Social Policy
Foster Kids Need Their Own Advocates
There are a lot of people who attend court hearings for children in foster care: a judge, at least one parent, a lawyer representing each parent, a social worker, a lawyer representing the child welfare agency, other relatives, lawyers representing them, foster parents, and maybe some witnesses. There is only
Charles Murray's 'Facing Reality'—A Review
A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021) I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the New Republic
The Limitations of Black Conservative Thought
I. Can we choose to be optimistic or pessimistic about our future prospects? Can we choose our appetite for risk or our attitude toward conformity? Can we choose to bolster our self-esteem if we know that low self-esteem is causing us grief? Few of us believe we are entirely free
The Conservative Case for Cannabis Legalization
Last November, more than 75 percent of voters in Mississippi voted to legalize medical marijuana. By February, neighboring Alabama’s Senate had passed its own legalization bill for the third year in a row. Of Alabama’s four neighboring states, only Tennessee still treats all marijuana possession as a crime.
Debate and Disinformation: The Ugly Quarrel Over the UK Government’s Race Report
Howard Beckett is the deputy leader of the largest trade union in the UK, a frontrunner in the race to be its new leader, and the elected representative of the country’s unions on the executive of the UK Labour Party. On Friday, May 14th, the party suspended Beckett, and
Britain Needs a New Approach to Homelessness
Author note: Some of the names in this essay have been changed in accordance with the wishes of those interviewed. “Out here, everyone’s taking something,” a man named Karl explains as he scratches his chest and tries to gather up the copies of the Big Issue he’s just
The Question of Affirmative Action: An Interview with Glenn Loury
On November 2nd, 2020, Brown professor of Economics and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Glenn Loury joined Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel’s course “Justice” to discuss the ethics of affirmative action in American higher education. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation. MICHAEL SANDEL: I
The Problem with Kinship Care
Thanks, but no thanks. That was the message that aspiring foster parents got this fall when they sent inquiries offering their services to the New Jersey Department of Children and Families. According to an automatic email reply from Dawn Marlow, administrator for the Office of Resource Families, the state is
