Weekly Writers Round-Up: Venezuelan Regime Change, Diversity in College, and Anti-Family Zoning

Each week, we’ll be featuring the work of the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. For more information on how the program can help launch your career in writing, see here.

Guns and Money: Maduro’s Hold on Power in Venezuela Is Tied to the Military by Erin Dunne (Fall 2018) in The Washington Examiner
When President Trump and international allies threw their support behind Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, they put international heft behind his government. The announcement, however, did little to uproot the source of President Nicolas Maduro’s domestic power: the military…

Measuring Economic Diversity At Colleges Is Harder Than You Think by Preston Cooper (Fall 2015) in Forbes
Economic diversity at America’s colleges and universities is a hot issue these days. The U.S. News College Rankings recently updated its methodology to measure how well institutions are serving low-income students. Six Democratic senators complained the changes didn’t go far enough and demanded the inclusion of an “exclusive metric assessing the access a college…provides to historically underrepresented students.” Other members of Congress have proposed bills to reward colleges for enrolling more low-income students, while some policy experts want to give tax relief to schools with more economic diversity…

How ‘Vasectomy Zoning’ Makes Childless Cities by Nolan Gray (Fall 2015) in CityLab
At the end of last year, the Philadelphia City Planning Commission weighed a proposed zoning change that would effectively ban new day-care centers—along with tire stores and car repair shops—in a large chunk of northwest Philadelphia. The bill swiftly encountered fierce resistance, and it now appears dead. But the effort to block additional child-care facilities with a zoning overlay hints at a broader relationship between city planning and the cost of raising children. A growing body of research indicates that restrictive zoning—which often blocks the services and housing that families need—may help to explain why family sizes are shrinking in the United States…

Banning Flavored Tobacco and Vaping Products Does More Harm than Good by Josh Smith (Summer 2015) in The Orange County Register
Doug Shaw, the owner of Sanctuary Tobacco for 26 years, expects to retire and close his shop if efforts to ban flavored tobacco in California are successful. Lawmakers in the state are considering a ban because of growth in the use of flavored tobacco products like e-cigarettes or vaporizers by teenagers. Yet Shaw sells none of those products. In fact, as he puts it in blunt terms, “My product [pipe tobacco] does not appeal to young people.” Despite being far from the intended target of banning cotton candy-flavored vaping juice, traditional tobacco shops across California nevertheless are caught in efforts to ban the sale of flavored tobacco products statewide…