Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders on day one of his second term in 2025. One of those executive orders was the beginning of the end for the agency known as USAID. It was started in 1961 by President Kennedy in order to advance human survival around the world, stabilize economies in the …
The 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests that pushed many institutions, including corporations, to confront racial inequality. Looking back at 2020 to 2024, companies issued public statements embracing racial justice causes in the hopes of protecting their reputations from claims that their practices perpetuate inequality, particularly in regard to race. In response …
Much has been written about the ill effects of our over-reliance on our on-life life with endless content, algorithm-driven polarization and pressure to publicly present oneself. In this podcast, our guest, Patricia Martin, author of “Will the Future Like You: Reflections on the Age of Hyper-Reinvention,” argues that the damage goes even deeper. It is …
I ran a few small state house and senate races in Connecticut back in the day. It was an era of news releases, radio ads, bumper stickers and small events in the district. To be honest, I cannot imagine the pressures of running campaigns today given the fractured and interactive media of this era, constant …
The Voting Rights Act, enacted in 1965, and considered to be the most important civil rights legislation in American history, was effectively jettisoned by the ruling of the United States Supreme Court last week, according to our guest, David Daley, one of the leading experts in the country on the Act itself, and partisan and …
Greek mythology. Greek tragedy. Greek philosophy. Any of us who took a course or two on Western civilization remembers the name John Davies Homer, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. We may not revisit them, but they revisit us in many of the traditions that are woven through to our modern- day concept of the world. And …
Whistleblowers in our society our either considered heroes or traitors. In any event they have a massive impact in our history. For those who compile such lists of modern-day whistleblowers often Mark Felt, Deep Throat from Watergate is number two and Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who revealed the Pentagon Papers, is number one. Ellsberg’s …
The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940’s, when the urgent economic problems were totally different from those of our times. In her book “The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters”, Cambridge professor, Diane Coyle, helps us understand how inadequate our system for assessing the economy …
Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope, has been seen as a stabilizing force in the Catholic Church after a tumultuous papacy of Pope Francis. And while he is disciplined, thoughtful, and measured in his words and deeds, perhaps more traditional than Pope Francis, he has also been very vocal about his concerns about the …
There is a largely invisible pricing structure in the American health care system that dictates the types of medical procedures that are most valued and therefore best compensated. It affects the way you interact with the system day after day. In her short, but clear-eyed, dissection of why specialists and surgery are often the weapon …