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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...
U.S.
President Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act into law on July 4, 2025, bringing about significant changes for many Americans [1]. One of the bill’s changes is a restructuring of federal borrowing and, consequently, repayment plans. One group in particular will be heavily affected by these changes: graduate students. The Education Data Initiative estimates that around 6...
U.S.
Since securing a conservative supermajority, the Supreme Court has been a beacon of controversy among the American people. From rolling back constitutionally-protected abortion to extending gun ownership rights, the decisions made in the land’s highest court have found their way into already polarized political discourse. Religion is no exception to this tr...
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...
World
Haiti - A Background
Haiti is a small country located in the Caribbean that shares an island with the Dominican Republic [1]. The capital of the country is Port-au-Prince. Haiti has a population of around 11.5 million. It is a semi-presidential republic in which the president acts as the country’s leader and the prime minister reports to the president [4]. However, Haiti has a deep histor...