Colin Gordon, “Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality” (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013)
Americans seem to be more concerned about economic inequality today than they have been in living memory. The Occupy Movement (“We are the 99%”) is only the most visible sign of this growing unease. B...
25 Jun 20131h 11min
Marc Mauer, “Race to Incarcerate” (New Press, 2013)
The American penitentiary model began as not merely a physical construct, but as a philosophical and religious one. Prisoners were to use their time in silence and isolation to contemplate their crime...
18 Jun 201341min
Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick, “Reducing Gun Violence in America” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013)
We’ve all heard the saying that when arguing we should ‘disagree without being disagreeable’ but, when it comes to guns, we often find ourselves disagreeing without actually disagreeing. Most American...
15 Mai 201351min
Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich, “The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013)
Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich are authors of the provocative new book, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies (Rowman and Littlefield 2013). Dr. Tienken is an assistant professor i...
13 Mai 201324min
Steven Hill, “Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age” (University of California Press, 2010)
What can the United States learn from Europe? One good answer, says Steven Hill, is social capitalism, a form of economic management that is responsive to markets and productive of broadly-shared pros...
9 Mai 201351min
Kathleen J. Frydl, “The War on Drugs in America, 1940-1973” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” We are still fighting that war today. According to many people, we’ve lost but don’t know it. Rates of drug use in the US remain, by histori...
9 Mai 20133min
Thane Rosenbaum, “Payback: The Case for Revenge” (Chicago UP, 2013)
All humans have an emotionally-driven sense of fairness. We get treated unfairly and we get mad. It’s no wonder, then, that our laws–and those of almost everyone else–are intended to assure that peopl...
8 Mai 20131h 3min
Paul Barrett, “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun” (Broadway, 2013)
History is in many respects the story of humanity’s quest for transcendence: to control life and death, time and space, loss and memory. When inventors or companies effectively tap into these needs pr...
2 Mai 201353min
