Showing titles in Civics & Citizenship

Extended solitary confinement has been condemned as a severe violation of human rights. Yet it is still widely used in Iranian prisons. In White Torture, thirteen women, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, share their experiences of imprisonment: harassment and beatings by guards, total blindfolding and denial of medical treatment. Angry interrogators threaten their families and lie about their whereabouts. One prisoner is even told she is dead.

The current school system churns out millions of illiterates and mental zombies—but here's how we're going to fix it, starting today. Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents across the nation grapple with a new and horrifying understanding of just how bad our educational system has become. It all adds up to a system that seems hopelessly, terribly, and irrevocably broken.

In Quarterly Essay 46 Laura Tingle shows that the answer goes to something deep in Australian culture: our great expectations of government. Since the deregulation era of the 1980s, Tingle shows, governments can do less, but we wish they could do more. From Hawke to Gillard, each prime minister has grappled with this dilemma. Keating sought to change expectations, Howard to feed a culture of entitlement, Rudd to reconceive the federation. Through all of this, and back to our origins, runs an almost childlike sense of the government as saviour and provider.

Neither Washington DC, Wall Street, Mexico, China, the Feds, nor the media are the cause of our problems - nor are they the cure. What happens after all the bogeymen have been vanquished? What if opposing the incompetence of the European Union, the biases of the American media, the corruption of crony capitalism, the arrogance of political power brokers, and allegedly unfair global trade deals is not enough? The key to American prosperity in this new era of populism is for moral people to make responsibility matter again by renewing personal virtue.

Rebel Song is a tremendous story of a woman, a heart, a madman, a rebel, and the growing storm of change. Eerie warnings parallel contemporary crises. Weaving metaphors soar and dive. Archetypes evoke stunning moments of real-life recognition. And in the end, the sweeping triumph of the rebel song's message leaves you in shivers-and-chills delight.

Andreas Karelas has a message we don’t often hear: We have all the tools we need to solve the climate crisis, and doing so will improve our lives, our economy, and our society. But to engage people in the climate fight, we need stories that are empowering, inclusive, and solutions-oriented, not based in fear. Karelas digs into the latest data on the rapidly falling costs and increased efficiencies of clean energy technologies compared to fossil fuels, looks at the rate of job creation in the clean energy sector, and introduces the listener to the inspiring work of climate heroes.

Tammy Duckworth takes listeners through the amazing - and amazingly true - stories from her incomparable life. In November of 2004, an Iraqi RPG blew through the cockpit of Tammy Duckworth's US Army Black Hawk helicopter. The explosion, which destroyed her legs and mangled her right arm, was a turning point in her life. But as Duckworth shows in Every Day Is a Gift, that moment was just one in a lifetime of extraordinary turns.

Liberal contempt for Trump supporters is exacerbating the political and cultural rift tearing America apart. Beyond Contempt shows progressives how to communicate respectfully and effectively across the great political divide, defusing hostility, building trust, and, just maybe, discovering common ground.

A global exploration of the Internet meme as an agent of pop culture, politics, protest, and propaganda on and offline and how they will save or destroy us all. Using social media-driven movements as her guide, technologist and digital media scholar An Xiao Mina unpacks the mechanics of memes and how they operate to reinforce, amplify, and shape today's politics.

No major arena of US governance is more elitist than foreign policy. International relations barely surface in election campaigns, and policymakers take little input from Congress. For much of the twentieth century, officials, activists, and academics worked to foster an informed public that would embrace participation in foreign policy as a civic duty. Every Citizen a Statesman recounts an abandoned effort to create a democratic foreign policy.

Donald Trump is the exact threat our Founding Fathers feared. Joe Walsh is as rock-ribbed a conservative as they come. But he believes that no right-wing policy victory is worth the loss of our very democracy. In this clear-eyed and unsparing audiobook, Walsh makes the case that Trump has more in common with the foreign dictators he praises publicly than a predecessor like Ronald Reagan. Trump is an existential threat to conservatism, the presidency, and national unity.

Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription.

Toxic culture is eroding our sense of belonging, community and well-being. Our capacity to collaborate and innovate together is also being undermined by the rising incivility and divisiveness. We need each other to address the complex challenges facing our cities and communities—from the infrastructure deficit to climate change, homelessness, mental health and addiction issues. To thrive, our local democracies depend on our ability to revive the art of living and working well together.

In a collection of original essays, the venerated television journalist, Dan Rather, celebrates our shared values and what matters most in our great country, and shows us what patriotism looks like. Writing about the institutions that sustain us, such as public libraries, public schools, and national parks; the values that have transformed us, such as the struggle for civil rights; and the drive toward science and innovation that has made the US great, Rather brings his experience on the frontlines of the world's biggest stories, and offers listeners a way forward.

The only book with exclusive analysis by the Pulitzer Prize - winning staff of The Washington Post, and the most complete and authoritative available. Includes a PDF of documents and other reference materials. Listen to the findings of the Special Counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, complete with accompanying analysis by the Post reporters who’ve covered the story from the beginning.

Americans have come to tolerate, embrace, and even champion many things that would have horrified their parents' generation - from easy divorce and unrestricted abortion on demand to extreme body piercing and teaching homosexuality to grade schoolers. Does that mean today's Americans are inherently more morally confused and depraved than previous generations? Of course not, says veteran journalist David Kupelian.

In an era of ballooning corporate campaign expenditures, unleashed by the Supreme Court in Citizens United, trust in our government is at an all time low. More than ever before, Americans believe that money buys results in Congress - and that our Republic has been lost.Using examples that resonate as powerfully on the Right as on the Left, Republic, Lost not only makes clear how the economy of influence defeats the will of the people, but offers cogent strategies to correct our course....

Bill Bryson meets Thomas Frank in this deeply insightful, unexpectedly hilarious story of how politicians hijacked American democracy and how we can take it back.

In Just Faith, progressive Christian activist and writer Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons explains how a strong religious left has accompanied every major progressive advance in our society, and he resurrects the long but forgotten history of progressive Christianity in the United States that can and must link arms with progressive Muslims and Jews to make the moral case for pluralism, human dignity, and the common good. Graves-Fitzsimmons provides a blueprint for this type of resurrection based on his advocacy work at the intersection of religion and American politics.

In Dare to Speak, Suzanne Nossel, a leading voice in support of free expression, delivers a vital, necessary guide to maintaining democratic debate that is open, freewheeling but at the same time respectful of the rich diversity of backgrounds and opinions in a changing country. Centered on practical principles, Nossel’s primer equips listeners with the tools needed to speak one’s mind in today’s diverse, digitized, and highly divided society without resorting to curbs on free expression.