And you think your family has some great achievements and enough demerits to warrant a book? Well, clearly, author and New Yorker writer, John Seabrook’s family, has all of that in triplicate and he spells it all out in the eminently readable “The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.” His grandfather, …
For more than sixty years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs. It is expensive and time-consuming to educate a new doctor, and much more expedient to bring immigrant doctors trained in other countries. And that’s what we’ve done. This all began, in earnest, with the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration …
Bitcoin had been a bit player as people designed their financial portfolios. Investors would ask ‘is this a scam and am I chasing the latest shiny object?’ But today it seems as if cryptocurrency and the blockchain technology that undergirds it is getting newfound respect. The second Trump Administration has passed The Genius Act and …
Many of us are unwitting victims of the private equity industry. Some by virtue of being employed by companies they have bought whose future success or failure may have no impact on the private equity firm’s ability to profit from the leveraged buyout of those companies. In her new book, “Bad Company: Private Equity and …
It is said that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Thus, we have taken some steps to protect endangered species–but clearly not enough. And while the stories we usually tell ourselves about global warming tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising …
It can be hard to explain how the actions of the top .01 percent have severe consequences for the rest of us, but in his book, “Burned by Billionaires,” Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies, lays it out chapter and verse. He demonstrates through words and charts how the rest of us …
America has many challenges in the health industry. And while our guest, who came to America as an immigrant, wanted desperately to be part of what he considered to be ‘the best medical system in the world’ back in 1975, he no longer holds that view. He says that our system has become too politicized, …
While the ideal of the American woman was to be skinny, now they need to be skinny and have a glow acquired through some combination of daily yoga, vegan makeup and mushroom coffee or tea. Gwyneth Paltrow’s company, GOOP, in many ways best exemplifies this growing industry which rakes in about $5.6 trillion a year …
Refrigeration is considered to be the most impactful invention in the history of food and drink. And while we focus on our personal refrigerators there is an entire ‘cold chain’ of cold storage warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, and display cases, keeping foodstuffs fresh until we can purchase them. It’s a labyrinth never documented in the …
Diane Ravitch, Ph.D, is a historian of education. For decades now, she has written, lectured and been interviewed about her views on a range of subjects related to education reform, including standardized testing, vouchers, charter schools and accountability. Early on, she was a proponent of all of the above. She was part of the leadership …