Crossing the Bay of Bengal

Recent News

• 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 Salon, William Hall, Anthony McDonnell, and Jim O’Neill, co-authors of Superbugs: An Arms Race against Bacteria, detailed the threats that antibiotic-resistant bacteria pose to civilization.
• Richard Sander, coauthor of Moving toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing, argued in the Los Angeles Times that fair housing law has succeeded in reducing racial segregation in cities like San Diego—while other American cities still struggle; Slate featured his coauthor Jonathan Zasloff’s recommendations for decreasing housing segregation going forward.

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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…