Emotion Trumps Logic in the Voting Booth
Written on October 24th, 2007All logic points to Republican losses in 2008. But logic doesn’t vote — and logic doesn’t win elections, argues Drew Westen.
Closer to home, as Westen points out, the Republicans led by Karl Rove consistently beat the Democrats at playing to the electorate’s emotions. All logic points to Republican losses in ’08. But logic doesn’t vote — and logic doesn’t win elections. Will the Democrats once more snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, or can they finally learn the crucial lesson that hearts lead minds? Drew Westen weighs in.
Drew Westen received his B.A. at Harvard, an M.A. in social and political thought at the University of Sussex (England) and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Michigan. For several years he was chief psychologist at Cambridge Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. He is a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and teaches at Emory University.
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Bioneers: Groundbreaking Ways to Repair the Earth
Written on October 19th, 2007October 19, 2007 | Human creativity focused on problem solving can explode the mythology of resignation and despair. It is this point of view that inspires the annual Bioneers conference that takes place each fall in the San Francisco Bay area, which now streams via satellite to 19 sites across the country. The conference (10/19-21 in San Rafael, Calif.) is a gathering of scientific and social innovators who are developing and implementing visionary and practical models for restoring community, justice and democracy, as well as the Earth itself.
Speakers this year include author, Alice Walker, inventor and entrepreneur; Jay Harmon, community arts pioneer; Judy Baca, environmental justice leader; Van Jones, Whole Earth Catalog founder; Stewart Brand; and Native American activist Winbona LaDuke.
In addition to founding and co-directing Bioneers, Kenny Ausubel is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and social entrepreneur specializing in health and the environment. He co-founded Seeds of Change, a biodiversity organic seed company. He authored the books Seeds of Change, Restoring the Earth and When Healing Becomes a Crime; edited the first two titles in the Bioneers book series Ecological Medicine and Nature’s Operating Instructions; and was a key advisor for the Leonardo DiCaprio documentary The 11th Hour.
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How Do We Cure a Sick Health Care System?
Written on September 4th, 2007September 4, 2007 | Every day, millions of hard-working people struggle to find affordable medical treatment for themselves and their families — unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular check-ups, let alone for hospital visits. Some of these people end up losing money. Others end up losing their health or even their lives.
The United States is the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee access to medical care as a right of citizenship. As outrageous as that fact is, why is it so? What does it mean in the lives of individual Americans and their families? And what can we do about it?
Like Michael Moore’s critically and commercially successful documentary, SiCKO, Jonathan Cohn’s new book, SICK probes the larger problems by focusing on the stories of individuals — most of them working members of the middle class — who are cruelly let down by our failing system.
Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic, where he has been since 1997. Prior to that, Jonathan worked for six years at The American Prospect, where he remains a contributing editor. A senior fellow at Demos, Cohn has also written for many other publications, and is the author of SICK: The Untold Story Of America’s Health Care Crisis — And The People Who Pay The Price.
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Why Do We Pay Our Plumbers More Than Our Caregivers?
Written on June 27th, 2007Surely leaky pipes aren’t more important than our children. Yet, in America, most plumbers make five times what caregivers do. Author Riane Eisler shows how our economic system, rooted in gender inequality, is failing us. An excerpt from her latest book follows.
Can the answer be that our economic signals are out of whack with reality?
An interview with Riane Eisler, author of The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, shows how our current economic systems aren’t solving our problems. If we want to address issues like poverty and environmental devastation, Eisler says, we must realize that the answer isn’t in money; rather, it lies in the “contributions of people and nature.”
An excerpt from The Real Wealth of Nations follows the interview.
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Paul Hawken: How to Stop Our Political and Economic Systems From Stealing Our Future
Written on June 26th, 2007Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, discusses what he sees as the largest social movement in human history, and why that movement is so invisible to the media — and itself.
Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From multimillion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise a movement that has no name, no leader, no location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up. Hawken’s new book, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, explores the diversity of the movement, its ideas, strategies and hidden history.
Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist and author. He has been involved in the startup of several businesses, including Erewhon natural foods and Smith & Hawken, the garden and catalog retailer. His six books have been published in more than 50 countries and have sold more than 2 million copies. They include Growing a Business (also a PBS series), The Ecology of Commerce, Natural Capitalism and Blessed Unrest.
