U.S.
In 2008, the Democratic Party mopped the floor with Republicans, riding a blue wave to the presidency, an expansive House majority, and even a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate. And yet, like a phoenix from the ashes, the Republican Party went on to secure more than 60 gains in the House of Representatives, net seven Senate seats, and flip 12 governorships away from Democrats just two years la...
U.S.
The United States has more mass shootings than any other country in the world, with 408 mass shootings in 2025 alone [1]. In 2025, 4,458 children and teenagers were shot, 1,256 of whom lost their lives. Firearms are the leading cause of death for Americans under 18 [2]. Americans are accustomed to mass shootings, while the rest of the world looks on in disbelief. One result of these frequent...
U.S.
“It is better to be feared than to be loved.” Many know Machiavelli’s infamous words, but in the year 2025, as the National Guard rampages through public protests and ICE agents patrol neighborhoods, it seems as though these words are more present than ever. While fear has held a place in politics for centuries, its role in contemporary American politics is more than just a conve...
U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 has not been sufficient to protect disability rights. Although the ADA prohibits discrimination based on disability, institutions frequently fail to uphold these protections [1]. For instance, only 17 percent of polling locations adhered to accessibility standards in the 2016 elections [2]. Additionally, Arkansas’s prisons are currently enter...
U.S.
As of 2025, America's outstanding student loan debt stands at $1.65 trillion [1]. It has surpassed credit debt to become the largest share of consumer debt after mortgages [2]. One in six adult Americans holds student loan debt with an average balance of $39,000 [3]. The federal student loan program has ballooned far past its modest intention to provide access to higher education and now threa...
.jpg)
World
In 2024, hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets to protest a meeting by far-right activists, in which they openly discussed a plan to deport migrants from Germany. Many of those who attended the meeting were members of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland—“Alternative for Germany,” or AfD—, thus the protest took on an explicitly anti-AfD...
World
Through the deployment of religious symbolism and traditional rhetoric, the Russian state has not only institutionalized ideological conformity but has militarized spiritual authority in contemporary war efforts. The close collaboration between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church (R.O.C.) has perpetuated these mechanisms of power into the 21st century, shaping Russia’s political, cul...
World
Anne Applebaum, a well-known writer for The Atlantic, characterized the war in Sudan as a nihilistic civil war between two power-hungry generals left to wreak havoc in the absence of a liberal order [1]. Concurrently, advocates have criticized the all-too-common attitudes that it is “just what happens in Africa”, a tragedy for which most outsiders have too much “compassion fatigu...
World
Introduction
In many introductory political science classes, students are taught the concept of the prisoner’s dilemma. Two prisoners are interrogated separately, with the option either to accuse the other or stay silent. If both remain silent, they both receive a short sentence. If both talk, they both receive a medium sentence. Yet if only one talks, they go free, while the accused pris...
World
On October 20, 2025, many UCLA students woke up to realize that Canvas, the software for accessing and submitting homework, was offline. This was caused by an outage of Amazon Web Services, the largest of the three main cloud computing companies. The outage temporarily disabled many of the websites and platforms hosted on the cloud. This highlights an issue with the internet as a whole: an overrel...