Story in the Public Square

There was a time in the United States—not that long ago, actually—when local newspapers played an undisputed positive role in holding people in authority to account.  Daniel Golden is a journalist practicing his craft in that great tradition.

Golden is a Boston-based senior editor and reporter at ProPublica.  He has been instrumental in three Pulitzer Prizes, two as an editor and one as a reporter.  He co-edited a ProPublica series on Latin American asylum-seekers caught between the U.S. government and the MS-13 gang, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.  Before joining ProPublica, he worked as managing editor for education and enterprise at Bloomberg News.  There he edited a series about tax inversions—companies moving headquarters overseas to avoid taxes—that earned Bloomberg’s only Pulitzer Prize in 2015.  Golden won a Pulitzer as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in 2004 for a series of articles on preferences for children and donors in college admissions. He expanded that series into a critically acclaimed national bestseller, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.” An updated edition was published in October 2019 with new reporting on the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.  He is co-author of “Spy Schools: How The CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities,” with Renee Dudley.  Golden spent 17 years as a staff reporter at the Boston Globe, including a stint on its Spotlight team, and served as senior editor for investigations at Conde Nast Portfolio.  He has won three George Polk awards, three National Headliner awards, the Sigma Delta Chi award, the Gerald Loeb Award, among others.

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Writing and creative expression have long been among the defining characteristics of humanity as a species.  But Naomi Baron chronicles the rise of artificial intelligence and its myriad abilities to write, to compose, to create—and what it means for our humanity.

Baron’s research interests include language and technology, reading, first language acquisition, the relationship between speech and writing and the history and structure of English.  A former Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Fellow, Fulbright Specialist, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, she has published ten books.  “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World” won the English-Speaking Union’s Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Award for 2008.  “Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World” appeared in 2015.  “How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio” was published in March 2021.  She examines artificial intelligence and writing in her newest book, “Who Wrote This? How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing,” published in 2023.  Baron taught at Brown University, Emory University, and Southwestern University and American University.  She has appeared extensively in the media, including interviews on “Good Morning America,” ABC News’ “20/20,” CNN, NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show” and “All Things Considered,” the BBC, and has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, among others.

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Persistent Organic Pollutants: you don’t need a Ph.D. in chemistry to recognize realize they are dangerous.  But Dr. Rainer Lohmann has been studying POPs for some time and their danger to the environment and human beings.

Lohmann’s research combines marine organic geochemistry and environmental chemistry to study recalcitrant organic compounds, including persistent organic pollutants on the molecular level.  He has led Superfund Research Center at the University of Rhode Island since 2018, one among roughly 20 nationwide.  The Center is a collaboration with scientists from Harvard University and the Silent Spring Institute.  It focuses on the Sources, Transport, Exposure and Effects of PFASs—poly- and perfluorinated alkyl substances.  Lohmann has engaged decision-makers by working with scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Environment Canada to advance the use of novel sampling devices to better characterize fluxes of organic pollutants in water and air.  Lohmann is currently one of several scientists from around the world coordinating the AQUA-GAPS program, a joint effort with the Czech Republic’s RECETOX initiative at Masaryk University, which conducts research and education around managing the environmental and health risks associated with the chemicals around us.  The AQUA-GAPS program promotes the use of passive samplers for legacy and emerging organic contaminants in the waters of the world is now underway.

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The year began with chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives and ended much the same.  Along the way, we saw technology demonstrate its potential to reshape human productivity and creativity; we have seen wars and violence; and we have worried aloud about the health of American Democracy. Dr. Evelyn Farkas helps us take stock of all of that and name our 2023 “Story of the Year.”   

Farkas is one of the nation’s premier voices on American foreign policy and geopolitics, and one of the nation’s most-trusted experts on U.S.-Russia relations. Some of her former positions include: the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the U.S. Department of Defense’s top Russia expert under President Barack Obama and advisor to three U.S. Secretaries of Defense during her tenure at the Pentagon. She serves as a Senior Fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States and worked in Congress as well as the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). She was a professor of international relations at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Marine Corps University and is the author of “Fractured States and US Foreign Policy: Iraq, Ethiopia, and Bosnia in the 1990s.” Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe, and more.   

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From the violence in the Middle East to the dysfunction in Congress, the world feels increasingly untethered. Tom Nichols spent his early career analyzing threats to American security and now is unapologetic in his warnings about the threats to American democracy.   

Nichols is an author and a staff writer for The Atlantic. His expertise encompasses a broad range of topics, including nuclear weapons, international security, Russia, and the overarching challenges to democracy globally and in the United States. Nichols has a background as a legislative aide in both the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. He taught at the U.S. Naval War College for 25 years and now holds the position of professor emeritus. Among his published works are “The Death of Expertise” and “Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy.” 

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The elements of a scary story might be exotic, super-natural, or even mundane. Tananarive Due weaves all of those things together in an ethereal world of her creation to explore the violence of the Jim Crow South.   

Due is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at the University of California-Los Angeles. She is an executive producer for the documentary “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror” and has written for “The Twilight Zone” and “Horror Noire” projects. She is co-writing a Black horror graphic novel, “The Keeper,” alongside her husband, Steven Barnes. Due’s work in the Black speculative fiction genre has won various awards including an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award. Her books include “Ghost Summer: Stories,” “My Soul to Keep,” and “The Good House.” She co-authored “Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir” with her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Due. Her new historical fiction book, “The Reformatory,” is based on the life of her relative, Robert Stephens. Set in Jim Crow Florida, it follows twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr. who is sent to a reformatory, where he must learn how to navigate the harsh reality of the Jim Crow South. 

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Globalization is often portrayed as the bogeyman in American politics. Thomas Barnett credits it with making the world better, more peaceful, and even more equitable. In the future, he argues, it will continue to drive even more profound shifts in the way the world operates—with real challenges for American leadership and security. 

​​Barnett is a strategic planner who has worked in United States national security affairs across his entire career.  He also operates a consulting practice, Barnett Consulting LLC. A  “New York Times" bestselling author and nationally known public speaker who addresses government officials as a forecaster of global conflict and an expert on globalization.  Barnett is the author of three bestselling books, including, “America's New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse,” which was released this year. Barnett was a Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College, Newport RI.  There, he taught and served – in a senior advisory role – military and civilian leaders in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Central Command, Special Operations Command, and Joint Forces Command. He co-authored the U.S. Navy’s historic white paper “From The Sea;” and pioneering and managing CNAC’s contractual relationship with the U.S. Agency for International Development.  

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Everyone faces challenges in life, but when those challenges are born of trauma, the challenge to persevere becomes more daunting. Dr. Jonathan DePierro discusses the science of resilience and how we can all thrive in the wake of adversity.   

DePierro is the Associate Director of the Center for Stress, Resilience and Personal Growth which provides comprehensive programming to support the resilience and mental health of Mount Sinai faculty, staff, and trainees. His clinical expertise is in the treatment of trauma-related mental health conditions, and the development and delivery of flexible resilience-building interventions. DePierro also teaches Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.  His new book “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges” includes three experts in trauma and resilience to answer what helps people adapt to life’s most challenging situations.  

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The transition from childhood to adulthood ushers in a wide variety of difficult questions like who actually loves us, and why. Nyani Nkrumah explores those coming-of-age themes, as well as issues of race, identity, trauma, and who is responsible for the person we actually are.   

Nkrumah was born in Boston and grew up in Ghana, West Africa and later Zimbabwe. Nkrumah holds a doctorate from Cornell University and attributes her love of writing to her mother, a former English and literature teacher who entertained her kids by reciting poetry and Shakespeare soliloquies on the way to school. Her book, “Wade in the Water,” tells the story of an unforgettable summer in 1982 seen largely through the eyes of Ella, an 11-year-old black girl trying to overcome familial abuse.  

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For too long, the history we’ve considered “America’s” has really just been the history of European conquest. Ned Blackhawk argues that there is no American history without its first, indigenous inhabitants. 

Blackhawk is a Professor of History and American Studies at Yale. He is the author of “Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the early American West,” a study of the American Great Basin that garnered half a dozen professional prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians. In addition to serving in professional associations and on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and Ethnohistory, Blackhawk has led the establishment of two fellowships, one for American Indian Students to attend the Western History Association’s annual conference, the other for doctoral students working on American Indian Studies dissertations at Yale named after Henry Roe Cloud.

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