Story in the Public Square

The history of 20th century autocracy seemed to race into the distance with the end of the Cold War. But Dr. Timothy Snyder cautions that in the decades since 1989, the West has seen the rise of new autocratic movements—some in traditional adversaries and some much closer to home.  

Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He has written eight books discussing issues in Central and Eastern Europe and co-edited three further texts surrounding similar topics. Snyder’s work has appeared in forty languages and has received a number of prizes, including the Emerson Prize in the Humanities, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Václav Havel Foundation prize, the Foundation for Polish Science prize in the social sciences, the Leipzig Award for European Understanding, the Dutch Auschwitz Committee award and the Hannah Arendt Prize in Political Thought. Snyder was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, has received the Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships and holds state orders from Estonia, Lithuania and Poland. He is currently researching a family history of nationalism and finishing a philosophical book about freedom. 

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Thomas Jefferson famously said he’d prefer newspapers without government over government without newspapers. In large parts of the United States today, government exists without independent news sources—undermining accountability and diminishing civic participation. Ellen Clegg and Dan Kennedy tell us that despite these troubling trends, there’s much to celebrate in the work of community news outlets around the country. 

Clegg spent over three decades at The Boston Globe and retired in 2018 after four years of running the opinion pages. In between stints at the Globe, she was deputy director of communications at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She is a member of the steering committee for the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship at the International Women’s Media Foundation and the co-founder and co-chair of Brookline.News, a nonprofit startup news organization. Kennedy is a Northeastern University professor in the School of Journalism and a nationally known media commentator. He was a panelist on the GBH News television program “Beat the Press” and a weekly columnist for the network. He was also a columnist for The Guardian and produces Media Nation, an online publication that serves as a media watchdog. Kennedy is a recipient of the Yankee Quill Award from the New England Academy of Journalists and the James W. Carey Journalism Award from the Media Ecology Association. 

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We take for granted that the “immigrant experience” is part of the American story. But in an epic new history Daniel Schulman tells the story of the Jewish immigrants who built some of America’s biggest financial institutions and transformed America. 

A best-selling author, Schulman is known for his first book, “Sons of Wichita,” a biography of the Koch brothers, which was a finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. His second book, “The Money Kings,” was recently released and details several German-Jewish immigrants who influenced the rise of modern finance in the United States, including Goldman Sachs, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers and J. & W. Seligman & Co. Beyond his books, Schulman is a journalist whose work has appeared in publications including the Boston Globe Magazine, Politico, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post and Mother Jones, where he is the magazine's deputy Washington, D.C. bureau chief.  

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Working together across party lines is anathema to much of political Washington, but Margaret Spellings says doing so is the only way to create solutions that last. 

A nationally recognized leader in public policy, Spellings serves as President and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center. Previously, Spellings was President and CEO of Texas 2036, president of University of North Carolina System and president of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas after she served as U.S. Secretary of Education. As secretary, she led the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, a bipartisan initiative to provide greater accountability for the education of 50 million U.S. public school students. She also launched the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, a plan to address challenges of access, affordability, quality and accountability in our nation’s colleges and universities. Before serving as secretary, Spellings was a White House domestic policy advisor, overseeing the agenda on education, transportation, health, justice, housing and labor.  

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Hollywood’s annual night-of-nights is upon us with the Academy Awards around the corner. Pete Hammond helps us take stock of the film industry and the films singled out for their powerful storytelling this year.  

Hammond, widely considered the pre-eminent awards analyst for film and television, is Deadline’s Awards Columnist covering the Oscar and Emmy seasons. He is also Deadline's Chief Film Critic, having previously reviewed films for MovieLine, Boxoffice magazine, Backstage, Hollywood.com and Maxim, as well as Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide where he was a contributing editor. In addition to writing, Hammond also hosts the KCET Cinema Series and the weekly KCET television series "Must See Movies." Previously, he held producing positions at “Entertainment Tonight,” “Extra,” “Access Hollywood,” “The Arsenio Hall Show,” “The Martin Short Show” and AMC Networks. He has received five Emmy nominations for writing and is only the second journalist to have received the Publicists Guild of America’s Press Award twice, in 1996 and 2013. 

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It's easy to listen to the news and conclude that we have never been more gripped by the so-called “Culture Wars.” But Kliph Nesteroff argues just the opposite: today’s conflict isn’t a fluke, it’s part of a long history of conflict, controversy and recrimination.  

Canadian comic Kliph Nesteroff is, according to the New York Times, the “premier popular historian of comedy.” He has authored two books since starting out as a stand-up comic, including “The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy” and “We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy.” His work has been praised by comedy legends from Gilbert Gottfried to Mel Brooks to Norm Macdonald. His forthcoming third book is titled “Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars.”  

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To some, the civil rights era seems like ancient history, but to others, it’s within living memory. Françoise N. Hamlin helps put the history of the era into a broader context about who we are as a people and what it means to be an American.  

Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor in history and Africana studies at Brown University. Prior to joining the faculty at Brown, Hamlin was a fellow at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Andrew Carnegie Foundation. She also spent several years as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Hamlin is the author of “Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II,” winner of the 2012 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize and the 2013 Lillian Smith Book Award. She also authored “These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War” and republished the previously self-published 1975 autobiography of Mississippi civil rights activist, Vera Pigee, “The Struggle of Struggles.” Her co-edited anthology, “From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle,” will be published in spring 2024.  

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Free speech is under assault in educational settings, school committees, university boards and political rallies across the United States. Suzanne Nossell warns the danger isn’t just about our access to books and ideas, but to the fundamental human rights and political freedoms we all hold dear.  

Nossell currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of PEN America, the leading human rights and free expression organization, and the author of “Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All.” She is a leading voice on free expression issues globally, having overseen groundbreaking work in Hong Kong, China, Myanmar, Eurasia and the United States. Her prior career spanned government service and leadership roles in the corporate and nonprofit sectors. She served under Presidents Obama and Clinton as well as for Amnesty International USA, Bertelsmann, and the Wall Street Journal. Nossell is also a featured columnist for Foreign Policy magazine and has published op-eds in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, and dozens of other outlets, as well as scholarly articles in Foreign Affairs, Dissent, Democracy, and other journals.  

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It’s easy to look at American politics, now, and find individuals for whom loyalty to party or an individual leader is the only thing that matters. But Richard Aldous tells us of another time when service to the nation was the highest service in public life. 

Aldous is the Eugene Meyer Professor of British history and Culture at Bard College  and specializes in twentieth-century history. He earned his Ph.D., from the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow in the Royal Historical Society. He has authored and edited 11 books, including “Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian,” “Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship,” “Macmillan, Eisenhower and the Cold War,” “The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli” and biographies of Malcolm Sargent and Tony Ryan. Aldous also taught for 15 years at University College Dublin, where he was chair of the History Department. He continues to write regularly for publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and The American Interest, where he is a contributing editor.  

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Most who write about politics focus on the horse-race of elections or the specifics of policies.  But Joanna Weiss says we should view American politics—especially current American politics—through a pop-culture lens.

Weiss is the executive director of the AI Literacy Lab at Northeastern University, a project to connect journalists and technologists. She is a contributing writer at POLITICO Magazine and is a former columnist, television critic, and political reporter at the Boston Globe; and the founding editor of Experience magazine, published by Northeastern University. She started her career covering Louisiana politics for the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, The Economist, Pacific Standard, and Boston Magazine, and was anthologized in the book “Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 Presidential Election.” She has appeared on local, national and international television and radio.

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