We know Republicans exercise minority rule in the states, the House, and the Supreme Court. Now Biden is arming Israel without meaningful or effective demands for humanitarian treatment of innocent civilians. Is it time for civil disobedience? Here’s my 2013 conversation with Tim DeChristopher. In a disputed auction of oil leases on pubic lands, Tim bid and won the rights to 22K acres, which he had no plan to pay for or exploit. He was tried on federal felony charges and served 21 months in prison. I offer this example to remind us of the personal courage it may take to offer real resistance to policies and actions being done in our names. 

ANGUS DEATON won the Nobel prize in Economics for work accomplished before he and his wife, economist Ann Case, wrote DEATHS OF DESPAIR and the Future of Capitalism. Pre pandemic, life expectancy in the US was no longer rising, and already falling among adults without 4 years of college, due in large part to alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicides. In his newest book, ECONOMICS IN AMERICA: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, Deaton reflects on 25 years of his writings from the perspective of 2023. He’s takes a hard look at the field of economics, and its role in a society and an economy that leaves out so many. His last words in this conversation: “I made a lot of mistakes in my life, and it’s good to be able to live long enough to be able to acknowledge them.” You can learn more at deaton.scholar.princeton.edu

This week the media offers Academy Award buzz as well as the horrors of Israel’s response to the horrors of October’s attack by Hamas. Here’s my 2013 conversation with Palestinian EMAD BURNAT and Israeli GUY DAVIDI, co-directors of the Oscar-nominated documentary, 5 BROKEN CAMERAS. The film tells the story of Burnat, a Palestinian West Bank farmer, his wife, and four small children. As we track the destruction of each of his cameras, we witness his village’s ancient olive trees bulldozed, protests intensify, and a son grow from a newborn to a young boy. 

We all know the newspaper business is in trouble. A weekday edition of the LA Times – once a “national” newspaper, along with the NYTimes, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal – now might be 32 pages and another 100 were recently laid off in the newsroom. The culprit is assumed to be the internet, stealing both stories and ads. Not so fast. I talk with MARGOT SUSCA, a former reporter, now a professor of Journalism, about her first book, HEDGED: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy. Her assessment: “What we have is not a crisis of profit. What we have is a crisis of greed and growing inequality.”

The last time a Democratic presidential candidate won a majority of White voters was in 1964. ROBERT P JONES, President and Founder of the Public Religion Research Insitute (PRRI) and author of THE HIDDEN ROOTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY and the Path to a Shared American Future, writes that “White Christian nationalism has become central to the…Republican Party, two thirds of whom identify as white and Christian.” To find the origins of white supremacy, he says we need to look beyond 1619 to 1493, when the Pope issued the Doctrine of Discovery – that all territory not already inhabited or controlled by Christians shall be claimed by Christians as their new promised land. Learn more at www.whitetoolong.net