BY STEVEN ROESCH What helped Donald Trump to achieve victory in two presidential elections? According to Norman Solomon, prolific author and co-founder of RootsAction.org, the warped nature of [...] Continue Reading
Books
EdTech’s Inexorable Limits
Recently, the Fresno Unified School District announced a major AI initiative. Trained teachers are now on hand at sites across the district to assist in implementing the program. But could it be [...] Continue Reading
Heroes and Stories: Building a Better System
The system is rigged. It’s a sentiment that’s been bandied about a lot in recent years. But what exactly is this system? How did it emerge, and can something be done to reform it? Robert [...] Continue Reading
Moving Fast and Breaking Lots of Things
The journey that Sarah Wynn-Williams traces in Careless People began when she came down with a severe fever—Facebook fever. In 2006, she noticed that politicians were starting to use the [...] Continue Reading
Theft from the People
A House of Dynamite, the latest film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, expertly dramatizes a nuclear attack. The well-researched script depicts just how quickly Armageddon could break out. Early on, [...] Continue Reading
Telling People What They Want to Believe
The military-industrial-media complex. That’s the terminology Norman Solomon uses in his 2023 book War Made Invisible. According to Solomon’s meticulously documented analysis, “[t]he business of [...] Continue Reading
“A Mine Awaiting Extraction”
Books about the business world usually aren’t compelling page-turners. And yet Megan Greenwell accomplishes exactly this in Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, her deep [...] Continue Reading
Inconvenient Truths About Homelessness
In There Is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America, Brian Goldstone follows the struggles of five Atlanta families who are trying to keep a roof over their heads. Their stories are gripping [...] Continue Reading
Not a Movement, More Like a Coup
If you’re probing a controversial issue, it’s heartening to find someone with wide-ranging experience and expertise in the field. And, when it comes to school vouchers, Josh Cowen—author of The [...] Continue Reading
Trump vs. the Universities
In Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future (One Signal Publishers/Atria Books, 2024), author Jason Stanley examines fascism and education. Stanley is a professor of [...] Continue Reading
How Social Media Is Changing Our Lives
Several recent books and articles that probe the troubling aspects of social media have something in common: They focus on the dangers that social media platforms pose for the young. Less explored, [...] Continue Reading
“They’ll Miss Their State”
For several years, some historians have speculated that democracies as we know them might collapse—and that repressive autocracies might replace them. For at least two scholars, however, the [...] Continue Reading