Public Health Reconsidered From A Different Perspective

Jonathan Metzl is a doctor, psychiatrist, professor and author of several well-received books. Right before the pandemic he wrote Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. The work garnered a great deal of attention and significant praise. It is a powerful study, drawing from several disciplines, and made all…

Aging And Options

Elizabeth White has a stellar resume, tremendous writing skills, and an important story to tell. A well-traveled army child attuned to the importance of education, White attended Oberlin as an undergraduate, majoring in political science. She went on to earn an MBA from Harvard and a Masters in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University. Early…

Future Latino Urbanism – 25 Years Ago

Twenty-five years ago, an activist and scholar named Mike Davis wrote Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City. It is a short book, packed with numbers, statistics and trends. Davis, who would pen many books and articles from a working class perspective throughout a lengthy career, makes a compelling case that American cities were and…

Think Clearly or Else!

Decision making for pilots is extraordinarily high-stakes, especially for those who fly in the military. Many of their choices in the cockpit provide little or no time for consideration. Fighter pilots make untold decisions each and every flight. They have to get it right or they may never fly again. The consequences of a poor…

American Culture in Cold War Germany

Never underestimate the power of a well-researched and well-crafted academic monograph. While the number of sales of these books may not be high, they are the foundation of how we know the world and ourselves. Academic scholarship informs everyone: professionals, students, textbooks, and future generations, serving as the building block for popular understanding. Well done…

Next Generation Equity

For the past decade forward thinkers in higher education have been researching, advocating and exploring equity as a goal and catalyzing concept. Much has been learned throughout the academy, from the examination of individual assignments in a course section all the way to system-wide policy and analysis. Equity thinking is now found throughout higher education,…

Organizational Matters

At a gathering of education and non-profit leaders, I was asked to facilitate a conversation, to provide a “spark.” The organizers gave me a prompt, a statement as the basis of a short presentation. The prompt queried the effectiveness of networks of institutions to advance change. Do they? The organizers wanted to get the participants…