Beyond the Ivory Tower

Recent News

• Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, argued in the New York Times that the human rights movement must adopt a more ambitious agenda—including a focus on addressing economic inequality—if it is to provide the necessary alternative to “the rising evils of our time.”
• In the New York Times, Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, analyzed the Oklahoma City bombing as the result of decades of very deliberate, organized white-power activism; Belew also discussed the white power movement with NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday.
• Yascha Mounk, author of The People vs. Democracy, debated the state of American democracy with Vox’s Ezra Klein and discussed the rise of populism with KPFA’s Letters and Politics.
• At Fortune, Mehrsa Baradaran, author of The Color of Money and How the Other Half Banks, argued that large banks like Wells Fargo must be prosecuted criminally in order to change their behavior; fines have little impact, and shareholders end up paying the cost.

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April 19: Facebook Interruptus

The Facebook hearings last week were quite the spectacle. Mark Zuckerberg deftly deflected his inquisitors and misled them, while share price rose 4.5% in a single day. Senators and representatives postured for their constituents and got free prime-time media exposure. Privacy experts crowed and gloated that they had always been right, but unfairly ignored. The media and the Internet harvested abundant costless content. And social media lit up, abuzz. Between the schadenfreude and the glee, and the plain-old gawking and goggling, everybody seemed to pleasure themselves. It was win-win—except, perhaps, for the ordinary digital subjects who were left high and dry: pleasantly entertained, but totally exposed. In the end, the Facebook hearings were nothing more than another tantalizing but a…