Is the world better off with cell phones? What about the Internet? These might seem like obvious questions. Sure, the rise of cell phones can be annoying when other people’s conversations disturb our peace and quiet, and the rise of the internet makes it harder for us to shelter our […]

Television shows like Friends and Seinfeld may have inadvertently been among the best things to have happened to the environment over the last few decades. These shows are not about environmental issues. They don’t cause people to want to be environmentalists – at least not directly. Instead, these American sitcoms, […]

In January 2012, Google, Wikipedia and Flickr temporarily closed their websites in protest of two proposed U.S. Congressional bills: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The legislation, if enacted, would have undermined online freedom of speech, and would have allowed governments and corporations to […]

Recent academic work has delivered a blow to the neoconservative agenda. Specifically, leading academics argue that past CIA interventions make countries less democratic, primarily benefiting U.S. corporations at the developing world’s expense. The results cast doubt on aggressive foreign policy’s ability to promote democracy abroad. Economists and political scientists have […]

“Don´t cry for me Argentina, the truth is I never left you,” sings Madonna in Evita, an award-winning film that tells the story of the first female president of Latin America, María Eva Duarte. Over recent decades, Bolivian Lidia Gueiler de Guevara, Nicaraguan Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, Panamanians Mireya Moscoso […]