The 2020 census is still a year away, but the politics around it are in full swing. The NAACP has filed a suit claiming that the Census Bureau has insufficient funds to properly conduct the 2020 census, risking a massive undercount of blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities. And a federal judge has ruled […]
With elegant simplicity, Maxim D. Frank-Kamenetskii elucidates the essential history and inner workings of DNA—a tiny molecule that holds within it the deepest mysteries of life. As Frank-Kamenetskii explains, DNA will undoubtedly shape our future, too, as we call upon it to convict criminals, clone creatures, and ultimately, cure cancer. This definitive guide to DNA, a previous version of […]
For two months in the spring of 2016, the world watched as wildfire ravaged the Canadian town of Fort McMurray. Firefighters named the fire “the Beast.” It acted like a mythical animal, alive with destructive energy, and they hoped never to see anything like it again. Yet it’s not a stretch to imagine we will […]
As critics of McCarthyism derided the period’s anti-Communist campaign as a “witch hunt,” the 1950s Broadway drama The Crucible underscored the link between contemporary political investigations and the 1692 Salem witch trials. The Specter of Salem reveals that this twentieth-century cultural moment, often cited as marking the emergence of such associations, actually followed a long […]
After almost getting expelled for exposing his prep school’s outrages in the Boston press, David Williams spent 1968 crossing the Pacific in the merchant marine and fighting the Vietnam War in the peace movement. Wanted in Oregon for jaywalking, be hitchhiked home to enjoy the mayhem of the Sixties at Harvard where he occasionally attended […]
Marjorie J. Spruill, is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. She is recognized in the US and abroad as a leading authority on the women’s movement. Marjorie is the author of Divided We Stand: Womenâs Rights, Family Values, and the Polarization of American Politics, published by Bloomsbury. Writing in The New York Times, Gillian Thomas wrote, […]
Jocelyn Simonson writes and teaches about criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, and social change at Brooklyn Law School. Her scholarship explores ways in which the public participates in the criminal process and in the institutions of local governance that control policing and punishment. Her forthcoming book looks at bottom-up interventions in the criminal legal system, […]
The picture of Mexico we most often see today, is the one of rampant drug violence and illegal immigration. While, unfortunately, there is truth to those images, they are far from the complete story. And the instinctive response – walling ourselves off – is counterproductive and even harmful to our national interests. Overlooked in today’s […]
Books like Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class celebrate the wave of highly productive and creative workers moving to the cities for the assets of arts, culture, diversity and tolerance that they offer. Good jobs await them there. But what happens to the people who are left behind? That’s the question that sociologists Maria Kefalas […]
In November 1977 more than thirty-five thousand people came to Houston, Texas. Twenty thousand visitors – mainly women – were there to celebrate the first and only national women’s conference to be sponsored by the federal government, and to endorse an agenda for women’s issues that would guide law and policy for the next decade. […]
In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Robert Lieberman and Suzanne Mettler, political scientists at Johns Hopkins and Cornell, gathered with a group of colleagues, all of whom were looking for ways to explain the predicament facing democratic institutions in the US. They found themselves asking – and being asked – whether we were […]
A consultant and educator, Bill Welter helps organizations succeed by helping managers excel and prepare for their tomorrows. He connects Louis Pasteur’s quote of “Chance favors the prepared mind” with today’s business realities. His workshops have been conducted for McDonaldâs, Walgreenâs, Starbucks, the Institute for Management Studies, DraftFCB and others. He is the lead co-author […]
Robert C. Lieberman is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University. His teaching and research interests include American political development, race and American politics, public policy, and inequality. He is the author of two books. Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State won the President’s Book Award of the […]
In over 25 years practicing pediatrics, Claudia Gold has worked in different ways to address the mental health needs of children. She currently works as a consultant in Human Development at the Austen Riggs Center and is on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Boston Infant-Parent Mental Health program, William James College, and the Austen Riggs Center. […]
Christopher Hodson specializes in colonial and Atlantic history, with an emphasis on the early modern French empire, comparative imperialism, and early modern diasporas. After earning his PhD. from Northwestern University in 2004, Chris spent two years as an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. In 2007 he […]