BOOK REVIEW | ‘Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond’ by Marc Lamont Hill When you hear about one more killing by police, read one more statistic about racial disparities in arrests and mass incarceration ...
27 Dec 2016 - Mike Wold
BOOK REVIEW | James Kilgore explains our dubious grip on freedom in ‘Understanding Mass Incarceration’ The irony of our criminal justice system is that our “land of the free” locks up more of its people than any other country. As such, it’s an outlier in ...
28 Apr 2016 - Mike Wold
Book review: Martha Long’s “Ma” series shows her genius for storytelling and phenomenal memory for details There are certain expectations that go with genres. A memoir set in Ireland about a girl growing up in poverty evokes the image of lovable alcoholic ...
3 Sep 2015 - Mike Wold
Author’s argument against capital punishment is compassionate and thought-provoking, but could go deeper If you’re going to put somebody to death for a crime, you’d want to be sure they’d committed it, right? Yet prisoners, guards, chaplains, lawyers and ...
26 Jul 2015 - Mike Wold
Book Review: Growing energy costs will make fossil fuels inviable, Heinberg explains, forcing a societal transformation Book Review: “ Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels ” by Richard Heinberg Let’s face it. We all know we’re in trouble. Last year was ...
14 Jul 2015 - Mike Wold
If you’re not in some way involved with public schools, you may not be aware of the explosion of standardized testing in schools over the past 10 years. Preparing for and taking these tests has significantly affected teaching and learning on all levels in ...
28 Jan 2015 - Mike Wold
One singer you won’t likely hear on a ’50s oldies station is Harry Belafonte, yet he was one of the most popular singers of that decade. He made a name for himself in the emerging folk music genre, with five gold albums between 1955 and 1963. For a time, ...
6 Dec 2014 - Mike Wold
At last count, the U.S. had more than 500 military bases in other countries. It spends as much on its armed forces as the rest of the world combined. According to author John Michael Greer, that’s because the United States is an empire and its military do ...
19 Aug 2014 - Mike Wold
Sociologist Jake Rosenfeld, author of “ What Unions No Longer Do,” describes union decline as if he were a building inspector describing the key weaknesses in an aging building where unions are a failing structural element. In sharp contrast, Steve Early’ ...
14 May 2014 - Mike Wold
Former economics correspondent Elizabeth Becker looks at the impact of our roving hearts Politically conscious Americans have an ambivalent relationship to tourism. On the one hand, many of us love to travel to foreign countries — if we can afford it. We ...
27 Aug 2013 - Mike Wold