Story in the Public Square

The planet is warming.  This isn’t conjecture and it isn’t political: it’s the overwhelming conclusion of climate scientists from all over the world.  Now, for a long time, the debate has been over whether and how we mitigate the threats posed by climate change.  But Alice C. Hill warns that debate needs to be expanded to include a discussion about the things we must do to adapt human existence to a warmer planet.

Hill is the David M. Rubenstein senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations.  Her work focuses on the risks, consequences, and responses associated with climate change.  Hill previously served as special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff where she led the development of national policy to build resilience to catastrophic risks, including climate change and biological threats.  Her coauthored book, “Building a Resilient Tomorrow,” was published in 2019.  In 2020, Yale University and the Op-Ed Project awarded her the Public Voices Fellowship on the Climate Crisis.  Hill’s new book, “The Fight for Climate After COVID-19,” was published in September 2021.  In 2009, Hill served as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in which she led the formulation of DHS’s first-ever climate adaptation plan and the development of strategic plans regarding catastrophic biological and chemical threats, including pandemics.  While at the Department of Homeland Security, Hill founded and led the internationally recognized anti-human trafficking initiative, the Blue Campaign.  Earlier in her career, Hill served as supervising judge on both the superior and municipal courts in Los Angeles and as chief of the white-collar crime prosecution unit in the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney’s office. The Department of Justice awarded her its highest accolade, the John Marshall Award for Outstanding Legal Achievement.

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2021 is the second year of the pandemic, and it began, almost immediately, with a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol.  Dr. Evelyn Farkas helps us put the big stories of the last 12 months in context even as we name the top story of 2021.

Dr. Farkas has three decades of experience working on national security and foreign policy in the U.S. executive and legislative branches, the private sector and for international organizations overseas.  In 2019-2020, she ran to represent New York’s 17th Congressional District in the House of Representatives.  She is currently President of Farkas Global Strategies.  She was previously a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Atlantic Council and a National Security Contributor for NBC/MSNBC.   From 2012 to 2015, Farkas served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and the Caucasus and conventional arms control.  From 2010 to 2012 she served as Senior Advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Special Advisor to the Secretary of Defense for the NATO Summit.  Prior to that, she was Executive Director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism and senior fellow at the American Security Project.  From 2001 to 2008, she served as a Professional Staff Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee responsible for the Asia-Pacific region, the Western Hemisphere, Special Operations Command and policy issues including combatting terrorism, and export control.  From 1997-2001 Farkas was a professor of international relations at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College.  She served 1996-97 in Bosnia with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).  She has published numerous journal articles and opinion pieces, in addition to her book, “Fractured States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, Ethiopia, and Bosnia in the 1990s.”

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The demands society places on women—the choices they make about their lives, their relationships, and their appearance—can be overwhelming.  Lindsay Crouse exposes those expectations to the bright light of day and forces all of us to consider our own roles in them.

Crouse is a film producer and senior editor at The New York Times.  A Rhode Island native, she graduated from Harvard University, where she competed in both track and field and cross-country sports events.  She helped produce the 2017 documentary 4.1 Miles, which won an award at the 2017 Peabody awards.  Crouse first wrote about the female athletes who wanted to become mothers and faced pressure to continue competing and training that would jeopardize their health and pregnancy outcomes in October 2014.  In May 2019, she reported on Nike’s lack of maternity support for the female athletes it sponsors.  She produced a video interview and wrote an op-ed, about distance runner Mary Cain, entitled “I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike,” which was critical of both Nike and its chief coach, Alberto Salazar, for the grueling training methods and negative culture that profoundly affected Cain’s mental and physical health.  Following the publication of the article, Salazar was permanently suspended from participating in track and field events by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a nonprofit that protect athletes from sexual, physical and emotional abuse.  

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There are some who argue that the United States of America as a nation, should be defined by its civic identity. A federal Republic that’s found he promised equality under the law and Liberty to all of its people. But there’s a darker side to the American history too, one built on ethnonationalism and white supremacy.  Colin Woodard traces the rise and fall, and rise again of these competed ideas, over the long arc of our national history.

Woodard is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and Polk Award-winning journalist.  He is a respected authority on North American regionalism, the sociology of United States nationhood, and how our colonial past shapes and explains the present.  He is a POLITICO contributing editor and the State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where he was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.  A longtime foreign correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, for which he has reported from more than fifty countries.  Author of the award winning “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,” Woodard has written six books including “The Republic of Pirates,” a New York Times bestselling history of Blackbeard’s pirate gang that was made into a primetime NBC series with John Malkovich and Claire Foye, and “Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood.”  His work has appeared in dozens of publications including The Economist, The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Newsweek and Washington Monthly.

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Every president, every public servant in the United States, raises their hand and takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  Robert Costa says the end of the Trump presidency saw an unprecedented threat to the Constitutional order emanating from the White House itself.

Robert Costa is co-author of the new book, “Peril,” with Bob Woodward.  He has been a national political reporter at The Washington Post since 2014 and previously served as moderator and managing editor of “Washington Week” on PBS until 2021.  He was a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC before that.  Costa joined Washington Week with nearly a decade of reporting experience that began with coverage of movement politics and Capitol Hill, including the battle over health care policy during the Obama presidency and the 2010 mid-term elections.  In 2012, he covered the race for the Republican presidential nomination and published interviews with all the major candidates.  He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge.

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Since early 2000, the world has become familiar with the impacts of COVID-19: isolation, mask-wearing, and, for far too many, disease and death.  Dr. Shekhar Saxena says there’s another impact we are just beginning to grapple with: the way the pandemic has affected global mental health.

Saxena is Professor of the Practice of Global Mental Health at the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He served in the World Health Organization (WHO) from 1998 to 2018, and served as the Director of the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse from 2010 to 2018.  In 2017, he received the prestigious Leon Eisenberg Award from Harvard Medical School.  Saxena is the author of more than 350 academic papers.  He served as the editor of the Lancet Series on Global Mental Health 2007 and 2011 and the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development 2018.  He advises policymakers on prevention and management of mental, developmental, neurological and substance use disorders and suicide prevention, and is an active contributor to Harvard’s Global Mental Health initiative.

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Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much—and, generally speaking, they don’t agree on health care policy.  But Robert Hackey and Todd Olszewski tell us that there is a rich history and potential for actual cooperation on policies intended to keep Americans healthy and the nation strong.

Bob Hackey is a Professor of Health Policy and Management at Providence College and an Affiliate of the Taubman Center for American Politics & Policy at Brown University.  He is the author of two university press books on state health care regulation and the rhetoric of health care reform, and co-edited two other volumes on health care reform.  Hackey’s research on health care professions, health care in popular culture, state health planning, and the regulation of medical providers has appeared in more than 20 peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of the American Academy of PAs, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others.  In 2018, he served as a guest editor for the Rhode Island Medical Journal‘s special issue on the PA profession.  For more than a decade, his research has focused on how Americans talk about health care and health care reform.  He earned his Ph.D. in political science from Brown University in 1992.

Todd Olszewski is an associate professor of health policy and management at Providence College, where he also serves as associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence.  He was previously a Stetten Fellow in the History of the Biomedical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health.  He has published on the history of heart disease and clinical research in Annals of Internal Medicine, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and the Rhode Island Medical Journal.  Olszewski’s research focuses on how medical research and public health institutions—like the NIH—translate scientific discoveries into clinical practice, technological innovation, and public policy.  He earned his Ph.D. in history with a concentration in the history of medicine from Yale University in 2008.

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Forests have long been celebrated in literature as a repository or life and solitude.  But Dr. Suzanne Simard says they are also an important repository of wisdom—a wisdom passed from tree to tree as they communicate with one another.

Dr. Simard is a Professor of Forest Ecology in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada.  She is particularly known for her work on belowground networks that connect the creatures of the forest, and how these are fundamental to the complex adaptive nature of ecosystems. At UBC, she facilitates a vibrant research program, a teaching program focused on forest ecology and complexity science.  A strong contributor to the forestry profession in Canada, her research is motivated by her desire for protecting our fundamental right to a clean and healthy environment.  She contributes to this goal by conducting scientific research on the synergies and complexities of our natural world and the development of sustainable land stewardship practices that both conserve and protect the environment.  Her research is centered on understanding the vital relationships between plants, microbes, soils, carbon, nutrients and water that underlie the adaptability, resilience and recovery of ecosystems.  She works primarily in forests, but also grasslands, wetlands, tundra and alpine ecosystems.  She strives to communicate this research so that it is understandable and usable to all people and is dedicated to empowering people with science-based knowledge and tools to manage and heal the land from human impacts including climate change.

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The promise of a liberal arts education has always been the insight offered to us by classic texts about the human experience.  Emily Allen-Hornblower and Nafeesah Goldsmith tell us the appeal is not limited just to traditional students in classrooms, but also students learning in environments as challenging as the American judicial system.

Emily Allen-Hornblower is Associate Professor of Classics at Rutgers University.  She is a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and received her Ph.D in Classics from Harvard University.  She has published articles on archaic and classical Greek literature, Greek and Roman historiography, and the twentieth-century reception of Greek drama.  She is the author of “From Agent to Spectator: Witnessing the Aftermath in Ancient Greek Epic and Tragedy.”  Her areas of interest include, storytelling, religion and gender, ancient cultural history, ancient Greek and Roman epic, Greek drama, and social justice.  Her book and articles center on both ancient and modern conceptions and portrayals of the human condition, suffering, and connection and disconnection between individuals and groups.  Allen-Hornblower has taught Classics and world history in medium and maximum security prisons in New Jersey, as part of the Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons (NJ-STEP) program.

Nafeesah Goldsmith is the CEO of RISE, Real Intervention Supports Excellence, a mission-based sustainability initiative that supports initiatives that support at-risk communities and building prison-free futures.  When she was 21 years old, she began serving a 15-year prison sentence at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, where she began her college career through the Clinton College Bound/NJ-STEP program.  Goldsmith was released from prison on June 23, 2015, and dedicates her time to speaking on incarceration, reentry, the School to Prison Pipeline, and the effects of incarceration on families and communities.  She studied Criminal Justice at Monmouth University after earning a bachelor’s degree in Sociology.  She is also an alumna of Rutgers University and is currently pursuing a degree in law.

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On January 6, 2021, a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.  While our attention has been consumed with things like the pandemic, vaccines, and America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Scott MacFarlane reminds us that the investigations into the events of that day—and the prosecutions of those responsible—are just beginning.

MacFarlane is an investigative reporter with the News4 I-Team and joined NBC after almost a decade of work as a Capitol Hill reporter for the Cox Media Group.  He began his career as a reporter for CBS TV affiliates in Detroit, Cleveland, Grand Rapids and Syracuse.  MacFarlane also once served as a congressional staffer in the U.S. House of Representatives.  His work has led to the creation of five state laws, triggered federal prosecutions, and has been referenced in more than a dozen formal congressional hearings and floor speeches.  MacFarlane has interviewed U.S. presidents, dozens of U.S. senators, governors and a Supreme Court justice, and he's questioned press secretaries in the White House press briefing room.  He is the recipient of several awards for his work on behalf of children’s safety.  He won the Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism from the Child Welfare League of America in 2018.  His series of investigations on public school security has yielded several honors from the Associated Press and a series of Emmy and Edward R. Murrow awards.  His reporting on thoroughbred horse racing deaths in West Virginia triggered a series of new safety state regulations for the sport and earned an award from the Humane Society of the U.S. His series of investigations on the U.S. State Department was honored in 2020 by the National Press Club.  MacFarlane’s investigations of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs inspired a congressional review by the U.S. House Oversight Committee, which played and cited his news reports in a June 2019 hearing.

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