This month’s installment of our 11 for '11 series of big picture conversations on the issues of our times. Today, we talk with Harvard experimental psychologist Stephen Pinker about his new book, Better Angels of Our Nature, about the history of violence, and why it's declined.
This month’s installment of our 11 for '11 series of big picture conversations on the issues of our times. Today, we talk with poet and journalist Eliza Griswold, about her book The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Griswold spend seven years traveling the band of the globe called the 'tenth parallel,' the latitude about ten degrees above the equator where two worlds collide. She visited the mega-cities and remote villages of Central Africa and South Asia, where more than half of the world's 2 billion Christians live along with half of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. It is here, far from the Middle East, where disputes over ethnicity, land, water, and oil are shrouded in conflicts over faith.
This month’s installment of our 11 for '11 series of big picture conversations on the issues of our times. Today, we talk with psychologist, author and blogger Bruce Levine, a radical progressive calling for the resurgence of an active and energized democracy. Polls show that politicians are out of step with the will of the citizens on issues like the wall street bailout, health care reform and the current deadlock over raising the debt ceiling. A Washington Post - ABC News poll says 72% of Americans want to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans, yet several Republican lawmakers have pledged to avoid any compromise that would raise taxes. If it were up to Levine, that 72% would be marching in the streets.
This month’s installment of our 11 for '11 series of big picture conversations on the issues of our times. Today, it’s energy, specifially oil. Oil is trading at 112-dollars a barrel, up from 86-dollars a year ago. Michael Klare says the era of easy oil is behind us. He’s made news for his concept of “extreme energy” – the pursuit of fossil fuels in increasingly difficult environments using expensive and sometimes dangerous methods. Klare’s most recent book, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet frames today’s political and social unrest as driven by growing competition for diminishing resources and predicts that the stakes will get higher in the future.
