It took her seven years, but Kalpana (name changed) felt she was finally close to her dream of getting an undergraduate degree and working for the Indian government. She had given up college in the past due to family problems, but a few years ago re-enrolled in an undergraduate program. Her studies were going well… more
8/31/2020, Underreported: Hosted by Nicholas Lemann
In 2008, the U.S. Treasury put Fannie and Freddie into a life-support state known as “conservatorship” to prevent their failure—and worldwide economic chaos. The two companies, which were always controversial, have become a battleground. Today, Fannie and Freddie are profitable again but still in conservatorship. Their profits are being redirected toward reducing the federal deficit,… more
The coronavirus has profoundly affected protest movements by simultaneously empowering governments and activists. In doing so, it has set up a race between protestors and governments to win the social media war—a drama that is playing out in different ways across the world. Although messy and nonuniform, social movements under COVID-19 fall into two broad… more
When Singapore became the country with the highest number of COVID-19 infections outside China in February, the small city-state quickly earned praise from Harvard epidemiologists and the WHO as the “gold standard” for its “near-perfection detection” of the virus, and it seemed that all was achieved without going into extreme lockdown. By late March, as… more
On April 11, Geumsun Oh put on a face mask and plastic gloves, and left her home for the first time in two months. The 92-year-old Seoul resident had reason to be cautious. She was diabetic, suffered from high blood pressure, and, at that point, the coronavirus had already claimed 211 lives in South Korea.… more
4/20/2020, UNDERREPORTED With Nicholas Lemann Podcast
The second part of our interview with Krithika Varagur. In her new book, "The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project," Varagur traverses three continents to tell the story of the Saudi religious campaign from Indonesia, Nigeria, and Kosovo. She finds Saudi money in all kinds of places, from universities to political parties to extremist… more
The early reviews are in for Columbia Global Reports' twentieth book, David Kaye's Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet. We are delighted to read Kirkus Reviews' enthusiastic appraisal of the work in our first-ever starred review from the publication: Policing the internet is necessary, but which entity shall we entrust with doing… more
"CBS Evening News" anchor Jeff Glor talks to the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. Should the U.S. negotiate for the release of American hostages? Joel Simon has worked for decades to try to bring dozens of reporters back home to America, but it's an official policy of the United States to never make… more
Law professor and political activist Tim Wu is one of the country’s leading public intellectuals and is here to argue that the time has come to restore the primacy of antitrust. In his latest book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, Wu crisply lays out the history of antitrust law, showing how… more
Why Has Nationalism Come Roaring Back? Two years ago, on the eve of the 2016 election, Columbia Global Reports published John Judis’ The Populist Explosion, which predicted a worldwide wave of populist sentiment, on the left and the right, in reaction to the disruptions caused by globalization. The Populist Explosion has become one of the standard places people… more
