Month: November 2007

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Thanks to her sure-footedness, her rivals’ mistakes, and diminishing Democratic divisions, Hillary has built a commanding lead – but we haven’t heard from Iowa yet. That’s what HAROLD MEYERSON says — he’s an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, and he wrote the cover story for the new issue of The American Prospect.

Also: Our Bodies, Ourselves may be the most influential left book of the last thirty years. LINDA GORDON explains how the feminist women’s health manual transformed women’s understanding of health and sexuality and changed US medicine. Linda teaches history at NYU, and wrote about The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves by Kathy Davis for The Nation.

Plus: THE SLAVE SHIP: 12 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic over three centuries, mostly on British and American ships. MARCUS REDIKER talks about the “wooden world” where British and American captains faced threats of mutiny and insurrection. His new book tells an intimate human history of an inhuman institution. It’s “a magnificent and disturbing work” — that’s what Robin D.G. Kelley says.
Marcus Rediker an award-winning historian, and also a teacher and activist.

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Once upon a time America was both prosperous and relatively equitable. But that economy was captured by a financial elite when Reagan became president, and the Democrats have failed to fight back. ROBERT KUTTNER argues that we need to rebuild the “equalizing institutions” that set limits on markets in labor, stocks and technologies. Kuttner is the founder and coeditor of The American Prospect; his new book is THE SQUANDERING OF AMERICA: How the failure of our Politics Undermines our Prosperity. Kuttner will be speaking Mon Nov. 26, 8pm at Town Hall’s Writers Bloc in UCLA’s Melnitz Hall in conversation with Arianna Huffington .

Also: The Weather Underground bombed hundreds of sites, but killed only their own members – three of them, in a bomb-making accident, at the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970. CATHY WILKERSON survived that explosion and escaped, got onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, lived underground for years, then emerged as a citizen, mother, and teacher. Her new book is Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman.
READ my Dissent piece “The Weatherman Temptation.”

Plus: American economic domination didn’t always bring hell to the Third World. Before Reagan, the US ran a politically savvy empire that brought a modicum of economic growth to poor countries. That’s what ALICE AMSDEN argues – she teaches political economy at MIT and wrote ESCAPE FROM EMPIRE: The Developing World’s Journey Through Heaven and Hell.

More stuff to read: my new piece at the Huffington Post, Seymour Hersh: Obama ‘Only Hope’ for US-Muslim Ties.

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What’s really at stake in the writers’ strike? HOWARD RODMAN explains the issues (hint: when Viacom fired its president Tom Freston in 2006, he received $60 million in severance pay — more than all of the DVD money paid to WGA members that year). We’ll also talk about how the writers can win. Howard is a board member of the Writers Guild of America, West, and a professor of screenwriting at USC; his screen adaptation of Savage Grace, starring Julianne Moore, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007 and opens in 2008.
WATCH the hilarious “Heartbreaking Voices of Uncertainty”

Also: BENAZIR BUTTO AND PAKISTAN’S FUTURE: AMY WILENTZ talked with the opposition leader just before she returned to Pakistan, where she called on Pervez Musharraf to resign and was placed under house arrest. Amy teaches literary journalism at UC Irvine; she has written about Butto for the Huffington Post, and her profile of Butto appeared in More magazine.

Plus: one Iraq story: in March, 20 people were killed in the bombing of Baghdad’s Mutanabbi Street market—bookseller’s row, the embodiment of the city’s venerable intellectual history. The ALOUD series at the downtown LA Public Library will hold a “Memorial Reading for Mutanabbi Street” Mon, Nov 19, 7 PM – we’ll speak with Beau Beausoleil, Sholeh Wolpé, and Louise Steinman, curator of the ALOUD series and organizer of the LA Mutanabbi program—she was profiled in the LA Times on Sunday.

More stuff to read: my new piece in The Nation about Clarence Thomas.

KPFK elections update: the voting deadline has been extended to Dec. 9. Please support the slate endorsed by the Committee to Strengthen KPFK: www.candidateslate.org

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“We hope we’re about to elect FDR,” New York Times op-ed columnist PAUL KRUGMAN says, “but we might be about to elect Grover Cleveland.” He said he was referring to the front-runner, Hillary Clinton. Krugman’s new book is The Conscience of a Liberal; I spoke with him at ALOUD at Central Library, a free series at the Los Angeles Public Library presented by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, and we will broadcast highlights of that conversation.

ALSO: Bush’s policies on “fighting terrorism” have made us not only less free, but also less safe: that’s what DAVID COLE says. He’s a law professor at Georgetown U, a contributor to Salon.com and The Nation. His new book is LESS SAFE, LESS FREE: Why America is Losing the War on Terror.

Plus: REPORTING IRAQ: what the key journalists have to say about the “good news,” and the bad. We’ll speak with JOHN PALATTELLA, co-editor, along along with Mike Hoyt and the staff of the Columbia Journalism Review, of Reporting Iraq: An Oral history of the War by the Journalists who Covered it. John has written for the L.A. Times Book Review and the Washington Post Book World, and he’s the new literary editor at The Nation.

More stuff to read: my piece at the Huffington Post: “NYT’s Krugman: Hillary — The Next Grover Cleveland”?