For years, Harvard professor ERAM ALAM has been looking at the role immigrant physicians play in US healthcare. We fill a chronic shortage of new domestic MDs with doctors trained elsewhere. Nearly a quarter of our physicians went to medical school outside the U.S. or Canada . We talk about her book, THE CARE OF FOREIGNERS: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare. I feel this is one of those issues where too many of us either don’t recognize its existence or don’t realize its implications. You can learn more at eramalam.com

SVEN BECKERT, in his latest book, CAPITALISM: A Global History, traces its story across the world since the dawn of the last millennium. He reminds us that capitalism is not natural or inevitable, but a human invention, one that has survived – even dominated – as its form has changed. What can we learn from history? If we invented capitalism, does that offer the possibility we could invent something to replace capitalism or that we could invent a capitalism that values sustainability and justice?  You can learn more at svenbeckert.com 

I’m one who says the 60s didn’t end until about 1973. John Jenkins was a young journalist in Washington DC in ’71 when some shit was going down. War still raging in Vietnam. Largest mass arrest of protestors in US history. Daniel Ellsberg steals, copies, and delivers the Pentagon papers and the Supreme Court rules they can be published. The deaths of George Jackson and the Soledad brothers in California, the Attica riots in New York. Jenkins did the historical research and revisits those eventful months in his new book, Summer of 71: Five Months That Changed America. You can learn more at johnajenkins.com