Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Follow Us:
Top Stories

Podcast: Breaking down the 2024 election

Opinion

Republican elephant and Democratic donkey
serazetdinov/Getty Images

In the latest episode of The Bully Pulpit podcast, Democrats, Republicans and the media come together for a lively discussion breaking down the 2024 primary contests, the general election, and the presidential campaigns as hosts Bob Shrum and Mike Murphy continue their work toward political solutions that overcome partisan divides.

Shrum, a Democratic strategist, and Murphy, a Republican consultant, are co-directors of the USC Center for the Political Future. For this episode, they spoke to:


  • Douglas Brinkley, presidential historian and the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities at Rice University. Jane Coaston: “The Argument” Podcast Host, The New York Times; Spring 2024 Fellow, USC Center for the Political Future.
  • Ron Galperin, former controller and CFO for the City of Los Angeles.
  • Tim Miller: political consultant, writer for The Bulwark and campaign director for Jeb Bush’s 2016 White House run.

Each of the guests is a spring 2024 fellow at Center for the Political Future.

Remember to check out The Democracy Group Podcast Fellowship, where passionate individuals, especially college and high school students, can learn to launch their podcasts. Apply at democracygroup.org/fellowship. The fellowship is sponsored by the Bridge Alliance, which operates The Fulcrum.

You can explore more featured podcasts here.


Read More

medical expenses

"The promise of AI-powered tools—from personalized health monitoring to adaptive educational support—depends on access to quality data," writes Kevin Frazier.

Prapass Pulsub/Getty Images

Your Data, Your Choice: Why Americans Need the Right to Share

Outdated, albeit well-intentioned data privacy laws create the risk that many Americans will miss out on proven ways in which AI can improve their quality of life. Thanks to advances in AI, we possess incredible opportunities to use our personal information to aid the development of new tools that can lead to better health care, education, and economic advancement. Yet, HIPAA (the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act), FERPA (The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act), and a smattering of other state and federal laws complicate the ability of Americans to do just that.

The result is a system that claims to protect our privacy interests while actually denying us meaningful control over our data and, by extension, our well-being in the Digital Age.

Keep ReadingShow less
New Cybersecurity Rules for Healthcare? Understanding HHS’s HIPPA Proposal
Getty Images, Kmatta

New Cybersecurity Rules for Healthcare? Understanding HHS’s HIPPA Proposal

Background

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted in 1996 to protect sensitive health information from being disclosed without patients’ consent. Under this act, a patient’s privacy is safeguarded through the enforcement of strict standards on managing, transmitting, and storing health information.

Keep ReadingShow less
Two people looking at screens.

A case for optimism, risk-taking, and policy experimentation in the age of AI—and why pessimism threatens technological progress.

Getty Images, Andriy Onufriyenko

In Defense of AI Optimism

Society needs people to take risks. Entrepreneurs who bet on themselves create new jobs. Institutions that gamble with new processes find out best to integrate advances into modern life. Regulators who accept potential backlash by launching policy experiments give us a chance to devise laws that are based on evidence, not fear.

The need for risk taking is all the more important when society is presented with new technologies. When new tech arrives on the scene, defense of the status quo is the easier path--individually, institutionally, and societally. We are all predisposed to think that the calamities, ailments, and flaws we experience today--as bad as they may be--are preferable to the unknowns tied to tomorrow.

Keep ReadingShow less
Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China-Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work

President Donald Trump with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, left, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Trump Signs Defense Bill Prohibiting China-Based Engineers in Pentagon IT Work

President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon’s cloud computing systems.

The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the Defense Department’s computer systems for nearly a decade — a practice that left some of the country’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary.

Keep ReadingShow less