New America NYC: Recent Episodes
New America
Events from New America NYC featuring innovative policy ideas from some of the best minds of our time.
New America NYC and NYU's McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research have teamed up to produce an inaugural conversation on June 18th to highlight the necessity of early and sustained census preparation in keeping our democratic institutions equitably funded and accessible.
Imagine a centralized database replete with your personal information that links together your and your family’s vital health, education, and social welfare records. Now imagine the database includes an entire country’s population.
Fifty years ago this year, Denmark launched the world's first nationalized big data project. The country's Civil Personal Registration (CPR) system assigns every resident a "digital ID" that directly connects them with the Danish state to facilitate government-citizen interactions from birth to death and everywhere in between. Originally created to render tax collection and the distribution of social benefits more efficient, the system has become a popular and benevolent instrument in Denmark built on the values of trust in government and sense of community.
Now similar data infrastructures—often built by private sector platforms—are being applied across the globe, but in a climate in which data breaches are growing more frequent and more severe, their implications must adapt to the opportunities—and account for the challenges—of twenty-first century technology. How can citizens ensure their personal data isn't vulnerable to hacking and that their privacy rights are being upheld? What safeguards must government and the private sector take on to guarantee data is used and stored securely? What do CPR-modeled platforms mean for the future of digital democracy?
Join New America NYC, in partnership with the Consulate General of Denmark in New York and Columbia University's European Institute, for a set of conversations on the past, present, and future of digital identity—and the measures we need in place to ensure its use for good.
WELCOMING REMARKS Elana Broitman @elanabroitmanDirector, New America NYC
Tom FrestonBoard Member and Chair, New America NYC Advisory Council
OPENING REMARKS Ambassador Jonas Bering-LiisbergState Secretary for Foreign Policy, Kingdom of Denmark
SESSION 1 Mikkel Hagen Hess @mikkelhess
Director, Invest in Denmark, North America Don Thibeau @4thibeau
Executive Director, OpenID Foundation
Zia Khan @ZiaKhanNYC Vice President, Initiatives and Strategy, The Rockefeller Foundation
Michael IbachChief Analytics Officer, United Nations
Tara Nathan @Thetaranation Executive Vice President, Public-Private Partnerships, MasterCard
Louise Matsakis @lmatsakisStaff writer, WIRED
SESSION 2 Rebecca MacKinnon @rmack Director, Ranking Digital Rights, New America Jacob Mchangama @JMchangama
Founder and CEO, Justitia
John Paul Farmer @johnpaulfarmer Director, Technology and Civic Innovation, Microsoft
Amanda Graham @BCCBlockchainCo-founder and Chief Services Officer, Blockchain for Change
David K. Park @davidchungparkDean of Strategic Initiatives, Arts & Sciences, and Faculty Member, Data Science Institute, Columbia University
Natasha Singer @natashanytTechnology reporter, The New York Times
This event is presented in partnership with the Consulate General of Denmark in New York with additional support from the European Institute at Columbia University.
There are no good guys in this story, including me. – Dan David, GeoInvesting
After the 2008 financial collapse, U.S. investors began scouring global markets for new opportunities for high returns, and they turned to China to take part in its explosive economic growth. Looking beyond profits that seemed too good to be true, a band of rogue Wall Street outsiders uncovered a massive web of multibillion-dollar fraud.
From the producers of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, The China Hustle** takes a deep dive into China's economic miracle to reveal how many ordinary Americans who want to invest in China's dynamic growth—through pension funds, retirement savings, and mutual funds—are unaware they could be holding billions of dollars of junk.
Academy-Award® nominee Jed Rothstein follows Dan David and a group of whistleblower investors who go to China to discover a landscape ripe for fraud. Working with Chinese investigators who put their freedom at stake, they expose hundreds of small Chinese companies that have vastly overvalued their assets, revenues, and and future prospects—representing 1.1 trillion dollars in market value on the NYSE and NASDAQ—and the American companies willing to turn a blind eye while they rake in huge profits.
Join New America NYC for an advanced screening of The China Hustle and a conversation with the film's director, key subject, and experts that considers the accountability and transparency needed to protect investors and asks: what will happen if the China bubble bursts?
PARTICIPANTS Jed Rothstein @boerumhillfilm
Director, The China Hustle
Dan David
Chief Investment Officer, F.G. Alpha Management, and Co-founder, GeoInvesting
Featured subject, The China Hustle
Dune Lawrence @DuneLawrence Investigative Reporter, Bloomberg & Businessweek
Jiayang Fan @JiayangFan
Staff writer, The New Yorker
Optimism is a moral choice. – Dr. Jim Yong Kim
Thirty years ago, as much of the world was being ravaged by horrific diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, three young people, not yet out of medical school, set out to provide healthcare for Haiti's rural poor. They went on to spend the next three decades on the frontlines of health crises across the globe.
Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, and Ophelia Dahl came together to deliver a world-class level of care — the kind they would expect for their own families — and build health clinics in remote areas ignored by everyone else. Their idea was controversial and revolutionary: to create partnerships with the patients themselves by training ordinary villagers as healthcare workers. Despite enormous resistance from the outside world, they made groundbreaking advances in combating the life-threatening conditions of impoverished communities and against the spread of pandemics including drug-resistant TB, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola.
Their inspiring vision is the subject of Bending the Arc, a new film by Academy Award® nominees Kief Davidson, Pedro Kos, and Cori Shepherd Stern. Through candid interviews and never-before-seen archival footage, the film profiles the fiercely dedicated group of doctors and activists as they deliver the highest-quality care in the most unlikely places.
Join New America NYC for a screening of Bending the Arc and a conversation with global health practitioners and experts to ask: is healthcare a privilege for those who can afford it or a basic human right?
***INTRODUCTION*** **Nina Fialkow**
Executive Producer, Bending the Arc
Chair, Massachusetts Cultural Council
PARTICIPANTS Natalia Kanem, MD, MPH @Atayeshe
Executive Director, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
Alishya Mayfield, MD, MPH
Senior Clinical Adviser on Strategy, Partners in Health (PIH)
Anatole Manzi, PhD
Director of Clinical Practice, Partners in Health (PIH)
Donna Patterson, PhD @PharmacySenegal
International Security Fellow, New America
Associate Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies, Delaware State University
Lori Adelman @Ladelman
Executive Director, Feministing
Director of Youth Engagement, Women Deliver
*This event is presented in partnership with Tumblr.*
In January 2013, on an early morning in Guatemala City, soldiers with automatic weapons are standing on street corners. A long line of Mayan women and men head into the high court, an institution historically dominated by the interests of a small white elite minority. Just three decades earlier, the ruling elite, with U.S. backing, engineered a coup that would topple a democratically elected government and unleash a dark period of repression and massacres. 200,000 mostly indigenous people were murdered; 45,000 urban artists, intellectuals, and activists disappeared.
Thirteen years later, the Mayan survivors and activists prevailed: former president Efraín Ríos Montt was brought before the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and a citizen uprising forced a corrupt president, Otto Perez Molina, to resign.
This heroic story is the subject of 500 Years, the third installment in Director Pamela Yates’s The Resistance Saga trilogy. Focusing on universal themes of racism, power, corruption, and social justice, 500 Years tells the story through the eyes of the majority indigenous Mayan population in Guatemala. It highlights how the ongoing struggle for human rights galvanized activists, especially women, to emerge as eloquent, powerful leaders of their community and country.
Join New America NYC for a screening of 500 Years and a conversation with the filmmaker, activists, and global experts about justice in the face of structural racism and how the force of sustained nonviolent resistance can make it possible for right to make might.
PARTICIPANTS Pamela Yates @pameladyates
Director, 500 Years
Monica Aleman Cunningham @ACunningham2013
Senior Program Officer, Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD), Ford Foundation
Andrea Ixchíu @Andreakomio
Mayan activist featured in 500 Years
Many American workers are unwell. They live with serious economic insecurity; succumb to diabetes, depression, and addiction at alarming rates; and struggle to balance the conflicting needs of their employers, their families, and their own well-being. That outlook won’t improve until we think of health as the driver of prosperity — not just the product of it.
In the U.S., we spend extravagantly on treating illness but spend proportionally less on keeping people healthy than most developed nations. But research shows a strong correlation between healthy communities with little economic disparity and healthy economies. People live longer in the nation's more equal states. What can we do to change the country's focus from health care as a cost with limited returns, to health as an investment that pays off over the long term — socially and economically? How can we better elevate health as a policy priority?
Join New America NYC for a conversation on the future of health and wellness — and what both governments and the private sector can do to improve its outlook.
PARTICIPANTS Esther Dyson @edyson Executive Founder, Way to Wellville, and health investor
Dr. Herminia Palacio @HerminiaPalacio Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, City of New York
Manmeet Kaur @ManmeetKaurNY Founder and Executive Director, City Health Works
Melanie Lavelle @Mglavelle Founder, Benefit Kitchen
Dan Goldberg @DanCGoldberg
Senior Health Reporter, Politico
The United States and China are in a race to build the world’s first quantum machine, and whoever crosses the finish line first will attain global dominance for generations to come.
In The Quantum Spy, a new genre-bending thriller, New York Times bestselling author and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius tells the fictional story of a hyper-fast quantum computer—the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb—able to shred any encryption and break any code in existence. When top-secret U.S. research labs are compromised by a suspected Chinese informant, CIA officer Harris Chang sets in motion a history-altering investigation that forces him to question he thinks about loyalty, diplomacy, and the primacy of truth.
Couched in the real-world technological arms race, the novel asks pivotal questions about contemporary national security issues—the competition to achieve quantum computing technology, the high stakes rivalry between the U.S. and China, and the conduct of spycraft in the digital age.
Join New America NYC for a conversation with David Ignatius and Karen Greenberg on the fictional tale of cyber espionage—and what it tells us about the real-world threats with which national security policy must contend.
PARTICIPANTS David Ignatius @IgnatiusPost
Columnist, The Washington Post
Author, The Director and The Quantum Spy
Karen Greenberg @KarenGreenberg3Director, Center on National Security, Fordham University School of Law
Author, Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State
Today, almost half of the American workforce earns less than $15 per hour and a third of working-age men are either unemployed or unable to keep a family of four out of poverty. Few have sufficient savings to retire with, while businesses continue to push healthcare and other social safety costs onto their employees. Yet American companies are far from struggling. Is the contract between employee and employer broken?
In his new book, The End of Loyalty, Rick Wartzman chronicles the erosion of the relationship between American companies and their workers through the histories of four major American employers — General Motors, General Electric, Kodak, and Coca-Cola. Wartzman argues that big businesses once took responsibility for providing their workers and retirees with an array of social benefits, but in a twenty-first century economy turbocharged by the pace of technology, access to a good, stable job no longer guarantees access to the American Dream. The cause, he says, is clear: the American workforce cannot thrive if it clings to systems that preference shareholders over employees and productivity over morale.
Join New America NYC for a conversation on the past, present, and future of work — and how technology can play a more constructive role in fostering effective systems for both workers and businesses.
PARTICIPANTS Rick Wartzman @RWartzman
Senior Advisor and former Executive Director, Drucker Institute
Author, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America
Ai-jen Poo @aijenpoo
Executive Director, National Domestic Workers Alliance
Co-director, Caring Across Generations
2014 MacArthur "Genius" Award winner
Jessica Lin @jerseejess
Co-founder and General Partner, Work-Bench
Kristin Sharp @ktsharp2Executive Director, Shift: The Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology, New America
When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States’ total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged.
According to a new book by Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money, this absence of wealth isn't just a failure to atone for oppression imposed by slavery and Jim Crow — it's the product of contemporary acts to maintain their legacies.
Today, the racial wealth gap persists in building wealth for those who already have it and sowing debt among those who don't. Many policies animated by this trend — fees and fines levied my municipal governments and the criminal justice system; residential segregation; the rise of predatory payday lenders — disappear mainstream banks from communities of color, pass off responsibility of investment in their wealth, and enforce conditions that disproportionately push them from profit to poverty.
Join New America NYC and the NYU McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research for a conversation with legal, business, and racial equity leaders on the fight for economic justice and how to pioneer strategies that reform how government works — and who it serves.
OPENING REMARKS Scott M. Stringer @NYCComptroller
Comptroller, City of New York
PARTICIPANTS Mehrsa Baradaran @MehrsaBaradaran J. Alton Hosch Associate Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law
Author, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
Blondel Pinnock @blondelSenior Vice President and Chief Lending Officer, Carver Federal Savings Bank
Anne Stuhldreher @AnneStuhldreher Director of Financial Justice, City and County of San Francisco
Fellow, New America CA
Clyde Vanel @clydevanelAssembly Member (D-33), State of New York
Michael Lindsey @DrMikeLindseyDirector, McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research, New York University
On Sunday, October 8th, join New America NYC for a private screening of Human Flow, a sweeping new film by world-renowned artist, activist, and icon Ai Weiwei, followed by a conversation with Richard Gere and David Miliband** on the plight of refugees all over the world.
More than 65 million people have been forcibly displaced due to war, persecution, climate change, and crushing poverty in the greatest human displacement since World War II. Setting out on a journey across 23 countries, Ai Weiwei, who spent his own childhood as a displaced person during China's Cultural Revolution, follows a chain of urgent human stories across the globe to bear witness to this massive human migration, elucidating both the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its intimately personal human impact.
From perilous ocean crossings to barbed-wire borders, Ai follows the desperate attempts of men, women, and children as they move from dislocation and disillusionment to endurance and adaptation. HumanFlow is a testament to the unassailable human spirit and poses a question that will define this century's greatest human rights challenge: will we emerge from fear and isolation and choose a path of freedom and respect for one another?
SPEAKERS Ai Weiwei @aiwwArtist and activist
Director, Human Flow
Richard GereActor and humanitarian
David Miliband @DMilibandPresident and CEO, International Rescue Committee
Former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, United Kingdom
Extremism across the continent of Africa has been widely researched and reported; less covered are the stories of those who have been survivors—and resisters—of it.
A Moonless, Starless Sky, the debut book by New America National Fellow, Alexis Okeowo, is a vivid account of Africans who are courageously countering their continent's wave of fundamentalism. Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's LRA; a Mauritanian waging a lonely campaign against modern-day slavery; a women's basketball league flourishing amid war-torn Somalia; and a vigilante who takes up arms against the extremist group Boko Haram.
Complicating the simplistic good-guy, bad-guy narratives common in describing the continent, the book illuminates the inner lives of ordinary people doing the extraordinary — lives that are too often hidden, underreported, or ignored by the rest of the world.
The only United States bank indicted for mortgage fraud related to the 2008 financial crisis is the one you’ve never heard of.
Charged with securities fraud, mortgage fraud, and conspiracy, Chinatown’s Abacus Federal Savings Bank — the country's 2,531st largest bank and a cornerstone of the Chinese immigrant community — became the only bank in the U.S. to face criminal charges in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Part legal thriller, part underdog saga, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, a film from director Steve James (Hoop Dreams, Life, Itself),tells the incredible tale of the Sung family and their five-year, ten-million-dollar legal battle to defend themselves and their bank’s legacy.
Thomas Sung, a prominent lawyer and real estate developer, opened the Abacus bank in 1984 to provide the small housing and business loans that Chinatown’s residents and business owners were routinely denied. The small, fiscally conservative bank weathered the 2008 worldwide economic meltdown, but at the same time large, global banking institutions were deemed “too-big-to-fail” and given bailouts, Abacus saw its employees marched out of the bank in chains for the evening news.
For her entire life, German-born and -educated Souad Mekhennet has had to balance the two sides of her upbringing—Muslim and Western—and provide a mediating voice between these cultures, which too often misunderstand each other.
In Mekhennet's new memoir, I Was Told To Come Alone, she journeys behind the lines of jihad, starting in the German neighborhoods where the 9/11 plotters were radicalized and culminating on the Turkish-Syrian border where ISIS is a daily presence. Traveling across the Middle East and North Africa, she documents the failed promise of the Arab Spring, and then returns to Europe, where she uncovers the identity of notorious ISIS executioner "Jihadi John" and delves into the terror that has pierced the heart of Western civilization.
With unprecedented access to some of the world's most wanted men, she's told to never come alone to an interview. As she gets closer and closer to the inner circles of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and their affiliates, she can never underestimate the personal danger that awaits her destination.
Join New America NYC for the release of New America fellow Souad Mekhennet's I Was Told To Come Alone and for a conversation on her journey coming face to face with the figures most of us confront only in news headlines.
PARTICIPANTS Souad Mekhennet @smekhennet
Correspondent, The Washington Post
Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow, New America
Author, I Was Told To Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad
Alexis Okeowo @alexis_okStaff writer, The New YorkerFellow, New America
Author, A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa (forthcoming)
The future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.— James Baldwin
In the final years of his life, James Baldwin began writing Remember This House, a personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his closest friends—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Now, more than 30 years later, a new documentary picks up those letters and unfinished manuscripts to explore how race became the defining struggle of American society.
I Am Not Your Negro , an Academy Award-nominated film by Raoul Peck,is an up-to-the-minute examination of race in America. Using Baldwin's original words and a spellbinding flood of archival material, the film is a journey into the black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights Movement to the present of Black Lives Matter. Baldwin's legacy makes one thing clear: the piercing endurance of racism—and the very definition of what America stands for—remains as relevant as ever.
On the eve of its theatrical release, New America NYC presented a screening of I Am Not Your Negro and a conversation on how we can better face—and change—the racial divide in America.
PARTICIPANTS Hébert Peck @IAmNotYourNegroProducer, I Am Not Your Negro
Nikole Hannah-Jones @nhannahjonesStaff Writer, The New York Times MagazineEmerson Fellow, New America
Aisha Karefa-Smart @afroculinistaAuthor and niece of James Baldwin
Jamil Smith @JamilSmith
Senior National Correspondent, MTV News
As the debate about which bathroom transgender people should use continues, a more complex question is emerging about how early the medical transition begins for trans kids.
Families and doctors are rewriting the rules as they decide when and how to start medical intervention before transgender youth hit puberty. In a special VICE on HBO episode, VICE correspondent Gianna Toboni explores this emotionally charged and rapidly evolving issue with trans youth and their parents in the midst of this intense process.
On August 9, New America NYC and VICE presented a special screening of VICE on HBO's Trans Youth at Lincoln Center, followed by a talkback with the segment's producers and some of the featured family members on the state of the transgender rights movement today.
PARTICIPANTS Tom, Rachel, and Max O'Brien
Featured subjects, Trans Youth
Nicole BozorgmirProducer, Trans Youth, VICE on HBO
Hendrik Hinzel @JH_Hinzel Associate Producer, Trans Youth, VICE on HBO
Tim Clancy @FancyTimClancy
Executive Producer, VICE on HBO
The regime’s biggest fears were those who held cameras, so they were the first to be eliminated. — Obaidah Zytoon, co-director, The War Show
When the Arab Spring reached Syria in 2011, 35-year-old radio DJ Obaidah Zytoon joined the revolution armed with two things: a video camera and hope. The portrait that resulted—encapsulating both the euphoria of protest and the devastating violence—is the subject of the 2016 Venice Days Award-winning documentary, The War Show.
Against the brutal backdrop of chaos and civil war, The War Show unfolds as an intimate account of the daily lives of Zytoon and her friends—among them a dentist, law student, and poet—and the transformations they endure documenting their own experiences of the Syrian conflict. But as protest marches turn into funerals, their ideas about the resistance—and their own identities—splinter. One thing, however, becomes clearer: the camera footage they collect doesn't just record the revolution—it is the revolution.
On May 9, New America NYC presented a screening of The War Show and a conversation with the film's producer and human rights experts on the state of the Syrian civil war, its estimated 11 million refugees, and what it'll take to move closer to resolution and peace.
INTRODUCTION Justine Nagan @justinenagan
Executive Director, American Documentary, Inc.
Executive Producer, POV & America ReFramed
PARTICIPANTS Alaa Hassan @Alaa7assan
Producer, The War Show
Sarah Mehta @sarahlmehtaAttorney and Researcher, Human Rights Program, ACLU
Sana Mustafa @sanasyr6Syrian refugee and social activist
Gissou Nia @gissounia
Human rights lawyer and Strategy Director, Purpose
Baltimore is a city fighting to save its youth. In the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, the inaugural class of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women began their senior year. Established in 2009, the charter school had a simple mandate: send every girl to college, regardless of any barriers their home lives and communities might present.
Step, the 2017 Sundance Special Jury Award winner for Inspirational Filmmaking by directorAmanda Lipitz, chronicles this pressure-filled year and the girls' dedication to a source of empowerment: the school step team. We follow the trials and triumphs – on and off the stage – of three tenacious seniors and the women who champion and challenge them, as their commitment to step becomes more than just a hobby, but a new approach to life.
PARTICIPANTS Amanda Lipitz @stepthemovie
Director, Step
Abigail Swisher @Abigail_Swisher****
Program Associate, Education Policy Program, New America
Paula Dofat @pauladofat
Director of College Counseling, Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women
Unique Brathwaite @LIFTcommunities
Executive Director, LIFT – New York
Blessin Giraldo @BlessinGiraldo1
Alumna, Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women
Cori Grainger @JustCoriG
Alumna, Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women
Tayla Solomon @notmyfor_tay
Alumna, Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women
When unarmed teenager Michael Brown, Jr. was killed by police and left lying in the street for hours, it marked a breaking point for the residents of St. Louis, Missouri. Grief, long-standing racial bias, and renewed anger brought together residents and activists from across the nation to confront this flashpoint in a long history of injustice.
Their stories are the subject of Whose Streets?, a new film narrated by the artists, parents, teachers, and children of Ferguson working to counter the mainstream media headlines that characterized the protests as looting, fire, and mayhem. Their cell phone video footage and social media updates tell another story: as the National Guard descended on Ferguson, nonviolent organizers were met with military-grade riot gear, their right to peaceful assembly rescinded. As we approach the third anniversary of Brown’s death, the struggle persists and these young community members have stepped up to become the torchbearers of a new wave of resistance. For them, the battle is not only for civil rights, but for the right to live.
Sabaah Folayan @sabaahfolayan
Director and Producer, Whose Streets?
Damon Davis @heartacheNpaint
Co-director and Producer, Whose Streets?
Rashad Robinson @rashadrobinson
Executive Director, Color of Change
Opal Tometi @opalayo
Co-founder, #BlackLivesMatter
Executive Director, Black Alliance for Just Immigration
Jimmie Briggs @briggsjimmieAward-winning journalist, public speaker, and author
The traditional narrative of the American Dream — hard work, steady saving, and a little bit of luck will lead to security today and mobility tomorrow — has all but become an American Myth.
Today, insecurity is so pronounced that 92 percent of Americans, when asked to choose between being a little richer or more financially stable, chose stability. But amidst 30 years of wage stagnation and radically decreased mobility, neither has been attainable.
In The Financial Diaries, authors Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider track the financial lives of 235 low- and middle-income households to cast a light on the pervasive economic anxiety felt across the country. The individuals they profile — among them a casino dealer, a street vendor, and a tax preparer — challenge popular assumptions about how Americans earn, spend, borrow, and save and suggest new tools the U.S. needs to correct the broader distress of income and wealth inequality.
Join New America NYC for a conversation on the growing financial instability Americans face and the policy interventions needed to better support those who need it most.
OPENING REMARKS: Xavier de Souza Briggs @xavbriggs
Vice President, Economic Opportunity and Markets, Ford Foundation
PARTICIPANTS Jonathan Morduch @JMorduch** Professor of Public Policy and Economics and Director, Financial Access Initiative, New York University
Co-author, The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty
Rachel Schneider @RachelSchneider** Senior Vice President, Center for Financial Services Innovation
Co-author, The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty
Justin KingPolicy Director, Family-Centered Social Policy, New America
Unique BrathwaiteExecutive Director, LIFT–New York
Alex Goldmark @alexgoldmark**** Supervising Producer, Planet Money, NPR
Amidst daily revelations about Russia's global web of influence, is there a way to chart a path ahead?
Not since the end of the Cold War has Russia received as much front page media attention as it gets today. Russia has been blamed for several recent global upsets — Trump's election, Le Pen's surge, and Assad's ability to remain in power. At the same time Russian oligarchs have structured a network of financial influence across Europe and into the U.S., Russian media has been charged with turning into an unabashed propaganda mouthpiece.
How should we read Putin's goals? As congressional and FBI investigations into election interference continue, is the Kremlin nervous about what might come out? And ultimately, how long can Putin's power be sustained, among everyday Russians and abroad?
Join New America NYC at the CORE: club for a conversation with leading reporters and editors on this age of Putinism and what its blowback means for the future of Russia's relationship to the world.
PARTICIPANTS Joshua Yaffa @yaffaesque**
Contributor, The New YorkerFellow, New America
Jo Becker @Jo_Becker** Investigative Reporter, The New York TimesWinner, 2017 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting
Noah Shachtman @NoahShachtman**** Executive Editor, The Daily Beast
Miriam Elder @MiriamElder** World Editor, BuzzFeed News
Former Moscow Correspondent, The Guardian
Police play an indispensable role in our society. But the responsibility for keeping them accountable may lay with us, the people.
In June 2013, documents leaked by Edward Snowden sparked widespread debate about secret government surveillance of Americans. Just over a year later, the shooting of Michael Brown, a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, set off protests and triggered concern about militarization of law enforcement and discriminatory policing.
In his new book, Unwarranted, Barry Friedman argues that these two seemingly disparate events are connected—by the failure of policing, from local officers to the FBI and NSA, to be accountable to the public. In recent decades, policing has changed dramatically. Technologies like CCTV and predictive policing software have made suspects of us all, while proliferating SWAT teams and militarized forces have put property and lives at risk—particularly for communities of color and the poor. The effects beg a critical realization for all of us: it's not a question of what the police should do, but what we want the police to do.
Join New America NYCfor a conversation with Barry Friedman, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Trymaine Lee on the contemporary debates about policing—and the call to better govern those who govern us.
PARTICIPANTS Barry Friedman @barryfriedman1** Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law and Director, Policing Project, NYU School of Law
Author, Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission
Sherrilyn Ifill @Sifill_LDF**** President and Director-Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
Trymaine Lee @trymainelee
National Reporter, MSNBC and NBC News
2016 Emerson Fellow, New America
When the online blog Gawker posted an excerpt of a secretly filmed sex tape of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, it ignited a high stakes legal battle that pitted privacy rights against the First Amendment.
Gonna be a lot of irate citizens when they find out that they’re paying for water they’re not gonna get. — Jack Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes in *Chinatown*
In 1994, a handful of California state officials met in secret with representatives from big agriculture to transform wide swaths of formerly arid land into some of the country's most fertile megafarms. Two decades later, amidst an historic drought, the Monterey Amendments have all but depleted the state's river waters, leaving homeowners with dry wells and agribusiness billionaires with skyrocketing profits.
Water & Power: A California Heist, a new National Geographic documentary from Emmy Award-winning director Marina Zenovich, examines the little-known events in California's notorious history of water manipulation and the far-reaching implications for the thousands of people currently lacking access to safe drinking water. Playing like a real-life, modern-day Chinatown, Roman Polanski's 1974 film noir, the film lifts the lid on the chilling effects California's water crisis has on all of us when a public resource is privatized.
Following the Sundance Film Festival premiere, join New America NYC at Tumblr for a screening of Water & Power: A California Heist and a discussion with the film's director, lead subject, and environmental experts on how everyday citizens are facing down the water crisis to better preserve one of our country's most precious resources.
PARTICIPANTS Marina Zenovich @MarinaZenovich**
Director and Executive Producer, Water & Power: A California Heist
Adam Keats @akboognish**
Senior Attorney, Center for Food Safety
Lead subject, Water & Power: A California Heist
Upmanu Lall
Director, Columbia Water Center, and Alan & Carol Silberstein Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering, Columbia University
Justin Worland @JustinWorland
Energy and environment reporter, TIME Magazine
Follow the conversation online using #WaterAndPower and by following @NewAmericaNYC.
What happens when a democratically elected leader evolves into an authoritarian ruler?
India and Turkey are two of the world's biggest democracies—multi-ethnic nations that rose from their imperial past to be founded on the values of modernity. The have fair elections, open markets, and freedom of religion. But despite their democratic values, each of their charismatic leaders—Narendra Modi in India and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey—have used their electoral support to amass significant control, in some cases limiting press freedom, pursuing opposition, and subverting democratic methods to extend their rule.
For his new book, A Question of Order, Basharat Peer spent a year and a half traveling across India and Turkey to uncover the alarming, illiberal drift these countries have engineered and the terrible human toll it has exacted. Through a combination of right-wing populism, majoritarian politics, and aggressive nationalism, the two countries provide a shocking warning to what many say are the same strongmen tendencies spreading across the globe—including here at home.
Join New America NYC and The India Center Foundation for the release of Basharat Peer's A Question of Order and for a conversation on what seem to be illusory promises of liberal democracy and the people fighting to protect it.
PARTICIPANTS Basharat Peer @BasharatPeer Opinion Editor, The New York Times
Author, A Question of Order: India, Turkey, and the Return of Strongmen
Elmira Bayrasli @endeavoringECo-founder, Foreign Policy Interrupted
Fellow, International Security Program, New America
Manu Bhagavan @ManuBhagavanProfessor of History and Human Rights, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York
Author, The Peacemakers / India and the Quest for One World
Sheri Berman
Professor of Political Science, Barnard College
Author, The Primary of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century
Copies of Basharat Peer's A Question of Order: India, Turkey, and the Return of Strongmen will be available for purchase. Join the conversation online using #QuestionOfOrder and by following @NewAmericaNYC.
*This event is presented in partnership with The India Center Foundation.*
A former insider discloses the story behind for-profit schools to explain the exorbitant price tags, the questionable credentials, and the lose-lose options for Americans seeking a better life.
More than two million students are enrolled in for-profit colleges, from the small family-run operations to the behemoths brandished on billboards, subway ads, and late-night commercials. These schools have been around just as long as their not-for-profit counterparts, yet shockingly little is know about why they have expanded so rapidly in recent years.
Lower Ed, a new book by Tressie McMillan Cottom, herself a former for-profit college recruiter, lifts the lid on this big-money industry to show precisely how it is part and parcel of the growing inequality plaguing the country today. Behind the shareholder earnings and congressional battles are human stories—from mothers struggling to pay for beauty school to accomplished professionals pursuing doctoral degrees—that illustrate the inextricable links between the for-profit industry and the stifled promise of opportunity in America.
Join New America's Education Policy program for a conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom and other leading experts and activists on the benefits, pitfalls, and real costs of a for-profit education.
PARTICIPANTS Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd** Assistant Professor of Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University
Author, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy
Robert Shireman @bob_shireman**** Senior Fellow, The Century Foundation
Former Deputy Undersecretary, U.S. Department of Education
Laura Hanna @0debtzone
Political organizer and filmmaker
Founder and Co-director, Debt Collective
Sarah Jaffe @sarahljaffe** Journalist and Fellow, The Nation Institute
Author, Necessary Trouble: Americans In Revolt
Stephen Burd @StephenBurd2**** Senior Policy Analyst, Education Policy, New America
Copies of Tressie McMillan Cottom's Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy will be available for purchase. Follow the conversation online using #LowerEd and by following @NewAmericaNYC.
What happens when a revolution unravels?
While motivations vary widely, revolutions are, at their core, a clash between old and new ideas. The Tahrir Square uprisings were no different. Nearly two-thirds of Egypt's 70 million citizens were under thirty years old and newly online, and it became harder for the regime to isolate the public from radical ideas. That influx of ideas—and the political sentiments that followed—created a new wave of turmoil for many young people torn between the ever-shifting balance of tradition and change in their own lives.
In her new book, Generation Revolution, journalist Rachel Aspden offers a window into the Arab Spring through the millennials who experienced it firsthand. Following the stories of four young Egyptians—an atheist software engineer, a village girl in defiance of her community, a one-time religious extremist, and a would-be teenage martyr—the book reveals a growing generation in Egypt vastly different from preceding ones, struggling to find a place for various voices during the chaos of government upheaval.
As misinformation about religious extremism and the refugee crisis accelerates, join New America NYC for a discussion on where the next generation will take the Middle East and how Americans can better understand the doubts, resentments, and hopes they carry into the future.
PARTICIPANTS Rachel Aspden @rachelaspden** Author, Generation Revolution: On the Front Line Between Tradition and Change in the Middle East
Sana Amanat @MiniB622
Director, Content & Character Development, Marvel Entertainment
Moustafa Bayoumi @BayoumiMoustafa** Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Author, How Does It Feel To Be A Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America
Angie Gad @Angieslyst**** Egyptian-American writer
Katherine Zoepf @katherinezoepf** Fellow, Better Life Lab, New America
Author, Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World
If you're looking for a place to hide, this isn't it. At our school, we want you to demand that we help you. There is no shame in asking for help. – Vonda Viland, Principal, Black Rock High School
At a remote Mojave Desert high school, educators believe that empathy and life skills, more than academics, give at-risk students command of their own futures. At Black Rock High School, the methods are unique and the model is innovative: no punitive measures, no end-date, and no formal graduation.
Employing a vérité approach during a year at the school, The Bad Kids follows Black Rock High School principal Vonda Viland as she coaches three at-risk teens – a new father who can't support his family; a young woman grappling with sexual abuse; and an angry young man from an unstable home – through the traumas and obstacles that rob them of their spirit and threaten their goal of a high school diploma. The film depicts how a radical approach to education can combat the crippling effects of poverty in the lives of these so-called "bad kids."
A discussion on the intractable problem of generational poverty and how public education can better support all students in our nation's schools that followed the advances screening of The Bad Kids.
INTRODUCTION
Victoria McCullough
Social Impact and Public Policy Director, Tumblr
PARTICIPANTS
Keith Fulton @BadKidsMovie
Co-Director, The Bad Kids
Lou Pepe @BadKidsMovie
Co-Director, The Bad Kids
Vonda Viland
Principal, Black Rock High School, Yucca Valley, California
India Williams @cisnational
Alumna, Communities In Schools
Elena Silva @NewAmericaEd
Director, PreK-12, Education Policy Program, New America
Join the conversation online by using #TheBadKids and by following @NewAmericaNYC.
Over the past 25 years, the United States has seen a disturbing militarization of its sworn law enforcement offices – a 25 percent increase in SWAT team raids, a mass influx of military-grade equipment in small-town communities, and the seeming immunity of a new force of violent warrior-cops.
Starting on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., as the community grapples with the death of Michael Brown, Tribeca Film Festival award winner Do Not Resistoffers a disturbing glimpse at the current state of policing in America and, if left unchecked, a troubling indictment on the future of police culture. The film puts viewers in the center of the action – from a ride-along with a South Carolina SWAT team to the inside of a police training seminar that teaches the importance of "righteous violence" – before exploring where controversial new technologies, like predictive policing algorithms, could lead the law and criminal justice fields next.
Join New America NYC for a conversation following the screening of Do Not Resista with the film's director and producer Craig Atkinson to explore what needs to be done to mend the growing rift between police forces and the communities they are tasked with serving.
PARTICIPANTS Craig Atkinson @DoNotResistFilm
Director and Producer, Do Not Resist
Maria Ponomarenko @m_ponomarenkoDeputy Director, Policing Project, New York University School of Law
With the death of Osama bin Laden and the explosion of the Arab Spring five years ago, it seemed like the war on terror might be ending.
Instead, the Arab Spring inaugurated civil war in much of the Middle East, out of which sprang brutal attacks by a rising global presence: the Islamic State. Exactly on year ago, ISIS-trained militants killed 130 people at the Bataclan concert hall and several other locations across Paris. Ever since, extremism has moved beyond the spheres of the military and foreign policy and into the daily discourse of our news feeds and living rooms.
In a new five-part series, VICE founder Suroosh Alvi travels the world to investigate the origins and impact of the world's deadliest terrorist organizations from the inside out. TERRORprovides viewers with an on-the-ground look inside the places and ideologies that shed light on the notorious groups that confound and threaten much of the globe.
Following his travels to Iraq, join Suroosh Alvi and New America's Peter Bergen for a screening of the episode examining the Islamic State and for a conversation on the past 15 years of terrorism and whether there's an end in sight.
PARTICIPANTS Suroosh Alvi @SurooshAlviFounder, VICE
Peter Bergen @peterbergencnnVice President and Director, International Security Program, New America
Author, United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists
In 2008, the collapse of the US financial system plunged the economy into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Between 2008 and 2009, the U.S. labor market lost 8.4 million jobs – 6.1% of all payroll employment – and the average household brought in roughly $5,000 less in 2009 than it did in the year 2000. Since then, the wealth gap has only gotten worse: the top 10 percent now averages nearly nine times as much income as the bottom 90 percent.
It should be no surprise, then, that Americans feel disenchanted. From Occupy Wall Street and more recent racial and economic movements to the left and right populisms of the 2016 election, Americans across the ideological spectrum are increasingly concerned by the concentration of both private and public power. Are our post-election politics on the precipice of change?
According to Democracy Against Domination, a new book by New America fellow K. Sabeel Rahman, today's inequality crisis will only be solved with a complete overhaul of how we govern the modern economy. New forms of democratic action – strategies that tap into contemporary labor and racial justice movements – will be necessary to counteract both the legacies of the New Deal era and the problems of corporate power, too-big-to-fail finance, and political dysfunction today.
On the evening following Election Day, join New America NYC to evaluate the economic policies of the past eight years and what the next Administration can do to turn today's "New Gilded Age" into a more responsive, inclusive economy.
PARTICIPANTS K. Sabeel Rahman @ksabeelrahmanAssistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Fellow, New America
Author, Democracy Against Domination
Dorian Warren @dorianwarrenContributor, MSNBC
Fellow, Roosevelt Institute
Keesha Gaskins @keeshagaskinsDirector, Democratic Practice Program, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
Daniel Altschuler @altochulo
Managing Director, Make the Road Action
Director of Civic Engagement and Research, Make the Road New York
They stomp on our neck, and then they tell us, ‘Just chill, O.K., just relax.’ Well, look, we are mad, and we’ve been had. —Sarah Palin, endorsing Donald Trump for president, January 19, 2016
More than five years ago, renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild embarked on a journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country—a stronghold of the conservative right. As she got to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she champions, Hochschild nevertheless finds common ground with the people she meets—people whose concerns are ones that all Americans share: the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for their children.
In a new book, Strangers In Their Own Land, Hochschild explores the right-wing world and discovers powerful forces—fear of cultural eclipse, economic decline, perceived government betrayal—that help explain the emotional appeal of a candidate like Donald Trump. Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help us understand what it feels like to live in “red” America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: why do the people who would seem to benefit most from “liberal” government intervention abhor the very idea?
Join New America NYC for a conversation with Arlie Russell Hochschild on a conversation that plumbs our deep political divide and asks the question: how does the world look from the heart of the right?
PARTICIPANTS: Arlie Russell HochschildProfessor Emerita, University of California, Berkeley
Author, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
Jamil Smith @JamilSmithSenior National Correspondent, MTV News
Nina Burleigh @ninaburleigh
National Politics Correspondent, Newsweek
Copies of Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Rightwill be available for purchase and signed by the author. Join the conversation online using #HeartOfTheRight and by following @NewAmericaNYC.
In the spring and summer of 2016, the world's richest democracies witnessed a collective upheaval that shocked the globe. As if overnight, many Democrats backed a socialist named Bernie Sanders; the United Kingdom voted to the leave the European Union, in a stunning rebuke; the nativist billionaire Donald Trump became the presidential nominee of the Republican Party; and a slew of extreme parties continued to win election after election in countries like Norway, Austria, and Greece.
A new book by John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion, traces the phenomenon of populism back to its roots in the 1890s United States and sees it in a new light: as a warning sign for the ideological crises to come. What started in the United States spread to Europe and back again. As the EU grapples with the aftershock of Brexit, the U.S. must also come to terms with the implications of the rise of Sanders and Trump: growing numbers of people are insisting that our standard worldview is breaking down and in desperate need of repair.
Join New America NYC for a conversation with John B. Judis and New America co-founder Michael Lind on the social and economic upheaval roiling politics on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Atlantic.
PARTICIPANTS John B. Judis @JohnBJudis
Editor at Large, Talking Points Memo
Author, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
Michael Lind
Co-founder and Policy Director, Economic Growth Program, New America
The only warheads we thought would go off in the United States were Soviet warheads. We never considered that our own warheads could detonate our own continent. – Allan Childers, Missile Combat Crew
It is September 19, 1980, and a nuclear disaster is playing out in a missile silo outside Little Rock, Arkansas. A worker accidentally drops a socket, puncturing the fuel tank of an intercontinental ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead in our arsenal. It sets in motion a chain of emergency responses to head off damage and destruction of unknown reach.
Directed by Emmy Award winner Robert Kenner (Food, Inc., Merchants of Doubt) and based on the critically acclaimed book by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Command and Control is a minute-by-minute account of the long-hidden story of the "Damascus Accident." With original footage and eyewitness accounts, the film recalls this near-miss catastrophe, shocking for being only one of thousands of close brushes with nuclear incidents, according to a recently declassified Department of Energy document.
Join New America NYCfor a screening of Command and Control and discussion about the risks of our aging nuclear arsenal and current efforts in arms control and nonproliferation.
PARTICIPANTS Robert KennerDirector, Producer, and Co-writer, Command and Control
Eric SchlosserProducer and Co-writer, Command and Control
Sharon SquassoniDirector and Senior Fellow, Proliferation Prevention Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Tamara Patton
Doctoral Candidate, Nuclear Futures Lab, Princeton University
In a world in which the instant push of a button can lead to the death of a particular individual more than eight thousand miles away, is it possible to define "war" with any clarity? What separates the targeting of an enemy combatant under lawful wartime from the extrajudicial murder of someone suspected of wrongdoing? What is the purpose of a modern military in a world where future threats come from computer hackers, terrorists, and other nonstate actors?
These are some of the questions Future of War fellow Rosa Brooks poses in her new book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. Backed up by a career with human rights NGOs and top positions in the Pentagon, she argues that by viewing more and more threats as "war," its ambit of law seems to apply to more and more spheres of human activity. The result: a greater tolerance for secrecy and coercion, the inevitable expansion of the military, and a society distrustful of the entity tasked with protecting it.
Join New America NYC for a discussion on how to bring into focus the increasingly blurry boundaries of "war" and "peace" and the global security outcomes that depends on their understanding.
It has been 43 years since Roe v. Wade passed 7-2, yet the war against reproductive health clinics has not subsided.
In the past six years, 288 TRAP () laws have been passed by state legislatures, subjecting reproductive health clinics and abortion providers to legal restrictions not imposed on any other medical professionals. Unable to comply with these extensive laws, dozens of clinics in states like Alabama and Texas have been forced to close, leaving scores of women under-served, without access to legal healthcare services.
But now, a contingent of clinic workers and lawyers have taken the fight to the courts. Trapped follows leaders on the front lines of an escalating battle who are working to change the fact that, for many women, a zip code determines the fate of their constitutional rights.
As another landmark Supreme Court case addressing abortion is decided this month, join New America for a screening of Sundance Film Festival award-winner Trapped and a conversation with leading experts on what remains among the country's most divisive issues. Stephanie Toti, lead counsel on that case, Whole Women's Health v. Cole, will be joining us.
This event is a Social Cinema Screening.
In the wake of the Great Recession, as the housing bubble burst and unemployment rose, millions of American families experienced a precipitous decline in their net worth. Those who were able to stay in their homes were able to weather the storm, but others couldn't.
Tragically, something more nefarious – and preventable – was also in play: foreclosure fraud. In his new book, Chain of Title, David Dayen chronicles how a small group of ordinary people uncovered the large-scale corporate malfeasance that undermined the financial security of families when they were at their most economically vulnerable. Scores of families were faced with eviction from their homes based on false evidence by mortgage companies with no legal right to foreclose.
Stories like this are, at once, a cautionary tale on how financial services firms can behave badly and an inspiring story of the citizens fighting back. Chain of Title provides a valuable context for the current and future fight to protect New York homeowners from the next wave of foreclosure scams, battles that continue to be waged on the frontlines by legal service attorneys and community activists.
“By the middle of this century we will trigger runaway climate change — a process beyond our control. What do you do if you have that information? What do you do?” – Dr. Steven Chu, Former U.S. Energy Secretary and Nobel Prize winner
Climate change may be the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. There are solutions, but we are in a race against the clock to respond to this critical global threat. In Time To Choose, Academy Award® winner Charles Ferguson (Inside Job, No End In Sight) explores the far-reaching effects of the climate change crisis and examines the potential of solutions already available and the promise of those to come.
Shot on five continents, from the oil fields of Nigeria to the forests of Indonesia and the coal mines of Appalachia, Time To Choose investigates the costs that fossil fuels and industrialized agriculture take on human lives and future of the land. Through interviews with clean energy and environmental entrepreneurs; innovators in urban planning and design; global and local leaders; and the grassroots activists working on the frontlines of climate change, the film takes an in-depth look at many of the remarkable people working to save our planet.
Join New America for a screening of Time To Choose and a conversation with the film's director and leading climate advocates on what may very well be the next greatest political issue of our time.
This event is a Social Cinema Screening.
Four years ago – in the infancy of Syria's civil war – Janine di Giovanni traveled to Syria on assignment for the New York Times. That trip became the first of many as conflict in the region escalated tragically, reaching far beyond borders and affecting millions of lives.
When di Giovanni, a seasoned war correspondent, first arrived in Damascus in 2012, she immediately recognized the familiar sight of a country trembling on the brink of war. Through the intimate stories of the ordinary civilians she encountered in places like Damascus, Homs, Darayya, and Aleppo, The Morning They Came For Us illuminates the harsh realities of warfare from all sides. What began with a handful of teenagers writing anti-government slogans rapidly turned into a full civil war, transforming a people in denial into a people in the midst of violence from which they have never recovered.
Join New America for a conversation with International Security Program Fellow Janine di Giovanni on the devastating impacts of the Syria crisis and the ongoing realities of daily life in a war zone.
Copies of Janine di Giovanni's The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria will be available for purchase. Join the conversation online using #DispatchesFromSyria and by following @NewAmericaNYC.
Janine di Giovanni Middle East Editor, NewsweekFellow, International Security Program, New America
Author, The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria
@janinedigi
Ben Taub
Contributor, The New Yorker
@bentaub91
Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was stabbed to death on a street in Queens, New York, in 1964, and 38 witnesses, it was claimed, did nothing. More than 50 years later, her brother uncovers a lie that transformed his life, condemned a city, and defined an era.
The murder of Kitty Genovese transfixed New York and the world; it came to symbolize the apathy and indifference of urban life, and for many, a great social breakdown. Now, The Witness, a new film by James Solomon, follows Kitty's brother Bill Genovese about his sister's life and tracks down the neighbors who, according to the press, did nothing as the terror-filled screams of rape and murder took place outside their windows.
A half-century after the crime, spurred by the recent death of Kitty's murderer Winston Moseley, the film also re-examines the journalistic telling of the story, its distortions, and how certain narratives "go viral" by capturing the anxieties of their times.
Join New America for a screening of The Witness followed by a conversation that explores the case that motivated the study of "The Bystander Effect," led to the creation of 911 emergency call lines, and held the public imagination to become an American obsession.
This is a Social Cinema Screening.
Popular awareness of postpartum depression has improved tremendously in recent years. Obstetricians now regularly screen patients for post-delivery symptoms of sadness and anxiety, and depressive illness in new parents is discussed in thousands of books, articles, support groups, and online forums.
Yet there has been no such growth in public understanding of prenataldepression. Though studies show that depression during pregnancy is just as common, and equally dangerous, many newly pregnant women are unaware that it is even a possibility. Conditioned to believe that pregnancy should be a joyful period, depressed expectant mothers may avoid seeking help, or find that their feelings are trivialized or stigmatized by partners and friends. Many obstetricians and psychiatrists remain reluctant to prescribe antidepressants to pregnant patients, even as suicide has become one of the leading causes of death among pregnant women and new mothers. And in the United States, a pregnant woman who survives a suicide attempt may find herself receiving, not support and psychiatric treatment, but a murder charge.
What can be done to ease the damaging guilt, shame, and stigma surrounding depression during pregnancy? Could ideals of maternal sacrifice be impeding the protection of some of our communities' most vulnerable mothers?
This is a Broadly Speaking event.
For many investors, emerging markets appear to be a turbulent and risky frontier; for others, they represent an opportunity to transform lives and communities.
In recent years, impact investing has gained significant momentum as a way to match socially-minded entrepreneurs with risk capital. This investment movement has occurred alongside massive technological innovation – and with it unprecedented ways to reach and connect the developing world. Increasingly, business solutions to entrenched social and economic problems are taking advantage of new technologies to bring goods, services, and opportunities to some of the world's underserved people and places.
But what does this mean in practice? Where do investors see the most promising opportunities – and barriers – to earn financial returns while addressing unmet needs? And what is it like to actually build these ventures on the ground?
The mixed economy was the most important social innovation of the twentieth century. It spread a previously unimaginable level of prosperity and enabled steep increased in education, health, and economic security. And yet, extraordinarily, it is anathema to many current economic and political elites.
Like every other prospering democracy, the U.S. developed a mixed economy that channeled the spirit of capitalism intro strong growth and health social development. In this bargain, government and business were as much partners as rivals. But, according to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's new book,American Amnesia, what's good for business and what's good for Americans has become misaligned. As anti-government advocates of free market fundamentalism have gained power, they are bent on scrapping the instrument of a century of unprecedented economic and social progress.
Participatory budgeting is perhaps the greatest experiment in democracy that could redefine how public budgets are decided in the United States. A “revolutionary civics in action” that came to the U.S. in 2009, this global phenomenon bridges a citizen-government divide in not only what public projects get funded, but who decides.
But for participatory budgeting to work, the health of American democracy is a must. According to Hollie Russon-Gilman's new book, Democracy Reinvented, current citizen disaffection and mistrust of government have stalled the best impacts of participatory budgeting and many other advances in civic innovation. The political and institutional restraints we work under now need to be opened up, and with the help of digital tools and other technological innovations, more inclusive governance is possible.
Join us at Civic Hall for a conversation with New America fellow Hollie Russon-Gilman, along with John Paul Farmer and Story Bellows, on the state of civic innovation today and the digital tools that can foster a better democracy tomorrow.
American attitudes toward marriage have undergone a seismic shift in recent decades. Gay marriage has become mainstream, nearly half of American households have female breadwinners, and gendered expectations of domestic roles have changed as well. Yet our attitudes toward divorce remain surprisingly unchanged.
Even as marriage rates overall have fallen and long-term unmarried partnerships are increasingly accepted, ending a marriage is still widely regarded as a failure and is stigmatized accordingly.
But divorce does not look as it once did. Changes in laws, customs, technology, psychology and child development research, and the evolving roles of men and women in the last decades have greatly improved uncoupling for many. And great knowledge of what helps both the adults and children involved in divorce have led to positively restructured families on the other side of marriage.
Is there such a thing as a good divorce? And have our courts, public policies, or even pop culture caught up? Is a good divorce available to all, or just the highly educated or well-to-do? Join New America and Wendy Paris, author ofSplitopia: Dispatches from Today's Good Divorce and How to Part Well, for a conversation about new models of divorce and their impact on the families involved and in culture at large.
A Broadly Speaking Event
In 1979, seemingly overnight, Iran became the first revolutionary theocracy in modern times. Since then, the country has largely been a black box to the West, a sinister presence looming over the horizon.
But inside Iran, according to Laura Secor's Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran, a much different picture has unfolded. With traditions drawn as deeply from the West as from the East, religious thinkers, political operatives, poets, journalists, and activists have wrestled with their country's apparatus of violent repression and reimagined what Iran should be.
Workers lose to automation, investors lose to algorithms, and even tech developers lose their visions to the demands of the startup economy.
According to Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, the digital economy has gone wrong, and no one quiet knows how to fix it. The problems lie not with digital technology itself, but in the ways we are deploying it: instead of building a distributed digital economy that new networks could foster, we're doubling down on the industrial age mandate for growth above all.
But it doesn't have to be this way. In the era of big data, robots, and the gig economy, Rushkoff calls for a bridge to the human-technology divide in a way that optimizes the economy for the people it's supposed to serve.
Within 20 years, we’ll see robot suits that allow paraplegics to walk and new drugs able to melt away most cancers. But we’ll also see definitions of money blur the line between corporation and citizen and computer code being used as a weapon to destroy physical infrastructures halfway around the world.
Those are some of the predictions leading innovation expert Alec Ross, author of The Industries of the Future, claims will drive the next two decades of change in our economies and societies. With stories and analysis in fields as sweeping as cybersecurity, genomics, and finance, Ross asks: can rising nations match Silicon Valley as the next innovation hotspots? What global trends are affecting the way we live and work? And how can we adapt?
Join New America for a conversation with Alec Ross, along withOpen Technology Institute's Kevin Bankston and 1776's Rachel Haot, on both the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the future, and how we can navigate them.
Exactly a century ago the first woman was elected to national office; 32 years ago we got the first female Supreme Court justice; and 23 years ago women got their own bathroom off the Senate floor. With more than 100 women serving in Congress today, they make up more than 20 percent of the Senate body and have finally achieved a "critical mass" of representation in American politics.
Representation, though, is hardly winner-take-all. According to Jay Newton-Small's Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works, women are better at consensus building and more able to avoid ego-driven decision making, but they also report feeling more likely to default to apologies, self-consciousness, and a greater aversion to risk. In any case, it's clear that their presence and influence in Washington has reached a tipping point that affects not only the inner workings of government, but also how Americans more broadly live and work.
PARTICIPANTS
Jay Newton-Small
Correspondent, TIME
Fellow, New America
Author, Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works
@JNSmall
Alex Wagner
Analyst and contributor, MSNBC
@alexwagner
Bernadette Meehan
Dean and Virginia Rusk Fellow, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service
Former Spokesperson, White House National Security Council
@MeehanBM
Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani
Host, Huffington Post Live
@CaroMT
Creativity and ingenuity aren't spread evenly. Throughout history, certain locations have become hubs for artistic, business, and technological innovation, for reasons that aren't always readily apparent. Why Silicon Valley right now? Why Florence during the Renaissance?
In search of answers, acclaimed travel writer and former NPR correspondent Eric Weiner traveled the world to investigate the relationship between society's innovative ideas and their surroundings. The result is his new book, The Geography of Genius:A Search for the World's Most Creative Places, from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley.
Join Future Tense for a conversation between Eric Weinerand Dayo Olopade on why certain places at certain times become the capitals of human progress.
In his most light-hearted and optimistic effort yet, filmmaker and provocateur Michael Moore becomes a one-man American army and sets out to "invade" several foreign nations to steal their good ideas. Where to Invade Next comedically pursues the serious mission of challenging the conventions and inequities of U.S. social policy and the mythology of the American Dream.
On his global tour, he looks to Italy where workers are given 30 days of vacation and new mothers get five weeks of full paid leave. He stops in France, where well-funded school systems provide multicourse, high-quality lunches; in Slovenia, where college education is free to citizens and foreign students alike; and in Germany, where workers are sent to spas to contend with overstressed work environments. In Norway, he finds that prisons provide humane housing and extensive work and learning opportunities, and in Iceland, a strong economy and thriving middle class has been recovered with the help of strong female leadership.
Since 9/11, more than three hundred Americans – born and raised in Minnesota, Alabama, New Jersey, and elsewhere – have been indicted or convicted of terrorism charges. Among the perpetrators are Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born radical cleric who became the first American citizen killed by a CIA drone, and Omar Hammami, an Alabama native and hip hop fan who became a fixture in al Shabaab's propaganda videos.
While some have taken the fight abroad, many others have acted on American soil, sparking new debates not only about extremist violence but about the controversial surveillance tactics used by U.S. government agencies to track potential terrorists, the biases experienced by innocent observant Muslims at the hands of law enforcement, and the role social media has played in revolutionizing terrorist activity.
Drawing on an extensive network of intelligence contacts, from the National Counterterrorism Center and the FBI to the NYPD, Peter Bergen's United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists takes on these topics by telling the entwined stories of the key actors of the American front of jihadism and by asking: what motivates them, how are they trained, and what do we sacrifice in our efforts to track them?
https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/united-states-of-jihad/
A Social Cinema Screening with The Marshall Project
For 33 years, Mark DeFriest has struggled against what he considers to be unjust imprisonment: he has escaped seven times and accrued hundreds of disciplinary write-ups, turning his original four-year sentence into one of life in prison. Known as the "Houdini of Florida" for his multiple and improbable jailbreaks, DeFriest was condemned to Florida's worst prison after a lone psychiatrist reversed the opinions of four court-appointed psychiatrists and declared he was faking mental illness. Over 30 years later, while DeFriest continues struggling to survive in a rigid and unforgiving system, his remaining supporters have forged an unlikely alliance to argue for his freedom.
DeFriest's story is both unique to him – a savant's mind, a notorious escape artist, a misunderstood troublemaker – and increasingly common to American prisoners – long sentences, brutal treatment, few chances for redemption. His surreal odyssey from jails to mental hospitals to some of America's toughest maximum security prisons has uncovered a lingering question: should DeFriest have ever been sent to prison at all?
https://www.newamerica.org/nyc/the-mind-of-mark-defriest/
In collaboration with ChinaFile
When Communist Party leaders adopted a one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birth rates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China moves to a nationwide two-child policy, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers.
Mei Fong's latest book, One Child: The Story's of China's Most Radical Experiment, explores the human impact of the one-child policy and its future implications: will China's "Little Emperor" cohort make for an entitled or risk-averse generation? How will the country manage to support itself when one in every four people is over sixty-five years old? Perhaps most importantly, exactly how much has the one-child policy hindered China's growth?
Please join us as we welcome the CORE Club and the Royal Norwegian Consulate General for a discussion on corporate board quotas. What do gender roles mean for business? What effect does the increasing visibility of women on boards have on women in the earlier stages of their careers? Do women leaders lead differently?
When, in 2002, Norwegian trade minister Ansgar Gabrielsen unveiled a radical new plan to put more women into his country's boardrooms, many Oslo business leaders were appalled, and Gabrielsen's own conservative party publicly disowned him. Gabrielsen's announcement – that the boards of major Norwegian companies would be compelled to include at least forty percent women – generated mocking headlines across Europe.
Today, just a decade after Norway began enforcing its corporate gender quotas, the jibes about "golden skirts" and "babes on boards" are long forgotten. Corporate board quotas have been imposed in Belgium, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, and though early data is mixed, it suggests that the shift has meant a net gain from an earnings – as well as a social justice – perspective.
The question of whether to regulate soda consumption has become a major political issue. Rising rates of obesity and diabetes, as well as the omnipresence of soda marketing and advertisements, have raised the powerful profiles of soda corporations and soda's impact on our national health. From the fight over New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's unsuccessful 2013 attempt to restrict soda sizes to Berkeley, California's first-on-its-kinda 2015 soda tax, soda regulation is currently one of the biggest and hotly debated issues in public health and food policy.
Marion Nestle's latest book, Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning), provides a history of how soda seemed to take over: How did soda become a part of so many Americans' diets? How did products containing such inexpensive ingredients turn into multibillion dollar industries and brand icons? Is there a way to push big business to adopt better social responsibility standards?
Join New America's Open Markets Program for a conversation with Marion Nestle and Leah Douglas on the challenges of taking on big soda – and all big food industry – and reclaiming the principles of public health and responsible markets in the U.S. and across the world.
As calls for criminal justice reform in the U.S. are becoming all the more urgent, and the toll of gun violence mounts daily, Abigail Disney's The Armor of Light turns to the unlikely journey of Evangelical minister Reverend Rob Schenk to explore the intersection of religion and the politics of gun control. Faced with a national epidemic of mass shootings and his own personal moral convictions, Schenk, a fixture of the political Right, is forced to confront conservatives and evangelicals with his impassioned belief in the need for gun control legislation. He breaks the political orthodoxy to ask: is it really possible to be both pro-gun and pro-life?
Reverend Schenck finds common ground when he meets Lucy McBath, the mother of Jordan Davis, an unarmed teenager who was murdered in Florida and whose death has cast a national spotlight on controversial "Stand Your Ground" laws. McBath, also a Christian but with opposite political leanings, decides to join forces with Schenk to compel others to consider the impact of America's gun culture and persuade them of the possibility that people across party lines can come together.
Join New America NYC for a conversation with the director of The Armor of Light and leading experts and advocates to consider the current stalemate of gun control and to ask if it's possible to turn a deeply divided political culture into a new standard of nonpartisan political action.
The U.S. workforce, which has been one of the wealthiest and most productive in the world, is undergoing an alarming transformation. Increasing numbers of workers find themselves on shaky ground, turned into freelancers, temps and contractors. Even many full-time and professional jobs are experiencing similar shifts. Add to that the steamroller of automation, robots and artificial intelligence already replacing millions of workers and projected to "obsolesce" millions more, is there at all a bright stop in the American economic story?
The answer depends: a historic mash-up of Silicon Valley technology, seemingly infinite investment dollars, and viral consumer response is ushering in the "sharing economy" era – companies like Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit are freeing their workers to work more independent, flexible schedules and outside of traditional company structures. But according to Steven Hill's new book, Raw Deal: How the "Uber Economy" and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers, the sharing economy has also been a source of smaller jobs and wages, unchecked corporate profit, and the continued dwindling of the middle class.
Does the economic impact of the sharing economy live up to its hype? Are the U.S. safety net and social contract at risk? Join New America NYC for a conversation on the "Uber economy" and how to sustain economic power in the hands of American workers.
New York's economic dynamism has long been a hallmark of the city; for centuries, jobs and opportunity have attracted people to New York from across the nation and around the globe. Yet today, many New Yorkers find themselves unemployed or working in unsafe conditions for unsustainably low wages.
At a moment of impassioned debate about the right to a "living wage," join New America NYC and the Museum of the City of New York to hear from a new generation of activists, journalists, and entrepreneurs who use organized labor, equitable business models, and the media to fight for a more livable and prosperous city – for all New Yorkers.
Today we carry around an almost infinite amount of information in our pockets, allowing us to instantaneously search for answers to almost any question. We hardly ever feel in the dark anymore, and we naturally tend to think that is a good thing. But is it always?
In his provocative new book, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing, Future Tense Fellow Jamie Holmes argues that our informational instant gratification isn't necessarily making us wiser. He explores the positive role of ambiguity and uncertainty in forcing us to see the world from a fresh perspective, and to think more deeply about the questions before us.
Join Future Tense for the launch of Nonsense with a conversation between Jamie Holmes and Maria Konnikova, contributing writer for The New Yorker, on the downside of having the answer to every question at our fingertips.
This is a Future Tense event.
We text, tweet, snap, and chat all day but are we ever engaging in meaningful conversation that surpasses 140 characters? Our constant social digital engagement can prevent us from feeling alone, but are we truly connected?
In her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age, media scholar Sherry Turkle deplores the consequences of our excessive reliance on tech devices to communicate with each other.
Future Tense invites you to look up from that screen, put away your device for a little while, and join us for a conversation between Sherry Turkle and Slate staff writer Amanda Hess on how best to connect in the digital age.
The media landscape in America these days looks like it's been hit by an earthquake. Indeed, the shifting tectonic plates of media have left legacy print and broadcast outlets in crisis – cutting columns, staff, and even entire bureaus. International reporting has been acutely impacted amid all this disruption. But the picture isn't entirely one of destruction and despair: emerging and digital-native media companies are successfully cultivating a talented generation of new reporters and investing in extraordinary storytelling. In some places, there's even positive revenue growth.
In a society where 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have the most traffic coming from cell phones and tablets, have we reached a new mobile majority in media? Are the tried models of advertising and circulation targets enough to sustain media's print gatekeepers? What will be the new business models that sustain great journalism?
Whether it's legacy or digital media, the reality remains: the state of journalism has reached a critical point of transition and transformation. Much is at stake. Americans' changing news habits impact how our country functions as an informed society, and the next steps in media are as important as ever in shaping the future of our democracy.
A real-life thriller, (T)ERROR is the first documentary to place filmmakers on the ground during a live FBI counterterrorism sting operation of a suspected jihadist. With unprecedented access to an active informant – Saeed "Shariff" Torres, a 63 year old former Black Panther – viewers get an unfettered glimpse of the government's counterterrorism tactics and the murky justifications behind them. (T)ERROR illuminates the fragile relationships between individual and surveillance state in modern America, and asks – who is watching the watchers?
PARTICIPANTS Introduction:Beth DembitzerCurator, Social Cinema@New America
@bethdembitzer
Participants:David Felix SutcliffeCo-director, (T)ERROR@davidfsutcliffe
Faisal HashmiFormer member, Muslim Justice Initiative
Ali KarimDirector of Security, Masjid At Taqwa
Mike GermanFellow, Liberty and National Security Program, Brennan Center for Justice
Prospective students often start their college searches with high expectations, and soon into their exploration, high anxiety. Both students fresh out of high school and older adults returning to school are making crucial choices about their educations without key information and resources and with misconceptions about everything from application requirements to financial aid and sound student loan options.
According to recent research from New America's Education Policy Program and Public Agenda, 41 percent of students say they did not find enough helpful information to make their college decisions, and less than 1 in 5 adult prospective students has used an interactive website like the College Scorecard when considering college choices. And when it comes to paying for college, for example, 48 percent of students from families making less than $50,000 were unfamiliar with the Pell Grant, the cornerstone of federal financial aid for low-income students.
What do these findings mean for the systems of higher education admissions and recruiting? As Congress begins looking towards the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, how can policymakers and education practitioners better address students' needs and help them become savvier about choosing the college that's right for them?
Join New America NYC and Public Agenda for a discussion with the researchers and policymakers charged with recruiting and counseling New York's prospective students into making beneficial choices for their educations and their futures.
Follow the discussion online using #CollegeDecisions and by following @NewAmericaNYC and @PublicAgenda.
PARTICIPANTS
Introduction:
Rachel Fishman @higheredrachel
Senior Policy Analyst, Education Policy Program, New America
Carolin Hagelskamp
Vice President and Director of Research, Public Agenda
Participants:
Paul Marthers, Ph.D.
Associate Vice Chancellor and Vice Provost for Strategic Enrollment Management and Student Success, State University of New York
Carmel Paleski, Ed.M.
Director of Academic Affairs, Manhattan Educational Opportunity Center
Laura A. Bruno, M.S.W.
Assistant Dean of Enrollment Management, Queensborough Community College
R. Ummi Modeste, M.S.Ed.
College Advisor, City-As-School High School
Moderator:
Kim Clark @kclarkcollege
Senior Writer, Money Magazine
This event is presented in partnership with Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that helps diverse leaders and citizens navigate divisive, complex issues and work together to find solutions.
The next Steve Jobs is just as likely to come from Lagos, Lahore, Monterrey or Mumbai as from Silicon Valley.
According to Elmira Bayrasli's From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places, high-growth entrepreneurs are overcoming vexing obstacles to not only build businesses and jobs and contribute to economic growth, but also to change mindsets. Whether in Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan or Turkey, people in some of the world's most challenging societies are building globally competitive products and services, attracting international praise and investment, and creating game-changing economic possibilities for their countries.
Join New America NYC for a conversation with Elmira Bayrasli and The Economist's Matthew Bishop to discuss the rise of global entrepreneurship, how Silicon Valley has become universal, and how innovation is shifting to the other side of the world.
I wish I could stop the world for a moment. - Puran Bhat, puppeteer
Puran the Puppeteer, Rahman the Magician, and Maya the Acrobat are just three of the talented residents of India's Kathputli Colony of street performers who, for more than sixty years, have built their tiny, patched shacks and workshops and a vital, tight-knit community in the alleyways of western Delhi. The colorful, clamorous Rajasthani slum, celebrated in Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, was home to 3,000 practitioners of India's ancient folk arts – snake charmers, fire eaters, contortionists, musicians, and circus performers – and their families whose children were tutored at the earliest ages to carry on their traditions.
In 2010, the Indian government sold the land to developers with plans to erect Delhi's tallest skyscraper and a luxury mall, and soon after, relocation permits were issued. Tomorrow We Disappear takes us through the dramatic last days of the community, following the artists' fight to protect their homes from devastation and the possible end of their vibrant way of life.
PARTICIPANTS:
Introductions:
Beth Dembitzer
Curator, Social Cinema@New America
@bethdembitzer
Aroon Shivdasani
Executive & Artistic Director, Indo-American Arts Council
@aroonshiv
Participants:
Jimmy Goldblum
Co-director and Producer, Tomorrow We Disappear
@jgoldy492
Adam Weber
Co-director and Producer, Tomorrow We Disappear
Fazeelat Aslam
Co-producer, Tomorrow We Disappear
@FazeelatAslam
Aseem Chhabra
Journalist and Festival Director, New York Indian Film Festival
@chhabs
The Voting Rights Act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. The historic march from Selma to Montgomery, grassroots demonstrations across the South, and legislative pressures in both Congress and the courts radically transformed American politics. And yet fifty years later we're still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power.
As chronicled in Ari Berman's new book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, we're at an alarming moment in history when lawmakers are being criticized for devising new strategies to keep certain communities out of the voting booth. In such a political climate, on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision overturning a key part of the Voting Rights Act, is there a new struggle for voting rights in America, or is a decades-long fight still unresolved? What will these tensions mean for the U.S. campaign system and an already hotly contested 2016 presidential race?
"I am intrigued by this strange collision of people from around the globe in Africa. What interests me is how fantastic, horrific, and how transparent, human stories unfold in this beautiful place from which we humans originate." - Hubert Sauper
Six years in the making, Hubert Sauper's We Come As Friends observes the precarious start of South Sudan, the African continent's newest country. With an eye for both haunting beauty and sorrow, the film captures South Sudan's earliest days of independence, the rapid exploitation of its natural resources by the world's superpowers, the displacement of its people from their ancestral homelands, and the devastating descent into war.
In a tiny, homemade tin and canvas airplane, through surreal and surprising encounters, Sauper explores the human landscape of the fledgling country – Chinese oil workers, UN peacekeepers, Sudanese warlords, American evangelicals, displaced farmers and their families – to capture all their thoughts and dreams for South Sudan's future.
Follow the discussion online using #NANYC and by following @NewAmericaNYC.
You can't win; if you tell lies people will distrust you. If you tell the truth people will dislike you. - Oscar Wilde
From little white lies to criminal deceit and global deceptions, dishonesty is a universal constant of the world we live in. Commonplace acts of make clear cheating isn't just happening on a newsworthy scale, but in smaller, more mundane ways everywhere.
(Dis)Honesty - The Truth About Lies shows us that lying is a part of human nature, but little fibs can snowball into large-sale problems with major implications for society. Several recent studies have shown that we don't really understand the causes and complexities of dishonesty, but at the same time, research is indicating that reminding ourselves about our own morality makes us behave better. When we too often go to great lengths to rationalize the stories we concoct, why is it so hard for us to tell it like it is?
Once seen as the Great Equalizer, the value of higher education in the era of soaring college debt has come into serious question.
In their new book, The Real College Debt Crisis: How Student Borrowing Threatens Financial Well-Being and Erodes the American Dream, William Elliott III and Melinda K. Lewis argue that our current system of financial assistance is failing the very students it's intended to serve. For many students, even crippling student debt seems a small price to pay for a college degree that leads them to a more prosperous life. But, in reality, low-income students who wholly rely on this system are hit the hardest, while students from more affluent families emerge unscathed. The Great Equalizer, then, is becoming a Great Reinforcer of growing inequality and widening income and wealth gaps.
Rather than patching up the student debt system, can we pay for college in a way that lives up to America's ideals? Can we reduce inequality and reward effort and talent, instead of conferred advantage? Can early investment in all children become an American cornerstone?
What will World War III look like? A new book from P. W. Singer and August Cole answers this by smashing together the technothriller with nonfiction.
Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War explores what would happen if the brewing cold war between the US and China/Russia were ever to turn hot. It is a fictional scenario, but a real risk in the years ahead. Amid escalating tensions over Ukraine and the South China Sea, China's regime newspaper recently warned that "war is inevitable" if the US doesn't change its policies.
A unique hybrid between the technothriller and the nonfiction current affairs genres, reviewers liken Ghost Fleet to early Tom Clancy in style – a novel, but one that comes with nearly 400 endnotes that point to just how real every single technology and trend in it is. The book follows everything from a modern day Pearl Harbor attack to what the first battles in space might be like, along the way revealing everything from new Chinese drone prototypes to how certain US weapons have already been hacked by cyberspies.
In 2009, photographer Gillian Laub went to rural Georgia to document Montgomery County's two segregated high school proms. Her New York Times essay that followed stirred a powerful outcry and forced the school district to bring the longstanding tradition to an end. Back a year later to photograph the school's first integrated proms, her welcome had run out and, despite the school district gains, she encounters a world still strongly divided and shaped by the legacy of Jim Crow.
Another year later, she's drawn back again when she learns of the murder of Justin Patterson, an unarmed 22-year-old black man, by an older white man. Years before the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray exposed the country's enduring struggle with racial injustice, the death of Patterson went largely unreported. With commentary and candid reflections from local residents, young and old, black and white, Southern Rites weaves together the stories of the senior prom and the murder of Justin Patterson to reveal a complex portrait of a small Southern town still grappling with the deeply-held beliefs and racial tensions that that case lays bare.
Join New America NYC for a screening of Southern Rites and a conversation with the film's director and two outspoken journalists on the persistence of well-worn racial lines and the challenges our country faces in the choice to ignore or confront them.
Inside the secretive and mysterious world of North Korea, Joseph Kim lived a young boy's normal life. But when he was five, disaster struck: the first wave of the Great Famine killed millions, including his father, and forced the rest of his family to desperate escape routes into China. Alone in the streets, he had nothing but his street-hardened instincts for survival.
But through the eventual support of an underground network of activists who kept him hidden from authorities, Kim eventually made his way through the American consulate in Shenyang and became one of just a handful of North Koreans brought to the U.S. as refugees.
Joseph Kim's Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America provides a vivid narrative of resilience. In a country where most have never heard of Facebook or Google and where details of social and cultural life are largely unknown, the book serves as an important first-hand account of atrocities committed within North Korea and hidden from the West and most of the rest of the world.
Join New America NYC for a conversation with Joseph Kim on his journey across new countries and cultures and on the political and economic realities in North Korea that continue to thwart the potential for open dialogue and diplomacy with the rest of the world.
In the wake of the formation of the new Israeli government and as the Vatican formally recognizes the the state of Palestine, the debate about Israel/Palestine in the United States is shifting. As many look past a two state solution that seems increasingly difficult to achieve, more fundamental debates about Zionism, partition and equality are gaining greater prominence.
Join New America NYC for a debate over these questions between Peter Beinart, Senior Fellow at New America, and Yousef Munayyer, Executive Director of the US Campaign to End Israeli Occupation.
Less than a month after it first appeared, Sarah Maslin Nir's two-part report on systemic wage theft, rights violations, and dangerous working conditions in New York City nail salons already looks like a journalistic parable for the ages. Within hours, the exposé had sparked thousands of conversations, in news broadcasts and on social media, about how best to help the vulnerable employees Maslin Nir had described. As a result, New York governor Andrew Cuomo ordered, on an emergency basis, broad new protections for nail salon workers, and hundreds of multilingual volunteers fanned out across New York City, distributing fliers and talking to the workers about their rights. Today, New York's nail salon industry, which had been almost completely unregulated, faces some of the strictest standards in the country.
Unvarnished, as the series was called, is an object lesson in the power of careful, sensitive reporting and writing to expose and correct workplace abuse, a warp-speed, Twitter-enabled version of what Upton Sinclair did for the Theodore Roosevelt-era meatpacking industry. But it comes at a time when few American publications still employ dedicated labor reporters, and only a handful continue to support long-term investigations like Maslin Nir's ("Unvarnished" took 13 months to report). What might this mean for workers in the United States, especially in an era of weakened unions and new rights for American corporations?
In a just released report, the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence presents oral testimonies collected from more than 60 Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza during last year's 50-day combat operation. More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the assault, the vast majority civilians. On Israel's side, 73 people were killed, all but six of them soldiers. More than 2,200 Palestinian homes were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced.
This is How We Fought in Gaza 2014 describes loose rules of engagement that were often interpreted as carte blanche to shoot anything that moved. The report's authors, all former combat soldiers, describe a "broad ethical failure" that "comes from the top of the chain of command" of the Israeli army.
Join New America NYC and Senior Fellow Peter Beinart, prominent American author and political analyst, in conversation with Breaking the Silence's Avner Gvaryahu and Eman Mohammed, the first female Palestinian photojournalist in Gaza, where she covered all three of Israel's military excursions into Gaza between 2008 and 2014. The conversation will address permissive "rules of engagement" of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and the human consequences of Israeli military policies on the ground in Gaza.
PARTICIPANTS
Avner Gvaryahu
Director for Public Outreach, Breaking the Silence
Former IDF paratrooper and sniper team sergeant
@avner87
Eman Mohammed
Palestinian photojournalist
2014 TED Fellow
@emanmohammedD
Peter Beinart
Senior Columnist, Haaretz
Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science, CUNY
Senior Fellow, New America
@PeterBeinart
www.newamerica.org/new-america/thi…fought-in-gaza/
Too many Americans are working too few hours for too little money. As federal, state, and local policymakers debate everything from minimum wages to budgetary goals to global trade policy, more attention has been appropriately focused on those left behind in the economic recovery. Among them are the 27 million part-time workers in America – while the country's overall employment rate has fallen, many remain stuck in part-time jobs. For older workers and those with child care obligations, a part-time schedule can be an advantage. For others, there is a greater need for full-time work and benefits.
Will America's economy of the future leave younger and lower-income individuals and families with fewer options for ensuring secure livelihoods? Where do current trends stand on the state of part-time work in America? In an age of simultaneously increasing flexibility and vulnerability, how are workforce and wage trends impacting families? What role can policymakers play in pursuing the objectives of both national economic prosperity and individual economic security?
Corporations are the dominant actors in Washington. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 represent business, and the largest companies now have upwards of 100 lobbyists representing them. How did American businesses become so invested in politics? And what does all their money buy?
In his new book, The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate, Lee Drutman draws on extensive data and original interviews with corporate lobbyists to provide a detailed picture of what corporations do in Washington, why it matters, and most importantly, how we can make sure that their presence doesn't undermine our democracy.
Join New America NYC for a conversation with Lee Drutman and Zephyr Teachout about the relationship between corporations and Capitol Hill – and how we might reform it.
New York may be known as a concrete jungle, but it is also an important center of green activism. To mark the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, we're partnering with the Museum of the City of New York to discuss how citizens, entrepreneurs, and policy makers are making an impact on our city's environment, today and for the future. Join our panelists for a conversation about how we can connect environmental and economic justice, balance ecological and development concerns, and strive for a greener—and more equitable—city.
On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then drove to the island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenagers. In her new book One of Us, journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day, Norway's own September 11. She delves deep into Breivik's childhood, showing how a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist and then an Internet gamer and self-styled warrior who believed he could save Europe from the threats of Islam and multiculturalism.
How did Breivik, raised by a single mother in one of the world's most famously tolerant and egalitarian societies, become convinced that feminism and immigration has destroyed European culture? How did a gifted child from an affluent Oslo neighborhood become Europe's most reviled terrorist?
Join New America NYC for a conversation with Åsne Seierstad and The New York Times's Lydia Polgreen about the psychological roots of right-wing extremism and about Norway's struggles to come to terms with homegrown terror.
PARTICIPANTS
Åsne Seierstad
Author, One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway
@AsneSeierstad
Lydia Polgreen
Deputy International Editor, The New York Times
@lpolgreen
In collaboration with Pacific Standard Magazine
An onslaught of new "psychoactive substances" -- an ever-shifting range of chemical products marketed in stores under names like "bath salts" and "spice" -- has transformed the global market for recreational drugs and reduced drug enforcement efforts to a hopeless game of Whac-a-Mole: as soon as one of these substances gets banned, a slightly different formula pops up, untested and potentially dangerous.
In Pacific Standard's March/April cover story, Maia Szalavitz, a reporter covering drugs and addiction for nearly 30 years, introduces us to Matt Bowden, a flamboyant New Zealand glam-rocker and drug-maker who has played a key role in launching this historically viral outbreak of new drugs. He has also spearheaded a national reform in favor of establishing a regulated market for new psychoactive substances, a tactic that may prove to be the only viable policy response to this burgeoning pharmacopeia. Rather than punish New Zealand for this experiment, world leaders -- faced with their own losing battles against so-called legal highs -- are taking careful notes. Has America reached a tipping point regarding the war on drugs? Is cutting off supply instead of focusing on minimizing their damage more retrograde than ever?
This podcast contains mature language.
In the year since MH370 vanished over the South China Sea, private pilot and science writer Jeff Wise has appeared on CNN more than 50 times to lend his insights on where he thinks the plane has ended up. In the same time Wise was dubbed CNN's new "aviation analyst," a million theories bloomed about MH370's whereabouts, including his own.
Despite the unprecedented and technically complex turn of events, aviation experts, governments, and amateur plane hobbyists all thought they had the answers, answers that were often received as incomplete, illogical, or downright wacky. Will we ever find the plane or learn more accurate details of its disappearance? In light of last week's crash of a Germanwings airbus in the French Alps, are safety standards and emergency protocols going unenforced? Will these crashes put new strains on global political relationships and the travel industry?
Join New America NYC for a conversation between Jeff Wise and technology and aerospace journalist Eric Adams to recount the progress a year has made in the search for MH370 and to assess its impacts on the politics and economics of global travel.
Follow the discussion online using #NANYC and following @NewAmericaNYC.
With 37 states recognizing legal same-sex marriage and increased visibility of LGBT characters on television shows like Transparent and Orange Is the New Black, the gay rights movement is claiming an unprecedented victory. But the future of gay rights is far from inevitable.
Despite massive gains, Michelangelo Signorile’s It’s Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality provides stinging evidence that age-old hatred and homophobia are still basic facts of American life. How do we hold the political, social, and media establishments accountable to discrimination? Can we get past mere tolerance and achieve a fuller acceptance?
Join New America NYC for a conversation between Michelangelo Signorile and Slate’s June Thomas on the state of LGBT rights and the effort to keep the momentum for equality moving forward.
Lacey Schwartz grew up in a typical household in Woodstock, NY, but her story is far from ordinary. Raised with noticeably dark skin within a white, Jewish family, Schwartz uncovers a family secret that leads her on a personal quest to examine the big issues of race, identity, and belonging. Coming at a moment when the political dialogue on race has reached a fever pitch, Sundance Institute Film Forward participantLittle White Lie confronts a complicated upbringing and asks the question of who we are and what makes us the people we become.
As China rises to superpower status, the country is challenging the United States not just economically and politically-- but also ideologically. Its leadership is asserting its own political and economic model as an alternative to American-style democracy and capitalism-- one Beijing believes is based on its own non-Western traditions.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius is, according to Michael Schuman's new book, Confucius and the World He Created, critical to China's political agenda today. The Chinese Communist Party is reviving Confucius as an attempt to legitimize its authoritarian rule by linking it to the country's political history. Confucius, they believe, can also act as a bulwark against dangerous democratic ideals from the West. Whether or not this Confucian campaign succeeds will have huge implications for China's political future, its role in the world, and Beijing-Washington relations.
Join New America NYC for a conversation with journalist and author Michael Shuman, along with Hua Hsu and John Bussey, on the steps it will take for Americans to contend with China in an ever-shifting world.
In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote that the crisis of his time consisted in the fact that "the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
Our polarized ideologies and traditional solutions seem inadequate to many of today's challenges around the revival of class hierarchy, the de-skilling of labor, the erosion of national identity, the fragmentation of the public sphere, and the global resurgence of religion as a political force. Do we once again find ourselves in one of these morbid intellectual periods when an interregnum of ideas leaves us struggling to understand the world around us?
Join New America NYC and The Nation as we discuss the possible responses to these challenges, from those who say that the old ideas are not at all dying, those who think that we need to look for new ones, and those who claim that new ideas are already here.
American higher education is in crisis. The price of college has grown astronomically, forcing students and parents to take out loans that now exceed $1.2 trillion in outstanding debt. Many of those loans are falling into default as graduates struggle to find good work. The latest research suggests that our vaunted universities are producing graduates who learn little while they're in school.
But the disruptive power of information technology is about to change all of that, upending centuries-old institutions and creating a new landscape of opportunity for students in America and around the world. In his new book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, New America education policy director Kevin Carey tells the story of how traditional colleges become so confused, ineffective, and expensive, and how a new generation of researchers and entrepreneurs are building a digital learning ecosystem to take their place.
Last summer’s 50-day military conflict in Gaza received saturated global media coverage and elicited a great deal of controversy, partly due to the high casualty rate among non-combatants in the Palestinian territory. Israel said it went to great lengths to avoid civilian deaths, while others — journalists on the scene and Palestinians in Gaza — said the Israeli military deliberately attacked non-military targets.
Physicians for Human Rights - Israel is the only independent international organization that was granted access to Gaza during the war. Now the organization has released its report, “No Safe Place,” based on 68 interviews with victims in Gaza hospitals, those in the field and at hospitals in Jordan, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
In 2015, the Millennial generation will surpass the outsized Baby Boom generation as the nation’s largest living generation. And while our country’s new largest constituency is optimistic about its future, current policies and resources aren’t keeping up.
In a country gridlocked by ideological standoffs and still recovering from the Great Recession, young people are proving to be innovators in a rapidly changing political, cultural, and technological world. But for all the diversity, education, and community experience they represent, support for their values of civic engagement isn't being met. As less Millennials agree with standard definitions of patriotism andengage less in traditional forms of political participation, how can we harness their assets and empower them to pursue their desires for change? What does meaningful citizenship look like in the future?
For all the global obsession with oil that has marked the past decades, the real future of energy might be something quite different. An advanced lithium-ion battery could power our electric cars and help relieve climate change. But the race is on in laboratories all over the world to be the first to solve this scientific enigma -- and the United States may not necessarily be the winner.
Steve Levine, Washington correspondent for Quartz, will discuss his new book, The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World, with Andrew Revkin, senior fellow at Pace University's Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies and author of the New York Times'Dot Earth blog. They will explore how geopolitics, competition, and the scientists themselves could shape technology's next great watershed.
Decades before the world knew the names of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, there was the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. During the height of the Vietnam War, eight ordinary citizens covertly entered their local FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania with the objective of stealing potentially incriminating files and leaking them to the press. What they left with would unearth a highly classified civilian surveillance and intimidation program and change the protocol of government surveillance in America forever.
In 1971, director Johanna Hamilton skillfully splices together archival footage and confessions to reveal the methods and identities of the perpetrators for the first time. Created on the heels of the NSA scandal and in the era of WikiLeaks, the striking expose begs the question: who's watching the watchmen?
Join New America NYC and the Brennan Center for Justice for a screening of 1971 and a conversation with the film's director and key figures in the landmark heist that forever changes the conversation on the rights of privacy and dissent in the era of government surveillance.
Follow the discussion online using #NANYC and following @NewAmericaNYC.
When President George W. Bush approved the first American-Afghan war, Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad from 1999-2002, found himself directing it. Grenier launched the “southern campaign,” orchestrating the final defeat of the Taliban and Hamid Karzai’s rise to power in eighty-eight chaotic days.
Grenier’s new book, 88 Days to Kandahar, recounts the crucial players during this critical time: General Tommy Franks, who balked at CIA control of “his” war; General Jafar Amin, the Pakistani intelligence officer who saved Grenier from committing career suicide; and Pakistan’s brilliant ambassador to the US, Maleeha Lodhi; among others. What results is a post-9/11 race to unseat the Taliban and al-Qaida, forever changing the U.S.’s relationship to Afghanistan.
"Hope is like a path in the countryside," wrote Chinese essayist Lu Xun. "Originally there is nothing. But as people walk this way again and again, a path appears."
In Half the Sky, award-winning journalists and husband and wife team Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof examined the stories of struggles facing women and girls around the world. Now, in A Path Appears, they focus on poverty -- its complex causes, symptoms and cycles -- and on solutions to this global scourge: innovative strategies for making a difference. Through a mix of research, reporting and extraordinary storytelling, WuDunn and Kristof introduce us to people who are using exceptional ideas and evidence-based approaches to tackle severe problems, inspire hope, and make the world a better place.
Participants
Nicholas Kristof
Columnist, New York Times
Co-author, A Path Appears
@NickKristof
Maro Chermayeff
Founder and Chair, MFA in Social Documentary, The School of Visual Arts
Executive Producer and Director, A Path Appears
@APathAppears
Georgia Levenson Keohane
Senior Fellow and Director, Program on Profits & Purpose, New America
@GeorgiaKeohane
In collaboration with Future Tense Americans are obsessed with tracing their family trees. Enabled by the Internet and advances in genetic technology, millions of people are diving deep into their family histories on WikiTree and Ancestry.com, or discovering their ethnic make-up down to the decimal point using 23andMe. Someday, the explosion of DNA-based genealogy could even create a universal family tree. So, how could these data sets alter how we think about ourselves? Should you feel a connection with someone because a genetic test says she's your seventh cousin?
The world's greatest manufacturing juggernaut -- the $2 trillion automotive industry -- is in the throes of a revolution. Its future will include cars Henry Ford and Karl Benz could have scarcely imagined. They will drive themselves, won't consume oil, and will come in radical shapes and sizes.
But the path to that future is fraught. Today, the top contenders are two traditional manufacturing giants, the United States and Japan, and a newcomer, China. The outcomes of this global competition will shape how we move, how we work, and how we live on Earth.
Your child is more than a score. But in the era of No Child Left Behind and the Common Core, many are accusing America's public education system of sacrificing substantial learning and taxpayer dollars in favor of high-stakes testing that doesn't measure what really matters.
In The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing -- But You Don't Have to Be, Anya Kamenetz dives into the surprising history and tempestuous politics that have led to the ubiquitous tests we see in public K-12 classrooms across the country. Beyond dilemmas about measuring the performance of students, Kamenetz also explores alternatives to the over-testing crisis in an effort to ask: what and how should we be teaching in a competitive and increasingly globalized world? And how can we best measure the progress of education in a way that allows us to hold teachers, education administrators, and policymakers equally accountable?
Inspired by the acclaimed book by Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt is a satiric yet serious examination into the heart of conjuring American spin. Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the curtain on a secretive group of charismatic pundits-for-hire and pseudo-scientists, paid for by multinational energy businesses, who present themselves in the media as scientific authorities -- yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied threats ranging from smoking and toxic chemicals to pharmaceuticals and, in recent years, climate change. By fabricating false arguments, they work to muddle the scientific debate on global warming to slow the cause of progress and defer public action for as long as possible.
Join New America NYC and the Environmental Defense Fund for a screening of Merchants of Doubt, followed by a conversation with leaders in the science, environmental, and media communication fields to discuss the state of our environment in the era of polarized politics.
The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; the War on Poverty; Medicare and Medicaid; the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities – these are just a few of the programs Lyndon Johnson spearheaded in what became known as the most transformative agenda in American political history since the New Deal.
But his plans for a “Great Society” didn’t come without bitter resistance. While most recount this era as an unprecedented “liberal hour” in America, Julian Zelizer’s The Fierce Urgency of Now paints a more complex picture in which Congress, religious groups, media, political action groups, and activists often had divergent views about the legacies they would leave. Our politics may have changed, but in many ways the Great Society legislation remains a center of gravity for the country we live in today.
Join New America NYC for a conversation with Julian Zelizer and Jonathan Alter about the hard-fought path to the Great Society and the role its agenda continues to have on the political and policy landscapes today.
