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Winslow Myers Intervioew

An interview with Winslow Myers the author of Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide. After thousands of years, the dream of a world without war may seem hopelessly unrealistic. But, as Winslow Myers shows in this concise, eloquent primer, what is truly unrealistic is the notion that war remains a reasonable solution to the conflicts on our planet. He begins by showing why war has become obsolete (though obviously not extinct): it doesn't solve the problems that ostensibly justify it; its ...

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An interview with Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists and author of How the Mind Works. Pinker explains the mind by "reverse-engineering" it — figuring out what natural selection designed it to accomplish in the environment in which we evolved. The mind, he writes, is a system of "organs of computation" that allowed our ancestors to understand and outsmart objects, animals, plants, and each other. How the Mind Works explains many of the imponderables of everyd ...

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An interview with Russ Baker the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. We'll talk to Baker about his recently published article "What Obama Is Up Against" — on the pressures Obama faces from the military-industrial-intelligence-finance sector and how that ties his hands on Afghan and Iraq. In Family of Secrets, Baker goes deep behind the scenes to deliver an arresting new look at Geo ...

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An interview with Alexandra Natapoff the author of Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice. Albert Burrell spent thirteen years on death row for a murder he did not commit. Atlanta police killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston during a misguided raid on her home. After being released by Chicago prosecutors, Darryl Moore — drug dealer, hit man, and rapist — returned home to rape an eleven-year-old girl. Such tragedies are consequences of snitching — police and ...

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An interview with James W. Douglass the author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters — an astonishing new examination of the Kennedy assassination and its meaning today. Douglass lays out the journey that led JFK in the course of three years from his position as a traditional Cold Warrior to his determination to break with the logic of the Cold War and lead the world in an entirely different direction. This sequence of steps led his adversaries in the military and in ...

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An interview with Dahr Jamail the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. project in Iraq has been condemned by a vibrant and vocal antiwar movement as illegal and unjust since before the invasion began. Since 2006, a majority in the United States have opposed the contination of the occupation, and reported to pollsters that they believe the invasion was a mistake. But how do the soldiers who carry out the occupation see the war? Fragme ...

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An interview with Jake Adelstein the author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan. At nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquility. What he got was a life of crime . . . crime reporting, that is, at the prestigious Yomiuri Shinbun. For twelve years of eighty-hour workweeks, he covered the seedy side of Japan, where extortion, murder, human trafficking, and corruption are as familiar as ramen noodles and sake. But when his final scoop b ...

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An interview with James W. Loewen author of Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History. Loewen takes history textbooks to task for their perpetuations of myth and their lack of awareness of today's multicultural student audience (not to mention the astonishing number of facts they just got plain wrong). How did people get here? Why did Europe win? Why Did the South Secede? In Teaching What Really Happened, Loewen goes ...

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An interview with Viktor Mayer-Schonberger the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schonberger looks at the surprising phenomenon of perfect remembering in the digital age, and reveals why we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, yet it has unforeseen consequences as well. Potentially humiliating content on Facebook is enshrined in cyberspace for future employers to see. Google remembers everything we've se ...

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An interview with Les Leopold the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and Prosperity — and What We Can Do About It. Leopold debunks the prevailing media myths that blame low-income home buyers who got in over their heads, people who ran up too much credit-card debt, and government interference with free markets. Instead, he reveals how Wall Street undermined itself and the rest of the economy by playing and losing at a ...

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An interview with Peter Maass the author of Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. Every unhappy oil-producing nation is unhappy in its own way, but all are touched by the “resource curse” — the power of oil to exacerbate existing problems and create new ones. Peter Maass presents a vivid portrait of the troubled world oil has created. He takes us to Saudi Arabia, where officials deflect inquiries about the amount of petroleum remaining in the country’s largest reservoir; to Equ ...

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An interview with Kevin Mattson the author of 'What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?': Jimmy Carter, America's 'Malaise,' and the Speech that Should Have Changed the Country. In 1979, in an effort to right our national malaise, Jimmy Carter delivered a speech that risked his reputation and the future of the Democratic Party, changing the course of American politics for the next twenty-five years. At a critical moment in Jimmy Carter’s presidency, he gave a speech that should have ...

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An interview with David Swanson author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union. Daybreak is an assessment of how Bush/Cheney fundamentally altered the way our government works, inflated the powers of the executive, and deteriorated the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Only through the active efforts of citizens, Swanson argues, can we restore our rights, and expand our conception of political rights to meet new challenges. Daybreak offers a shocking an ...

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An interview with Charles P. Pierce the author of Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. The Culture Wars are over and the idiots have won. In the midst of a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, Charles Pierce had a defining moment at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he observed a dinosaur. Wearing a saddle... But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evoluti ...

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An interview with Len Saputo, MD the author of A Return To Healing: Radical Health Care Reform and the Future of Medicine. For several decades, a rapidly emerging new medical paradigm has supported a renaissance in our understanding of lifelong wellness. Saputo presents the story of this new medicine, and reveals how it can unlock the door to a health care system that works for all Americans.Conventional medicine's obsession with profitably treating symptoms drives up the cost of health ca ...

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An interview with Peter Schrag the author of California: America's High-Stakes Experiment. Schrag takes on the big issues — immigration, globalization, and the impact of California's politics on its quality of life — in this dynamic account of the Golden State's struggle to recapture the American dream. In the past half-century, California has been both model and anti-model for the nation and often the world, first for its high level of government and public services — schools, unive ...

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An interview with Frederick Hertz co-author of Making it Legal: A Guide to Same-Sex Marriage, Domestic Partnership & Civil Unions. 11,000 couples have married in California since the Supreme Court legalized marriage in May of 2008, and nearly as many married in Massachusetts between May of 2004. Further, nearly a quarter of the U.S. population lives in a state with some form of legal recognition for same-sex couples — with more than 40% of these states' couples having registered their re ...

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An interview with Jarret S. Lovell the author of Crimes of Dissent Civil Disobedience, Criminal Justice, and the Politics of Conscience. From animal rights to anti-abortion, from tax resistance to anti-poverty, activists from across the political spectrum often deliberately break the law to further their causes. While not behaviors common to hardened or self-seeking criminals, the staging of civil disobedience, non-violent resistance, and direct action can nevertheless trigger a harsh resp ...

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An interview with Christopher Steiner the author of $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better. Imagine an everyday world in which the price of gasoline (and oil) continues to go up, and up, and up. Think about the immediate impact that would have on our lives. Of course, everybody already knows how about gasoline has affected our driving habits. People can't wait to junk their gas-guzzling SUVs for a new Prius. But there are more, ...

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An interview with Fred Kaplan the author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. It was the year of the microchip, the birth-control pill, the space race, and the computer revolution; the rise of Pop art, free jazz, "sick comics," the New Journalism, and indie films; the emergence of Castro, Malcolm X, and personal superpower diplomacy; the beginnings of Motown, Happenings, and the Generation Gap-all bursting against the backdrop of the Cold War, the fallout-shelter craze, and the first Amer ...

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