≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Politics | ≅ Comments
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When the global financial system collapsed last year, This American Life and its sister program, Planet Money (iTunes - RSS Feed - Web Site) began doing something that few others could pull off. They took very complex problems and made them understandable, often demystifying difficult concepts in a reliably engaging way. Now, they’re at it [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Philosophy, Politics | ≅ Comments
A quick heads up: The BBC is featuring a series of lectures with Michael Sandel (Harvard Professor of Government) that will collectively talk about “the prospects of a new politics of the common good.” Sandel is a very popular professor at Harvard. Some 15,000 students have taken his courses over 30 years. In the first lecture, [...]
≡ Category: History, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Comments
Thanks to PBS, you can now download from iTunes a four-hour definitive biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR guided the US through the Great Depression, then World War II, serving as president for an unprecedented four terms. The video podcast run a good four hours, and it’s part of a series called American Experience: The [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Film, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Comments
Michael Moore is getting wise to the virtues of free/open culture. Starting September 23, you can download his new film – Slacker Uprising – via the web for free. The unfortunate rub is that this download will only be available to US and Canadian residents, and it will remain free via the web for three [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Politics | ≅ Comments
A rather sad commentary on the integrity, depth and sincerity of the American politics. But, it’s funny and it’s Friday, so here it goes. Take it away John Stewart (and thanks for the tip Larry):
PS Check out this WSJ article, The Biology of Ideology, which suggests that our political choices may be shaped by genetics.
Related [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics | ≅ Comments
In response to China’s vigorous crackdown on Tibet (see this photojournalism account), a group of experts were convened to discuss Tibet and its future. The panelists included Robert Thurman (famed Buddhism scholar at Columbia University), John Kenneth Knaus (Harvard University), John Tkacik (Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation), and Amit A. Pandya (Henry L. [...]
≡ Category: History, Politics, Stanford | ≅ Comments
Here’s a new, free course from Stanford University. Taught by James Sheehan, the History of the International System (iTunes) offers a historical view of international politics in the 20th century, exploring how international players have attempted to project their will and protect their interests, all while negotiating fluid and not always manageable external forces. The [...]
≡ Category: Politics | ≅ Comments
His essay appearing in The Village Voice: Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics | ≅ Comments
It’s rare that professors find themselves at the center of a political firestorm. But that’s where Samantha Power, Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard, found herself last week when, during an off-the-record conversation with a reporter, she referred to Hillary Clinton as a “monster” and then had to resign as [...]
≡ Category: Politics | ≅ Comments
Liberals outnumber conservatives in the academy. That’s a known fact. What explains this divergence? Some have attributed it to liberals creating a hostile environment for conservatives. But new research calls that view into question and offers an intriguing alternative explanation.
As described in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Matthew Woessner (a conservative academic) and April Kelly-Woessner [...]
≡ Category: Politics, Video - Politics/Society, YouTube | ≅ Comments
If you’re a resident of a Super Tuesday state, we hope you can find some time to pull the lever tomorrow. Also, we hope you’ll forgive (at least) one more political post before Super Tuesday. Whatever your political affiliations, the video below is a compelling example of new media at work. According to the New [...]
≡ Category: History, Politics | ≅ Comments
Although he hasn’t served in government for more than 30 years, Henry Kissinger still exercises more power internationally than Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton combined. That’s a strong claim, and it comes from Professor Jeremi Suri, who has a new book out on the former Secretary of State. In a wide-ranging and [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Web/Tech | ≅ Comments
The truism goes that laws and sausages are the two things you don’t want to see being made. Nevertheless, if more of us paid attention to what our congressional representatives are really up to (and let them know when they screw up), we’d probably be a little happier with how the system works overall. Two [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Film, Politics | ≅ Comments
The Iowa caucus is finally and mercifully upon us. And right in time, filmmaker Michael Moore has offered an analysis of the Democratic field of candidates. There’s much here that I don’t particularly agree with here, but Moore makes two large claims that strike me as being fundamentally (and regretfully) true:
The “Democratic front-runners are a [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Comments
Again, no commentary needed. Informative in many ways, Bhutto’s talk was taped at the Council on Foreign Relations in August. More info here.
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≡ Category: History, Politics | ≅ Comments
Robert Dallek’s latest book recounts in plentiful detail (752 pages) the odd working relationship that existed between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger (Nixon’s national security adviser and, later, secretary of state). They were partly allies, in many ways strongly dependent upon one another, particularly when it came to making American foreign policy. But they also [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Harvard, Politics | ≅ Comments
In case you missed it, The New York Times published a lengthy article — The Politics of God — last weekend which essentially traces how the thought of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and other major political philosophers gave us secular politics, and particularly the separation of Church and State. They’re innovations with many upsides, but [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Comments
Strange culture we live in these days. It’s the comedians that ask the hard questions. See John Stewart below and the referenced Dick Cheney video below that.
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Comments
What’s gone wrong with America’s democracy? It’s a question that Al Gore takes a hard look at in his recent (and well-reviewed) book, The Assault on Reason. Below, Gore gives you the gist of his argument in a half-hour video. It’s a bit heady. He’s invoking the Ancient Greeks, the Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics | ≅ Comments
We have hit bottom in Iraq. And you know it because the debates over Iraq (whether the war was just, whether we planned it adequately, whether we have a meaningful exist strategy, etc.) have ground to a halt. The big defenders of the war effort have mostly gone silent, or they’re no longer taken seriously, [...]
≡ Category: Politics | ≅ Comments
We recently stumbled upon a big trove of political dissent. This collection features over 200 talks — some in audio, some in video — given by MIT’s Noam Chomsky. The talks, which focus on politics (and not his work on linguistics) range from the 1970s to today. For an archive of his political writings, [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Comments
America’s 42nd president spoke this weekend at Harvard’s Class Day, a traditional event held for graduating seniors. While Class Day often features pop icons and comedians — take this speech by Ali G from a few yeas ago — Clinton’s speech was a bit more serious and idealistic, and it reminds us that there may [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Google, Media, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Comments
YouTube is a little more than two years old. It’s a mere toddler. But, it’s now owned by an overgrown, fully-bearded nine year old. Yes, that would be Google, and that means that YouTube is ready to storm its way into the media mainstream, pampers and all.
You can be sure that GooTube has already [...]
≡ Category: Books, History, Politics | ≅ Comments
Whether you think John F. Kennedy was a great president or just a guy
who enjoyed sultry birthday
serenades (see clip below), you have to admit
his hold on America’s cultural imagination is still powerful four
decades after his assassination. Two major new works of history tackle
the question and, predictably, come down on opposite sides of it. David
Talbot’s Brothers: [...]
≡ Category: Media, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Comments
As many know by now, David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was killed in a car accidenton Monday just a few short miles from the Stanford campus. As the obits were all quick to point out, Halberstam made his name during an era that paralleled our own, during the Vietnam War. And he did it [...]
≡ Category: Politics | ≅ Comments
Here is where the ideology of privatization logically ends up. As part of its occupation, the US government has flooded Iraq with private contractors. And while some build bridges and others help pump oil, a good number carry out military operations in America’s name, and they’ve positioned themselves to be subject to neither military nor [...]
≡ Category: Politics | ≅ Comments
The vast majority of Americans have only a remote sense of what Iraqis
are experiencing these days. We hear about people dying daily — 10 in a market here, 30 in a mosque attack there — but it comes across as statistics, as numbers divorced from a reality that we can empathize with. In past [...]
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