Many All Things Consider readers may have heard about an American soldier murdering 16 Afghanis last Sunday.  It was a horrific event, and presented in this way—a lone gunmen “inexplicably” massacres Afghan civilians—it seems difficult, if not impossible, to understand.  The American soldier, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, had a perfect military record, and it’s easy to write off his [...]

When reading through some articles for a class, I came across this very interesting article.  Lily Tsai addresses questions of how village officials distribute resources to their constituents and what resources they should provide.  This starts with providing the villagers the ability to monitor and ultimately improve the government’s performance.  I have read in the past [...]

As presented in this week’s issue of Consider, St. Patrick’s Day has sparked controversy concerning, both, its heritage and its exploitation of a traditional holiday. Well, now an elementary school in Massachusetts has presented a new complaint on the holiday tradition. Lisa Curtin, the principal of the Soule Road School in Wilbraham, Massachusetts decided to change [...]

Politicians say the darndest things. To the chagrin of comedians and pundits alike, few politicians make it through a campaign without saying something a little too brash, too anti-party line or simply too stupid. The long drawn out 20-debates-thus-far Republican primary campaign has given all the candidates plenty of time to say something worthy of the “gaffe” designation. There was [...]

“The sad fact is that minority students across America face much harsher discipline than non-minorities—even within the same school.” On March 2, Arne Duncan, our nation’s Secretary of Education described a fact that I think many of us can admit we’ve observed throughout our educated lives: color lines are everywhere we turn. In this modern day and [...]

Last week Consider brought you a variety of perspectives on the Kony 2012 campaign, and I wanted to highlight a related issue.  Saturday, Zeynep Tufekci wrote a post criticizing the concept of “slacktivism.”  The idea is this: critics often call social media campaigns like Kony 2012 “slacktivism,” suggesting that while people think they’ve made a difference by posting the Kony video to [...]