Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S Jacobs' book Moving the Needle: What Tight Labor Markets Do for the Poor (U California Press, 2023) is a timely investigation reveals how sustained tight labor markets improve the job prospects and life chances of America’s most vulnerable households.
Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what happens when jobs are plentiful, and workers are hard to come by? Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves benefits, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market.
Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data, as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs investigate the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets. They also consider the downside of overheated economies that can ignite surging rents and spur outmigration. Moving the Needle is an urgent and original call to implement policies that will maintain the current momentum and prepare for potential slowdowns that may lie ahead.
John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma.
UFOs became part of our cultural landscape in 1947, and they've been with us ever since. Debunked innumerable times, they refuse to go away. Made the subject of great expectations by their believers, they invariably disappoint. They've been called a myth, both in disparagement and, more properly, in appreciation of their power and significance.
This book argues that they are actually a mythology, as gripping and profound as the great mythologies of antiquity to which they're linked. The question it asks about them is not, "What are they?" nor "Where do they come from?" but "What do they mean?" Halperin begins his exploration with his own longish teenage foray into the UFOs that he began to believe in as his mother lay dying of cancer. Despite the fact that he was only a high school student, Halperin joined and then became the director of "New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena" (NJAAP), an organization of amateur observers with members across the States. He goes on to revisit a range of famous cases of UFO sightings and abductions while introducing his own approach, which is informed by the study of religion, folklore, and Jungian psychology. Ultimately arguing for UFOs as evidence of the inner trauma of individuals as well as entire societies, he posits that the rise of the UFO in post-World War II America coincides with that moment in the nuclear age when we first became capable of imagining our death as a species,
If you have ever gotten excited over buying a new object only to feel let down once you acquire it, then today’s discussion will be relevant to you. My guest is Todd McGowan, author of the book Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016, Columbia University Press). We discuss his critique of capitalism as a system that encourages us to forever chase satisfactions that never come. And we explore his suggestion that true satisfaction lies in the wanting, not the acquiring. It’s a fascinating conversation that will radically change the way you approach everyday consumption and how you think about your own satisfaction.
Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist practicing in Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate and faculty of William Alanson White Institute in Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York City and former chair of their LGBTQ Study Group; and faculty at Florida Psychoanalytic Institute in Miami. He is a contributing author to the books Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge) and Patriarchy and its Discontents: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (2023, Routledge) and has published on issues of gender, sexuality, and sexual abuse.
Leigh Goodmark’s new book,Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism (U California Press, 2023), uses the stories of individual criminalized survivors of gender based violence to illuminate the ways that the criminal legal system perpetuates violence against the very women, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people it claims to protect. Leigh argues that reform is not the answer to this problem, and that instead of limiting our efforts and imaginations to the pursuit of reforms that ultimately expand the reach of the criminal legal system, we should invest in abolition feminism and a world of non-carceral supports and resources like housing, healthcare, and education instead of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration.
Kendall Dinniene is a fourth year English PhD student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Their research examines how contemporary American authors respond to anti-fatness in their work.
A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters.
Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution(Simon and Schuster, 2021) is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes.
Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics.
Liberty Is Sweet is a “must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation” (Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin), from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.
One of the most recognizable tropes in American society in the past few decades is the scarred war veteran, returning from foreign lands with wounds both visible and invisible. His experiences are incomprehensible to those who’ve not served, but we owe him everything, and it is our duty as American citizens to honor him with nonjudgmental empathy so that he might eventually heal and reintegrate into the national community. But this narrative, this response to combat is neither natural or the only possible way of dealing with the issue. In fact, my guest Nadia Abu El-Haj argues that it is a distinctly apolitical interpretation, one that works as a cover for the politics of American empire in her new book Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America(Verso, 2022).
Beginning her narrative in the 1960’s and 70’s with the war in Vietnam, El-Haj traces PTSD back to it’s roots as a response to extreme circumstances. In the soldiers being studied, psychologists found men who were shattered by their experiences, struggling to process them and move on when they returned home. However, key to their understanding was a sense of guilt and complicity in the war. They might’ve been damaged and in need of care to move forward with their lives, but they were still guilty of immoral and criminal acts. The diagnosis was then not just an individualized pathology but part of a broader political critique, and part of the healing process involved engaging in activism to fight the very systems the soldiers had been participants of.
Fast forward a few decades, and this political angle has almost been entirely erased. Instead, soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are no longer perpetrators but victims who bear a burden we all must honor them for. This new discourse around trauma buries the possibility of political dissent, leaving us unable to understand the decisions that produced the trauma in the first place, but also focuses so heavily on the traumatized soldier that civilians caught in the crossfire almost never factor in our understanding, in spite of the fact that they are the most numerous victims of wars in the last several decades. This combination has produced a toxic form of militarism, one incapable of sustained political critique, which helps explain why the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere have been able to go on so long.
Combining fields and disciplines and tying numerous disparate threads together, El-Haj’s work is a devastatingly urgent, eye-opening critique of a society that has long lost it’s capacity for critical self-reflection. It reveals many ideological traps and mazes many have been lost in, and even if it cannot bring about a more peaceful world on its own, it can point the way towards a more critical one.
Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O'Brien's book Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege(U Minnesota Press, 2021) collects more than two dozen chronicles of white imperialism and Indigenous resistance. Ranging from the historical to the contemporary and grappling with Indigenous land struggles around the globe, these narratives showcase both scholarly and creative forms of expression, constructing a multifaceted book of diverse perspectives that will inform readers while provoking them toward further research into Indigenous resilience.
John Cable is assistant professor of history at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia. He earned the Ph.D. in history at Florida State University in 2020. His forthcoming book, Southern Enclosure: Settler Colonialism and the Postwar Transformation of Mississippi (University Press of Kansas), will be out in December 2023.
Unsung: Not all Heroes Wear Kits(Pitch Publishing, 2022) by Alexis James introduces the sports stars you don't know, telling the stories you can't miss. It shines a rare spotlight behind the scenes of professional sport, with overlooked heroes such as F1 mechanics, athletics starters, football chaplains, rugby medics and cycling moto pilots revealing previously untold tales of intrigue, ambition and dedication.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
Harvard's Department of Social Relations made history in the 1950s and 1960s as the most ambitious program in social science in the United States. Dedicated to a synthesis of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and other disciplines, the scope of its ambitions were matched only by the scope of its failures. Patrick Schmidt's new volume Harvard's Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science: The Rise and Fall of the Department of Social Relations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022) documents the history of SocRel, as it was called, in intimate detail. It paints a colourful and carefully researched picture of the personalities and events that are central to the department's story, ranging from the austere theoretician Talcott Parsons to the hallucinogen-ingesting Ram Dass.
In this episode, Patrick talks to host Alex Golub about SocRel as well as the wider context of the Cold War academy in which it was situated.
Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.
The national purpose of the American state is to realize and then sustain the democracy and the equality that was the promise of our founding. I believe that requires perennial struggle and … groups like Black Lives Matter are an essential part of that struggle … Those are the social movements I hope to join, support, and that I hope will always be qualified by the adjective ‘liberal’.
– Michael Walzer, NBN interview (2023)
In the 1990 collection What is Justice? Classic and Contemporary Readings edited by Solomon and Murphy and published by Oxford, teachers had a textbook to help introduce students to a broad cross-section of political thinkers ranging from Hobbes to Hegel to Hayek to Mill, Nozick, Rawls, Sandel, Taylor and Walzer among others. It is worth mentioning because Michael Walzer insists he is not a formal philosopher, does not in fact, deserve to be grouped with the likes of a Dewey or a Hegel, as Richard Rorty had done in the introduction of his 1999 collection of essays in Philosophy and Social Hope:
‘Recently Michael Walzer, a political philosopher best known for his earlier work, Spheres of Justice, has come to Hegel’s and Dewey’s defense. In his more recent book Thick and Thin, Walzer argues that we should not think of the customs and institutions of particular societies as accidental accretions around a common core of universal moral rationality, the transcultural moral law. Rather, we should think of the thick set of customs and institutions as prior, and as what commands moral allegiance.’
Rorty’s broader point remains as relevant as arguably, the positions of the political philosophers as collected in the Solomon and Murphy reader mentioned above, What is Justice?, which also recognized the appeal of Walzer’s ‘very different approach’ to the Rawls’ paradigmatic A Theory of Justice. That same collection also shares Nozick’s critical response to Rawls - mentioned because of the well-known course, ‘Capitalism and Socialism’, that Robert Nozick and Michael Walzer taught together at Harvard.
A former student, the Washington Post columnist, Brookings senior fellow, and policy professor E.J. Dionne once said: it was one of the best courses he ever took, adding, it was Michael Walzer ‘who very much shaped my view’.
A short list of Professor Walzer’s book titles include Just and Unjust Wars, Spheres of Justice - A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, The Company of Critics, Thick and Thin - Moral Argument at Home and Abroad, On Toleration, Politics and Passion, The Jewish Political Tradition, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions, A Foreign Policy for the Left, as well as a published conversation - Justice is Steady Work: A Conversation on Political Theory - published by Polity in 2020.
This interview focuses primarily on his latest book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On “Liberal” as an Adjective (2023, Yale University Press) which does much to clarify a simple, yet crucial distinction, between liberal and illiberal sensibilities underlying the pluralism, populism, and polarization today.
Michael Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and editor emeritus at Dissent magazine. Professor Walzer studied on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge and completed his PhD in government at Harvard University.
Keith Krueger can be reached at keithNBn@gmail.com
