We have a lot of experts on what to do about poverty -- academics and policy makers.  Mia Birdsong has been working with a different sent of experts: poor people themselves.  She’s a Senior Fellow of the Economic Security Project, and her TED talk “The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn’t True” has been viewed almost two million times.  Now she has a new 4-part podcast at The Nation – it’s called “More Than Enough.”

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Kate Aronoff and Michael Kazin talk about socialism in America today—they are co-editors with Peter Drier of the new book We Own the Future, which includes chapters on sports, banks, work, health care, campaign finance, immigration, and families.

 

 

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Henry Louis Gates discovers slave-owners – and also slaves—in the family histories of some surprising people--on the PBS series “Finding Your Roots.”  On this season’s premiere, Anjelica Houston learned that one of her ancestors, who died in Maryland in 1811, was a slaveowner, and that in his will he acknowledged fathering four slave children.  Gates, the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, also talks about his collaboration with historian Eric Foner on the award-winning PBS documentary on Reconstruction. 

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Joe McCarthy as a predecessor of Donald Trump: the connections and similarities (“McCarthy was willing to assert things that he knew weren’t true, and did it with aplomb”) are traced by Jelani Cobb of The New Yorker and the Columbia University faculty.  He’s a contributor to the new McCarthy episode of the PBS series “American Experience.”

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Naomi Klein says that, to create a Green New Deal, we need to follow the example of the New Deal era of the 1930s,  when nothing would have happened without “massive pressure from social movements”  that “changed the calculus of what was possible.”   Naomi is the author of several number one bestsellers,  including “This Changes Everything.”

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The end of the year brings The Nation’s progressive honor roll for 2019 - honoring those who’ve done the steady work of advancing economic, social and racial justice.  John Nichols names the elected officials and also activists, organizations, and ideas that are shaping our future--including Ayanna Presley and the Sunrise Movement.

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This week India is on fire--with massive protests, and massive repression, of Muslim students saying “no” to the government’s move toward making India a Hindu nation – the great Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy explains.

 

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Brett Kavanaugh was not on the list of candidates for the Supreme Court that Trump released during the campaign – how did Kavanaugh end up ahead of everybody else?  Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post has that story --her new book is “Supreme Ambition: Brett Kavanaugh and the Conservative Takeover.” 

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What happens to pregnant women when anti-abortion state legislatures grant legal personhood to fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses?  What happens when pregnant women’s behavior is criminalized?  Katha Pollitt reports.

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 Bryce Covert has been examining strikes in America over the last couple of years.  More workers went on strike last year than at any time since 1986 – more than 20 years ago.  They include public sector workers, like teachers and nurses, and corporate employees, like auto and hotel workers – and even low-paid, part-time and temporary people who don’t have unions—like fast food workers and Uber drivers.  There's something happening here. . . 

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