Category: Books
Sight Unseen
by Maya Binyam | Jun 9, 2016 | Books, PoliticsTrayvon Martin’s father Tracy Martin and mother Sybrina Fulton speak at a protest in New York City. Photo Credit: David Shankbone When George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, 2.7 million Americans had their eyes on LeBron James. It was the night of the NBA’s 2012 All-Star game. LeBron scored 36 points, with six rebounds and seven assists. […]
Blueprint for a Divided City
by Naomi Gordon-Loebl | Jun 1, 2016 | Books, PoliticsMitchell Duneier’s Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea is not so much a full history of the ghetto as a place as it is an intellectual history of those who have studied it. Duneier profiles four black social scientists and community leaders who engaged with the physical spaces frequently […]
Seeing Like a Burglar
by Jonathan Tarleton | May 19, 2016 | Books, PoliticsPhoto Credit: USGS Architectural determinism has a strange effect: under its auspices, behavior is attributed to brick and mortar. Towers sow violence and destitution, either by creating irresistible opportunities for crime or structuring life in such a way that social contracts continually rupture. The argument is at once both a perverse scapegoating and a peculiar […]
Back to the Dark Side: Dick Cheney’s Pax Americana
by Ambassador Joe Wilson (ret.) and Valerie Plame | Oct 22, 2015 | Books, Foreign Policy, PoliticsExceptional, the new book from former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz, is not. It is nothing more than an unhinged rant that smacks of sedition. “The children need to know the truth about who we are, what we’ve done, and why it is uniquely America’s duty to be freedom’s defender,” the […]
Right-Wing Doublespeak and the Long Con
by D.R. Tucker | Oct 19, 2015 | Books, PoliticsBefore I read Arthur Brooks’s The Conservative Heart, I wondered if he chose that title because Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul (HarperCollins, 2006) was already taken. After reading this odd work, I wondered if he chose that title because American Hustle was too accurate a description. Brooks, the head of the right-wing American Enterprise […]