Moorland-Spingarn Research Center– Jan 14, 2022
Amiri Baraka at the demonstration in support of Pan-African and Nationalist movements through the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC near Howard University. Interviews are conducted with African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) International Representative Dawolu Gene Locke, from Houston, Texas and Poet and Activist Imamu Amiri Baraka an At-Large member of the ALSC.
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Date: Wednesday, November 30, 2022, 12:30pm
Location: Hutchins Center, 104 Mount Auburn Street, Floor 3R, Cambridge, MA
This event will be in-person & live-streamed on YouTube
Suzanne Blier (Guest Speaker), Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies
The Medicis and Africa
Part of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Colloquium Series
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DW Planet A – Jan 15, 2021
A lot speaks for solar energy. It’s clean, renewable – and now even cheaper than energy from fossil fuels like coal or natural gas. Sounds pretty great, right? But it only makes up a tiny bit of global electricity production. Why don’t we use a lot more of it yet? We’re destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we’ll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
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DW Planet A Nov 25, 2022
The ice in the arctic is melting, revealing huge amounts of fossil fuels, rare earths and new shipping routes. And the rush to secure these has already begun. Will countries continue their race for economic and militaristic advantages or will they finally work together to solve the global problem of climate change? Credits Reporter: Monika Sax Video Editor: Markus Mörtz Supervising Editor: Joanna Gottschalk, Kiyo Dörrer & Michael Trobridge We’re destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Our channel explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we’ll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
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BBC News – Nov 28, 2022
A new battle of faith is being driven by some pastors and politicians in the United States. Their central message is that the country’s conservative Christian way of life is under threat, and American society is moving in the wrong direction. The BBC’s Barbara Plett Usher explores the impact of this growing movement on US politics.
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Democracy Now! – Nov 28, 2022
As climate Sahrawi activists in occupied Western Sahara accuse Morocco of greenwashing, the Spanish Film Academy, the Spanish equivalent to the Oscars, has just given its social justice award to the Western Sahara International Film Festival and its film school. We feature our interview at the U.N. climate summit with Mahfud Bechri, who explains how Morocco sells the natural resources and wealth of Western Sahara without the consent of the Sahrawi people as part of an effort to greenwash its military occupation of Western Sahara, and his larger campaign to demand companies end complicity with the occupation. The new social justice award from the Spanish Film Academy recognizes how Spanish support for the Moroccan occupation has led to “a complete media blockade” of the conflict, says María Carrión, executive director of FiSahara, the Western Sahara International Film Festival.
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WoodrowWilsonCenter – Nov 28, 2022
In this edition of “Need to Know,” Raoni Rajao, an Associate Professor at the University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, talks about his experience at COP27. Minas covers the climate change debates taking place at the conference, who the key players are, what challenges they face, and how talks have progressed since he attended his first COP seven years ago.
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An “utterly charming”(The Observer) look at the white Indian elephant who became the darling of Pope Leo X and Renaissance Europe.
In 1514, Rome, the Eternal City, was the center of the Chrisitian world and home and workshop to Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. It was also the city of Pope Leo X, the pleasure-loving pontiff whose court was infamous for its excess, frivolity and impropriety, as well as for its newly-arrived white elephant Hanno. Hanno became a star feature in processions and festivals, and the subject of countless paintings, sculptures and fountains. In this fascinating glimpse at a forgotten sidenote to history, Silvio A. Bedini gives us an elephant’s-back view of early modern Europe and the inner workings of the Vatican at the height of its influence. Charmingly written with dozens of accompanying photographs and illustrations, The Pope’s Elephant will delight readers just as Hanno delighted the people of Rome five centuries ago.
“A work of extraordinary scholarship. . . . Crisply written and amply illustrated, it shines a bright light on two short lives, that of Leo and Hanno, and that of the age they embodied.”– The Literary Review
Amazon.com Review
In early 16th century Rome, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, when artists such as Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo thrived in the Holy City, the decadent court of Pope Leo X was a place where visitors could find pleasures and entertainment more exotic than anything they had previously imagined. Among the Pope’s great joys was his menagerie of exotic animals, and the prize of his collection was an Indian elephant named Hanno, presented to him by the King of Portugal. The Pope’s Elephant by Silvio A. Bedini, historian emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, describes Hanno’s powerful effect on the Papal Court and on the Roman citizenry. This elephant–trained to kneel, dance, weep, and trumpet on command–led parades and entertained at public festivals and was commemorated in paintings, poetry, and sculpture. For Romans, Hanno became the preeminent symbol of the alluring Orient; for Pope Leo’s detractors, the elephant became a symbol of Roman corruption. Bedini’s rigorous research and eager enthusiasm for his subject and his judicious selection of whimsical illustrations make reading The Pope’s Elephant a quirky and delightful pastime. –Michael Joseph Gross
About the Author
A Vatican scholar and the author of numerous books, Silvio A. Bedini is Historian Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where he has worked for many years as Deputy Director of the National Museum of History and as Keeper of the Rare Books.
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The disturbing eyewitness account of how a new breed of Republicans—led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn—far from moving on from Trump, have taken the politics of hysteria to even greater extremes and brought American democracy to the edge
The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a terrible day for American democracy, but many people dared to hope that at least it would break the fever that had overcome the Republican Party and banish Trump’s relentless lies about the stealing of the 2020 election. That is not what happened. Instead, “the big steal” has become dogma among an ever-higher percentage of American Republicans. What happened to the Republican Party, and America, during the Trump presidency is a story we more or less think we know. What has happened to the party since, it turns out, is even more disquieting. That is the story Robert Draper tells in Weapons of Mass Delusion.
Through his extraordinarily intrepid cross-country reporting, Draper chronicles the road from January 6 to the 2022 midterms among the Republican base and in the U.S. Congress, rendering unforgettable portraits of how Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk came to shape their party’s terms of engagement to an extent that would have been unimaginable even five years ago. He also brings to life the efforts of a dwindling group of Republicans who are willing to push back against the falsehoods, in the face of a group of ascendent demagogues who are merrily weaponizing them. With a base whipped up into a perpetual frenzy of outrage by conspiracy theories—not just about the big steal but about COVID and vaccines, pedophilia and Antifa and Black Lives Matter and George Soros and President Obama, and on and on and on—the forces of reason within the GOP are on the defensive, to put it mildly. The book also benefits greatly from reporting conducted in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and other bellwether states in the country of the mind one might call a fever of undending conspiracies.
Robert Draper has been a wise, fearless, and fair-minded chronicler of the American political scene for over twenty-five years. He has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. He has never seen it this ugly. Ultimately, this book tells the story of a fearful test of our ability, as a country, to hold together a system of government grounded in truth and the rule of law. Written on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, Draper’s account of a party teetering on the precipice of madness reveals how the GOP fringe became its center of gravity.
Review
“Illuminating . . . Any reader of The Capital Order will be struck by the contemporary resonances.” ― The New Statesman
“A serious economic history of the 1920s and its fiscal and credit policies, and you should not dismiss it.” — Tyler Cowen ― Marginal Revolution
“Brilliantly provocative . . . powerfully argued . . . With her history of the relationship between liberal economists and fascism, Mattei puts the skids under complacent champions of liberal democracy who today summon the fascist figure as a reassuring boogyman. . . . A round house critique of the role of liberal economics in general.” — Adam Tooze ― Chartbook
“Mattei reminds us that . . . austerity is a one-sided class war, conducted in numbers and defended by economists’ jargon.” — Aditya Chakrabortty ― The Guardian
“A work with remarkable resonance for the moment we are living through. I found it impossible to put down.” — James K. Galbraith
“Clara Mattei shows how the supposedly apolitical science of economics has served, and continues to serve, as an ideology of class oppression. The chapters exploring the birth, in Britain and Italy in the 1920s, of what the author calls ‘the technocratic project’ of austerity, and its political and economic consequences, are particularly illuminating.”
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3 Roads Communications– May 15, 2019
Dr. Michael Russell Winston’s commencement video for receiving an Honorary Degree of Humane Letters from Howard University.
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Transition Studies 