obstacles to employment are a problem. They impede social mobility, disproportionately harm society’s most vulnerable citizens, and hinder the larger economy. That is why efforts to remove such barriers have become a bipartisan cause. It’s why more than two dozen states now ban public employers (and sometimes even private ones) […]
Frederick Hess: Obstacles to employment are a problem. They impede social mobility, disproportionately harm society’s most vulnerable citizens, and hinder the larger economy. That is why efforts to remove such barriers have become a bipartisan cause. It’s why more than two dozen states now ban public employers (and sometimes even private ones) from inquiring about […]
NEGASSI TESFAMICHAEL: During the 1995-96 school year, a pilot program placed police officers at West and La Follette for most of each school day. At West, the idea to bring officers into schools — instead of having detectives assigned to schools on an as-needed basis — came after a group of students in student government […]
LOUISE S. ROBBINS, via a kind reader: As the Madison School District decides which organizations and partners to fund, it should embrace — and support — the Simpson Street Free Press. The Simpson Street student newspaper, unlike some of the district’s attempts to bridge the achievement gap between students of color and white students, has […]
Jonathan Merritt: Three blocks from my Brooklyn apartment, a large brick structure stretches toward heaven. Tourists recognize it as a church—the building’s bell tower and stained-glass windows give it away—but worshippers haven’t gathered here in years. The 19th-century building was once known as St. Vincent De Paul Church and housed a vibrant congregation for more […]
Victor Davis Hanson: Three, unelected bureaucrats multiplied and vastly increased their power over private citizens. The targeted middle classes lacked the resources to fight back against the royal armies of tenured regulators, planners, auditors, inspectors and adjustors who could not be fired and were never accountable. Four, the new global media reached billions and indoctrinated […]
Bloomberg: “I’m nervous, worried, even saddened by the unnecessary conflict,” said Liu Yuanli, founding director of the Harvard School of Public Health’s China Initiative and now serves as dean of Peking Union Medical College’s School of Public Health in Beijing. “The restrictions on Chinese scholars and students are irrational and go against the very core […]
Cutizens against government waste: Even in the “Drain the Swamp” era, the national debt of the United States first exceeded $21 trillion in 2018 and is poised to rise substantially in the coming years. To help chart a path out of this calamitous hole, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) is releasing Prime Cuts 2018, a […]
Bloomberg: Several Chinese graduate students and academics told Bloomberg News in recent weeks that they found the U.S. academic and job environment increasingly unfriendly. Emory University dismissed two Chinese-American professors on May 16, and China’s Education Ministry issued a warning Monday on the risks of studying in the U.S. as student visa rejections soar. “I’m […]
Ryan Mac: Princeton University and the US’s largest public pension plan are among a number of stateside organizations funding technology behind the Chinese government’s unprecedented surveillance of some 11 million people of Muslim ethnic minorities. Since 2017, Chinese authorities have detained more than a million Uighur Muslims and other ethnic minorities in political reeducation camps […]
Glenn Greenwald: The argument offered by both the Trump administration and by some members of the self-styled “resistance” to Trump is, ironically, the same: that Assange isn’t a journalist at all and thus deserves no free press protections. But this claim overlooks the indictment’s real danger and, worse, displays a wholesale ignorance of the First […]
Trent England: Now a California millionaire named John Koza is trying to undo this system. He is leading and funding the National Popular Vote campaign. Their plan is to get state governments to ignore how their own citizens vote in presidential elections and instead get them to cast their electoral votes based on the national […]
Ryan Williams: Google wasn’t represented at a Senate hearing last month on political censorship. But it assured lawmakers in a written statement that “our products serve users of all viewpoints and remain politically neutral” while acknowledging that “sometimes our content moderation systems do make mistakes.” This week my organization was hit by one such “mistake.” […]
Corey DeAngelis: Using Evers’ own publicly available Accountability Report Card data from the 2017-18 school year, I find that private schools participating in choice programs and independent charter schools tend to offer the citizens of Wisconsin more “bang for the buck” than district-run public schools. Specifically, private schools deliver 2.27 more Accountability Report Card points […]
Tom Nichols: When did college students get it into their head that they should be running the university? The distressing trend of students somehow thinking that they’re the teachers began in earnest in the 1960s, a time when at least some of the grievances of campus protesters—from racism and sexism to the possibility of being […]
Victor Davis Hanson: The harshest critics of the West in general and the United States in particular are the best arguments for it. Take the latest iconic critic, 29-year-old Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. She has a predictable list of complaints against America, past and present. Yet fortunately for her, her paternal grandparents and mother had experienced firsthand […]
US Congress Joint Economic Committee: Over the past 50 years, the United States has experienced major shifts in geographic mobility patterns among its highly-educated citizens. Some states today are keeping and receiving a greater share of these adults than they used to, while many others are both hemorrhaging their homegrown talent and failing to attract […]
David Blaska: Would that there have been a few more courageous citizens. These names come to mind for lack of courage: Dave Cieslewicz. The former mayor has condemned identity politics on his Isthmus column; he could have spoken up. The Madison police union considered endorsing Blaska because he is the only candidate on the local […]
Wisconsin Watch: Wisconsin’s largest newspaper and a small Madison paper produced mostly by teens are among the honorees of the 2019 Openness Awards, or Opees, bestowed annually by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, along with awards to a Wausau-based citizens environmental group and a state senator who is seeking to end his colleagues’ ability […]
Negassi Tesfamichael: However, the group said support dipped once additional information on current spending levels and other information about the budget was included. The poll found only a third of respondents supported Evers’ proposal to freeze the growth of private school vouchers and independent charter schools. The poll found a majority of support for public […]
Gene Healy: Standing on the Shoulders of Tyrants Donald Trump’s rhetoric is breathtakingly authoritarian, but so far he’s done less than his predecessors to expand executive power. Gene Healy from the May 2019 issue – view article in the Digital Edition “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself,” President Donald Trump announced via Twitter […]
Cass Sunstein: Reducing these burdens can have an enormous impact on people’s lives. For free school meals, the Department of Agriculture has adopted a “direct certification” program, which means that if the locality or the school district has enough information to know that children are eligible, they are automatically enrolled. In recent years, more than […]
Lucian Armasu: The Electronic Privacy Information Center (“EPIC”), a civil liberties group based in Washington D.C., filed an amicus brief in the United States vs. Wilson case concerning Google scanning billions of users’ files for unlawful content and then sending that information to law enforcement agencies. Bypassing the Fourth Amendment EPIC alleges that law enforcement […]
Elections offer an opportunity to chat with and see new and old friends, consider signs, advertising and campaign rhetoric. It’s also an opportunity to exercise our citizenship. Happy Tuesday. Notes and links on the 2019 Madison School Board election, here.
Katrina Schwartz: Many students are not good at evaluating the credibility of what they see and read online according to a now-famous Stanford study that was released just after the 2016 election. And while it’s true that 82 percent of middle schoolers couldn’t tell the difference between a native advertisement and a news article, neither […]
Adriana Cohen: For far too long colleges and universities have been stifling free speech on campus, contrary to the notion that higher education is supposed to promote a free flow of ideas. Thanks to political correctness spreading like a noxious weed from one liberal campus to the next, free speech has been under assault. The […]
Lawrence Bacow: Turning to the role and values of higher education, Bacow then drew upon his Harvard installation address, last October, emphasizing that universities are venues for pursuing the hard work of finding the truth, by airing the most diverse opinions and insisting on excellence and opportunity. Lest anyone doubt that those principles have practical […]
Orange County Register We continue to encourage our kids to go to awful colleges and load up on stifling student loan debt, resulting in unfulfilled dreams, when many of these kids need to just get a job or learn a trade. Access to higher education is important for those who truly want to attend, but […]
Tunku Varadarajan: ‘The comic thing about this drama is that no one is even pretending there is a real emergency.” So says Neeraj Kaushal, 57, a professor of social policy at Columbia who has just published a bracing book on U.S. immigration policy. Her thesis: Far from presenting an emergency, as President Trump contends, America’s […]
Lily Kuo: China blocked 23 million “discredited” travellers from buying plane or train tickets last year as part of the country’s controversial “social credit” system aimed at improving the behaviour of citizens. According to the National Public Credit Information Centre’s 2018 report, 17.5 million people were banned from buying flights and 5.5 million barred from […]
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: One of Emmanuel Macron’s most endearing qualities is his unshakable faith in his own power to convince anyone of the truth of his beliefs. Last November, the youngest-ever president of France tried to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1918 armistice by touring small French towns situated on the former front line to […]
Negassi Tesfamichael: In an open letter to the community released Thursday morning, Madison School District Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham acknowledged that the district “cannot be silent” on issues of racial justice. The letter comes eight days after media reports surfaced regarding an alleged assault at Whitehorse Middle School. In that incident, which is still being investigated […]
Rod Rosenstein: Good afternoon. I am grateful to the Center for Strategic and International Studies for hosting this discussion about the rule of law. A prosperous and safe society needs to vest people with the power to govern – the ability to set enforceable rules, punish violations, and act on behalf of the people. The […]
He Huifeng: Millions of Chinese individuals and businesses have been labelled as untrustworthy on an official blacklist banning them from any number of activities, including accessing financial markets or travelling by air or train, as the use of the government’s social credit system accelerates. The annual blacklist is part of a broader effort to boost […]
Daniel Immerwahr: Contrary to popular memory, the event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on US and British holdings throughout the Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the US territories of Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island and Wake Island. They also attacked the British colonies of […]
Lorraine Boissoneault: The story began with a warning: “I have attempted to compose a book that shall neither be too abstruse for the gay, nor too amusive for the learned,” the author wrote. “Possibly in attempting to find a middle way which would accommodate philosophy of every class, I have chosen one that will not […]
Philip Ball: The Romans had presumed that the Alps created a secure natural barrier against invasion of their homeland. They hadn’t reckoned with Hannibal’s boldness. In December he smashed apart the Roman forces in the north, assisted by his awesome elephants, the tanks of classical warfare. Many of the animals died of cold or disease […]
Dell Cameron: A misconfigured online database has exposed new details of China’s tyrannical surveillance apparatus, which the country’s government has used to further suppress one of its most persecuted populations. In the past year, there’s been an uptick of reporting on China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. In August, for instance, Business Insider detailed how the […]
Emily Esfahani Smith: The new translation of Characters, by the philosopher Theophrastus (Aristotle’s favorite student), presents 30 brief vignettes of vulgarians, dullards, and yokels who populated the streets of ancient Athens—and who continue to make their presence known in ours. The rascals he profiles—from “The Newshound” and “The Arrogant Man” to “The Social Climber” and […]
Dave Bangert: Purdue President Mitch Daniels, bemoaning the civics literacy of American university students, including those on the West Lafayette campus, on Monday pushed faculty to help come up with a test to guarantee students who graduate can at least pass the same test given to newly naturalized citizens. “It’s hardly a new issue,” Daniels […]
Citizen Stewart: Are we more harmed by black paint on a white face, or the fact that black rates of high school dropouts is double that of whites and college completion for LatinX and black students lags far behind whites? You will ask why must you choose? Both are bad. These simple binaries aren’t instructive […]
Caroline Goldstein: The Beijing-born artist Ai Weiwei has been such an outspoken critic of China’s human rights violations that he landed in government custody back in 2011 and endured years of surveillance afterward. But now he’s turning his critical eye toward the West, as tensions escalate between the US, Canada, and China. In an extensive […]
Citizen Stewart: I got an email from an @AP reporter. The subject: “black charter schools debate.” It said: “This is Sally Ho, national education reporter with the Associated Press. I am working on a story about the black charter school debate in light of increasing enrollment in the community.” When we talked Ho framed the […]
John Garnaut: They are all engineers of ideological conformity and cogs in the revolutionary machine. Among the many things that China’s modern leaders did – including overseeing the greatest burst of market liberalisation and poverty alleviation the world has ever seen – those who won the internal political battles have retained the totalitarian aspiration of […]
Citizen Stewart: Childhood ain’t what it used to be. Our fluorescent colored, artificial fruit scented, bubble-wrapped perversion today of the growing years of children may seem like evolution but in truth, it’s a regression. No, I’m not casting nostalgia as fact and pandering to your generation X (or boomer) illusion of your rugged past captured […]
Abdi Latif Dahir: Kenya will teach Mandarin in classrooms in a bid to improve job competitiveness and facilitate better trade and connection with China. The country’s curriculum development institute (KICD) has said the design and scope of the mandarin syllabus have been completed and will be rolled in out in 2020. Primary school pupils from […]
Russell Berman and Peter Thiel : The current historical moment appears to be marked by opposition to globalization, which has emerged in many countries in the vanous forms of populism, restrictive trade policies, attacks on “neo-liberalism,” protest parties and localism. These positions are sometimes accompanied by appeals to national interests and cultural traditions. This new […]
Max Rivlin-Nadler: These details and others were revealed in more than 1,000 pages of previously unseen Customs and Border Protection training documents, which were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union after a four-year legal battle and shared exclusively with The Intercept. The documents were finally released to the ACLU’s Border Litigation Project this past […]
Max Planck: The President and scientific council members of the Max Planck Society (MPS), one of the world’s largest research performing organizations, counting 14,000 scientists who publish 12K new research articles a year—around 1500 of which in Elsevier journals, have mandated the Max Planck Digital Library to discontinue their Elsevier subscription when the current agreement […]
Merrilee Pickett: I attended a Madison City Council police oversight committee meeting and was surprised that I was one of only a handful of citizens in attendance. The others in attendance were the usual people who are quoted in the local media, and who evidently have great influence over members of the City Council. Was […]
Alex: “The bipartisan passage of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act is a significant step toward a more efficient, more effective government that uses evidence and data to improve results for the American people,” said Michele Jolin, CEO and co-founder of Results for America, in a statement. “We commend Speaker Ryan, Senator Murray and their […]
Citizen Stewart: Less than 1% black proficiency (as opposed to a startling 9% for the state overall)? Man, y’all better keep the eye on the prize and put the outrage where it is supposed to be. Student achievement this bad paints a picture of the future none of us want. Yes, I think it’s terrible […]
Jeff Francis: What this means is that the government decided to convert the pension payments into the Petro cryptocurrency. This was done without any prior notice or the consent of the people receiving the pensions. Senior citizens who get a pension now have to navigate through the carnet de la patria system and find the […]
Citizen Stewart: To be specific, one of my sons is a daily witness to minor and major forms of bullying between races and classes of students in his new school. Some of it amounts to the kids-will-be-kids variety of abuse like relentlessly making fun of ears or nose sizes or other immutable characteristics. Other times […]
Gary L. Kriewald: It appears we are headed toward a School Board election that promises something new: a candidate whose voice will do more than add sound and fury to the liberal echo chamber that is Madison politics. David Blaska has the background, experience and most importantly the courage to expose the abuses and neglect […]
Sergio Chapa: “I will be honest with you, it troubles me that the American people seem to want to know so little about issues, that they are satisfied with a 128 characters,” Tillerson told Schieffer. Tillerson voiced those concerns even further in his conversation. “I don’t want that to come across as a criticism of […]
Vermont Agency of Education: The State Board of Education’s Final Report of Decisions and Order on Statewide School District Mergers is a requirement of Act 46. It is the conclusion of a multiyear process to create more sustainable and efficient school governance structures and improve access to quality PreK-12 education for all Vermont students. Creating […]
Rodney Brooks: The answer, in a word, is experience. The difference between the possible and the practical can only be discovered by trying things out. Therefore, even though the physics suggests that a thing will work, if it has not even been demonstrated in the lab you can consider that thing to be a long […]
Nick Summers: Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet division focused on smart cities, is caught in a battle over information privacy. The team has lost its lead expert and consultant, Ann Cavoukian, over a proposed data trust that would approve and manage the collection of information inside Quayside, a conceptual smart neighborhood in Toronto. Cavoukian, the former […]
Andrew Ferguson: Among the 50 states, Illinois’s income tax rate is only middling, ranking from 25th to 36th depending on who’s doing the counting, but overall its total average tax burden, according to the economic research firm WalletHub, is the worst in the country. A home-owning family in Illinois earning the U.S. median income of […]
Nathan Robinson: There are so many bad opinions crammed into this single Wall Street Journal op-ed by Yale professor David Gelertner that I cannot hope to address them within the finite period of a human lifespan. Primarily, Gelertner argues that hatred of Donald Trump is hatred of America. Here is a large chunk of the […]
Rita Koganzon: But all this takes place in the context of inward-looking institutions, which engage with the outside world for the sake of scholarship, but are not open to its input about how they should be run. The comparison to the Venetian Republic is not so far off, for it is a kind of late-medieval […]
Diane Ravitch via Will Fitzhugh: This is an exciting time for history education. States across the nation are strengthening their history curricula and expecting youngsters to learn more American and world history. Even the vitriolic controversy over the national history standards serves to remind us that people care passionately about history. Not only is there […]
Will Fitzhugh: The extra-large ubiquitous Literacy Community is under siege from universal dissatisfaction with the Writing skills of both students and graduates, and this is a complaint of very long standing. The Community response is to request more money and time to spend on sentence structure, paragraphing, voice, tone, and other mechanical Writing paraphernalia. It […]
Ryan Gallagher and Lee Fang: According to three sources familiar with the incident, Google leadership discovered the memo and were furious that secret details about the China censorship were being passed between employees who were not supposed to have any knowledge about it. Subsequently, Google human resources personnel emailed employees who were believed to have […]
Xu Zhiyong: Xu Zhiyong was released from prison on July 16 after serving four years for his role in the New Citizens Movement. Xu is a seminal figure in China’s rights defense movement with the founding of “Gongmeng” (公盟) in 2003, a NGO providing legal assistance to victims of social injustice. It was a training […]
Damien Ma and Neil Thomas: That problem was the CCP itself. Most Chinese were well aware that the Party had drifted toward crony capitalism, as corruption swelled within its rank-and-file. The CCP brand reached its nadir when the Bo Xilai crisis—in which the populist and ambitious leader of Chongqing was purged and jailed after his […]
Tanner Greer: There is a crisis in Xinjiang. The details are murky. The Communist Party of China has little incentive to reveal the inner workings of the vast system of surveillance and terror it has built to control the 12 million Uighur and Kazakh citizens of China’s westernmost region. From the party’s perspective, the further […]
Amanda Ripley: Before the automobile, before the Statue of Liberty, before the vast majority of contemporary colleges existed, the rising cost of higher education was shocking the American conscience: “Gentlemen have to pay for their sons in one year more than they spent themselves in the whole four years of their course,” The New York […]
Associated Press: China is eliminating a trio of agencies responsible for enforcing family planning policies in a further sign the government may be planning to scrap long-standing limits on the number of children its citizens can have. The move was part of a reorganization of the National Health Commission announced Monday that creates a new […]
Citizen Stewart: When we talk dollars and cents in public education, there are a few truisms: teachers are paid too little, schools are underfunded, private and charter schools “drain” funds from traditional districts, and when schools can’t make ends meet it is the result of things done to them and never stuff they do. The […]
David Gelernter: Welcome to Yale. Please disregard what you’ve been told so far, and follow these instructions. 1. Understand that you’re here to learn how to be good citizens of the United States. Many of you come from Japan or Ghana or France, and we’re glad to have you. But Yale can’t teach you to […]
: Ms. Khan was born in London to Pakistani parents who emigrated to the United States when she was 11. She is now 29, an Amazon critic whose Amazon account is largely inactive, newly married to a Texas doctor who uses his Amazon Prime account all the time. Ms. Khan was supposed to move this […]
Peter McPherson and Philip Trostel: If students across the country judged the value of college by headlines alone, they would come away with a bleak view of higher education. Rising costs. Diminishing value. Questionable career prospects. It’s a small miracle students enroll in college at all. Yet despite the widespread cynicism about higher education, more […]
Bruce Vail: Public school teachers in Los Angeles voted overwhelmingly in late August to authorize a strike over stalled contract negotiations, but the issues really energizing the union membership go far beyond a new contract. Instead, say union leaders and rank-and-file members, the teachers are growing increasingly alarmed at a small clique of billionaires that […]
Chen Guangcheng: The recent news that Google is working on a search engine for China’s highly censored Internet reminded me of a Chinese saying: “to have your spine pointed at.” Back home in China, if someone who has done something immoral or unethical is seen walking down the street, others might point at the person’s […]
Christina Larson: In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed […]
Maria Repnikova: In the summer of 2008, when I interviewed for an internship at Google London headquarters, one of the questions was whether I would have supported Google’s entry into the Chinese market in 2006. This was two years prior to Google’s official and dramatic exit from China on account of ethical considerations. My answer […]
What’s on Weibo: A recent article, in which two Chinese academics propose the implementation of some sort of ‘tax’ for people under 40 who have no second child, has sparked outrage on social media. “The same woman who had to undergo a forced abortion before, is now pressured to get pregnant,” some say. A controversial […]
Adam Segal: For almost five decades, the United States has guided the growth of the Internet. From its origins as a small Pentagon program to its status as a global platform that connects more than half of the world’s population and tens of billions of devices, the Internet has long been an American project. Yet […]
Joe Seyton: So it came as no surprise that Paul lauded Trump for taking away Brennan’s security clearance. “I urged the President to do this. I filibustered Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA in 2013, and his behavior in government and out of it demonstrate why he should not be allowed near classified information,” Paul […]
Citizen Stewart: I mention that routine because last week I felt like a victim of Sandburg’s non-wrath when Twitter’s anti-school reform voices suggested school reformers were wearing facial egg because “King” LeBron James’ celebrated new school opened in Akron, Ohio as a “traditional” public school rather than a charter. Frankly, I didn’t get the joke. […]
Citizen Stewart: “I shared it, and I’m not sorry I did…And I meant it because it shows hypocrisy in our country. Some people can get away with it and some people can’t. It was not racist…It had nothing to do with color. It had nothing to do with race…I’ve seen all kinds of people say […]
Ransom: An increasing number of countries are passing laws that facilitate the mass surveillance of Internet traffic. In response, governments and citizens are increasingly paying attention to the countries that their Internet traffic traverses. In some cases, countries are taking extreme steps, such as building new Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), which allow networks to interconnect […]
Anna Welch and Mckenna Kohlenberg: Local watchdogs and litigators say a City of Madison initiative and its multiple committees should provide the public with greater transparency. In a unanimous 2017 decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that committees created by local governmental bodies in Wisconsin are themselves governmental bodies subject to the state’s open meetings […]
Gideon Rachman: The west’s metropolitan elites have not yet turned against democracy. But some may harbour doubts. In Britain, many ardent Remainers are eager to overturn Britain’s vote to leave the EU. In the US, as the political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Foa point out, “the trend toward openness to nondemocratic alternatives is especially […]