Over the last three decades, millions of people have slipped through a loophole in the American dream and become downwardly mobile as a result of downsizing, plant closings, mergers, and divorce: the middle-aged computer executive laid off during an industry crisis, blue-collar workers phased out of the post-industrial economy, middle managers whose positions have been […]
It’s 1884, and America is obsessing over one of the closest and dirtiest presidential races in history. A high-profile tussle in the mud, it seems well suited to American tastes. Even the race for the nation’s highest office has become vulgar and sensational, as the public clamors for trashy stories and celebrity exposes generated by […]
It’s intuitively appealing to imagine a line as composed of infinitely small individual points – or “indivisibles,” as they’re called in mathematics. After all, we know that wood is a composite of individual fibers, and a rope is composed of individual strings, so we would expect the same to be true of the lines and […]
Thomas “Tim” Borstelmann is the Elwood N. and Katherine Thompson Distinguished Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he teaches U.S. and international history. He previously taught at Cornell University. Tim is the author of The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena, published by Harvard […]
Chris Myers Asch is the co-author, with G. Derek Musgrove, of Chocolate City: A History Race and Democracy in Our Nation’s Capital. Published by the University of North Carolina Press, it was praised as “an epic history of politics and power in Washington, D.C.” by Kate Masur. Chris is also the author of The Senator and the Sharecropper. The […]
Suzanne Mettler is professor of Government at Cornell University where her research and teaching focus on American political development, public policy, and political behavior. She is particularly interested in issues pertaining to gender and politics, race and politics, democratization, inequality, and citizenship. She is the author, most recently, of Degrees of Inequality, published by Basic Books. Writing in […]
It’s intuitively appealing to imagine a line as composed of infinitely small individual points – or “indivisibles,” as they’re called in mathematics. After all, we know that wood is a composite of individual fibers, and a rope is composed of individual strings, so we would expect the same to be true of the lines and […]
Whether you are faced with decisions momentous or trivial, how you go about resolving everyday dilemmas will definitely affect your level of satisfaction in life. In this engrossing and entertaining guide, David Welch, who has studied the decision-making process at the highest levels, shows how both the science and the art of decision-making are essential […]
Atul Gawande uses the term “positive deviant” to describe unusually effective performers in the field of medicine. To Gawande it is natural that we should study these outliers in order to learn from them and improve performance. Surprisingly, however, in business the best are not studied as closely as in other fields. The Outsiders is an attempt […]
Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation’s capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America’s expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, […]
Rick Levine is a soup-to-nuts serial entrepreneur, with a bent towards creating companies that produce things. In the last 30 years, his experience has ranged from software development to consumer goods. Much of his work, despite often being buttressed by technology in some form, revolves around anchoring product and brand experience in the real world, with tangible […]
W. M. Adams (Bill) holds the Moran Chair of Conservation and Development in the University of Cambridge, where he has taught about conservation and the environmental development since the 1980s. He has a masters degree in Conservation from University College London, and a PhD in Geography from Cambridge. He has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate […]
Wendy Hamand Venet is professor of history at Georgia State University. A scholar of 19th century U.S. history, her work on Civil War Atlanta began in 2006 when she encountered the diary of Samuel P. Richards, a bookstore owner in Atlantaâs central business district during the Civil War. His diary is the best account of […]
Ariane De Lannoy is a senior researcher at the Children’s Institute and lecturer in the Sociology Department of the University of Cape Town. Her research focuses on youth transitions to adulthood in South Africa, and she has published on young adults and educational decision making, youth belonging and citizenship, and youth violence in a context […]