Renata Adler, Queen Of The Culture Wars

September 29, 2015 at 11:00 AM Legendary journalist and critic Renata Adler on American culture now. She’s not a happy camper.

(L-R) Renata Adler and Joan Didion in an archival photograph from May 17, 1978. (Flickr / Creative Commons)

Journalist and critic Renata Adler came out of the generation that came of age between World War II and the boomers. Not in the war. Not of the sixties. But always watching. And writing, in Renata Adler’s case, with a fierce frankness that has earned her deep admirers and wary targets. She covered Selma, the Vietnam War. Watched Watergate. Famously torched film critic Pauline Kael and publications where she had written – the New Yorker, the New York Times. She’s tough, clear-eyed, impolite if need be about where American culture’s gone and going. This hour, On Point, we talk with Renata Adler.

– Tom Ashbrook

Guest

Renata Adler, journalist, critic and novelist. Author of “After the Tall Timber,” “Canaries in the Mineshaft” and “Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker,” among others.

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Robert Reich: How the Pro-Corporate Elite Has Rigged the System Against the Rest of Us

Ever wonder why Americans pay more for Internet, airplane tickets and medicines?

By Robert Reich / Robert Reich’s Blog
September 29, 2015

Photo Credit: via YouTube

You often hear inequality has widened because globalization and technological change have made most people less competitive, while making the best educated more competitive.

There’s some truth to this. The tasks most people used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.

But this common explanation overlooks a critically important phenomenon: the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs.

As I argue in my new book, “Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few” (out this week), this transformation has amounted to a pre-distribution upward.

Intellectual property rights—patents, trademarks, and copyrights—have been enlarged and extended, for example, creating windfalls for pharmaceutical companies.

Americans now pay the highest pharmaceutical costs of any advanced nation.

At the same time, antitrust laws have been relaxed for corporations with significant market power, such as big food companies, cable companies facing little or no broadband competition, big airlines, and the largest Wall Street banks.

…(read more).

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YaleNews | Campus community invited to ‘Celebrate Sustainability’

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New Program on Climate Change and Health at Yale School of Public Health

In response to the growing health threat posed by climate change, Yale School of Public Health has created a new program — Climate Change and Health @Yale — to train future public health leaders to search for innovative solutions.

“Public health aims to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy, and one of those conditions is a stable climate,” said Professor Robert Dubrow, M.D., the program’s faculty director. “Public health leaders have a central role to play in navigating and reversing the dangerous new era of climate instability that humanity has entered.”

The World Health Organization estimates that climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year between 2030 and 2050, mainly due to heat exposure, diarrhea, malaria, and childhood malnutrition. It is expected that the poor will be disproportionately impacted.

The program, one of the first of its kind, includes new undergraduate and graduate courses that will debut in the fall semester of 2016, two doctoral training positions, a case study on climate change and health for the M.P.H. core curriculum, a leadership training workshop for students, summer internships, a climate change leader in residence, a speaker series, and pilot research grants for faculty.

Climate Change and Health @Yale is made possible through a generous $1.3 million grant from the Overlook International Foundation. Martin Klein, an associate dean at the School of Public Health, is the executive director.

Dean Paul Cleary said that a better understanding of climate change is vital to protecting and promoting public health in the coming decades. “I have no doubt that the direct and indirect effects of climate change on health will become increasingly important over the coming decades,” he said.

“It is important that we continue to think about how best to educate the public health leaders of tomorrow so that they will be able to address these incredibly important issues.”

Cleary recently signed President Barack Obama’s plan to protect the public’s health from the effects of climate change.

(Photo via Shutterstock)

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Our Posthuman Future: The Perils and Promise of Biotechnology (2002)

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Van Comments on Pope Prison Visit

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