Make the 2020s a Decade of Reform
21 min read Our two parties have each decided that the other is the country s biggest problem, which makes it difficult to take up any other problems through the tools and institutions available to our system of government.
The president who will take the oath of office in January 2021 will face some enormous governing challenges. Some are practical and obvious. Our country will be about a year into its confrontation with the global COVID-19 pandemic, and even if we are close to defeating the virus, both the public health and economic burdens of that confrontation will continue to require the president s extraordinary efforts and attention. Add to that the many policy challenges that predate the pandemic and may have been exacerbated by it-such as the socioeconomic prospects of the most vulnerable Americans, the government s fiscal imbalance, and an increasingly aggressive China-and it is not hard to see how our government s ch
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On Sept. 15, I interviewed Professor Kurek by telephone. The following transcript of our interview has been edited for style and length.
In the latter half of the 20th century, postmodernism abandoned unity and form in classical music, leading to a lot of compositional experimentation. What, if anything, was valuable about this period for your own musical journey?
Because it paralleled my journey back to the church, it was useful to see the other side. It was the antithesis that taught me what I didn’t want and made me search for a role model of something I did want to emulate. But you don’t want to be completely derivative, and go back to sounding like Mozart, because as an artist you want to find your own unique voice and not sound like a cheap copy. How to do that was a decades-long process for me.
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Credits: Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
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MIT’s Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences Sara Seager has been named an officer of the Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. Announced by the governor general of Canada last month, the nomination recognizes Seager “for her multidisciplinary research that has contributed to transforming the study of extrasolar planets into a full-fledged planetary science.”
Raised in Ontario, Canada, Seager holds dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship, as well as academic appointments in MIT’s departments of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Physics; and Aeronautics and Astronautics. She joins 114 new appointees to the Order of Canada, which include eight companions, 21 officers, one honorary member, and 84 members.
When Slate debuted a feature called “80 Over 80” more than a decade ago, we had two goals in mind: to poke fun at America’s obsession with early achievers (and the 30 Under 30 industrial complex) and point to the lasting influence of octogenarians on American society. In 2008, John Paul Stevens topped the inaugural list.
Logo by Morgan Saavedra-Friedman
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We brought the feature out of retirement this year because the power of the geriatric set in politics, in Hollywood, in culture writ large has never been clearer. America just elected its oldest president ever. Joe Biden, who bested one septuagenarian to win the primary and another to win the general election, will turn 80 before the midpoint of his term. The speaker of the House turned 80 this year. She’s joined by 11 other octogenarians in the House and seven in the Senate. Old money, in every sense, continues to have a disproportionate impact on the electoral process. But today’s most powerful 80-year-old