Throughout this election cycle, we’ve seen the rise of the radical right reminiscent of the pull of ultraconservative organizations from the past; increasing calls to prevent new immigrants from entering our country; increased calls to improve gun control legislation; a resurging wave of religious intolerance against Muslim Americans; and nationwide protests imploring racial justice and economic progress. These issues and others that have made headlines in the news have become focal points in this year’s presidential debates. To help inform the conversation about these topics, we’re recommending a list of titles from our catalogue. Read more →
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By James W. Russell
The ad from TIAA-CREF, the company that administers university and other retirement plans, which ran alongside my Yahoo inbox was too enticing to ignore. I clicked on the bait: “You could get ninety percent of your income and maintain your lifestyle in retirement.” The click brought me to another eye-catching claim: “On average, participants in TIAA-administered plans are on track to replace over ninety percent of their income in retirement.” These were eye-catching claims because I had been in TIAA for over thirty-five years and would be replacing nowhere near ninety percent of my preretirement income. Nor would anyone else I knew who was in TIAA. Read more →By Stephen Kendrick
Autumn: New England’s residing glory, what people from all over the world come to see. Maybe we are used to it, or simply through familiarity do not realize our trees produce the greatest profusion of fall color in the world—but there it is. Nowhere else in the world are concentrated such orange-tinged russets, golds, and vivid reds. Our trees do us proud. There is only a short time to see all this; “leaf-peepers” are simply seekers of something rare and ephemeral. Mount Auburn, although a small player within these thousands of miles of burning fall tints, asserts itself every year as one of the special sites in the midst of nature’s color show. Read more →By Lyn Mikel Brown
As philosopher Peggy McIntosh, historian Howard Zinn, and others remind us, the history taught in school is told from the perspective of those in power, and for the most part this version has “left out the female half of humankind, and excluded the knowledge of most people of color worldwide about their own cultures and their versions of history.” It also deemphasizes how women, working people, and people of color have worked together within organized social movements to shape history. If social change “is made not by a few heroic individuals, but instead by people’s choices and actions,” as the Zinn Education Project website proclaims, then our “own choices and actions matter.” Read more →A Q&A; with Michael Bérubé
A capacious and supple sense of what it is to be human is better than a narrow and partial sense of what it is to be human, and the more participants we as a species can incorporate into the determination of what it means to be human, the greater the chances that we will enhance our collective capacities to recognize each other as humans entitled to human dignity. Read more →