A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves

By New America

When Jason DeParle moved into the Manila slums with Tita Comodas and her family three decades ago, he never imagined his reporting on them would span three generations and turn into the defining chronicle of a new age – the age of global migration.
In a monumental book that gives new meaning to “immersion journalism,” DeParle paints an intimate portrait of an unforgettable family as they endure years of sacrifice and separation, willing themselves out of shantytown poverty into a new global middle class.
At the heart of the story is Tita’s daughter, Rosalie. Beating the odds, she struggles through nursing school and works her way across the Middle East until a Texas hospital fulfills her dreams with a job offer in the States.

Posted on August 29, 2019

Dude Picks Up Babe Ruth Book In Chicago Signed By Babe Ruth

By Brigandi Coins & Collectibles

Chris Brigandi and Jimmy Spence of JSA Authentication, at the 2019 National Sports Collectors Convention earlier this month.

Posted on August 22, 2019

The Right-Wing American Love Affair With One Of America’s Most Disturbing Serial Killers

By Thom Hartmann/Independent Media Institute

There’s a direct link between a sociopathic killer in 1927 and the GOP’s willingness to embrace a sociopathic president like Trump. That link runs through the work of Ayn Rand.
When Donald Trump was running for the GOP nomination, he told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, The Fountainhead, was his favorite book.
“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to . . . everything.”
Trump probably knew that anything by Rand would be the right answer for Republicans; the party has embraced her for decades, to the point that Paul Ryan required interns to read her books as a condition of employment.

Posted on August 20, 2019

The Secret History Of Koch Industries And Corporate Power In America

By New America

Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.
The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and U.S. Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers want it that way.

Posted on August 16, 2019

20 Ways Trump Is Consciously Following Hitler’s Template

By Steven Rosenfeld/Independent Media Institute

A new book by one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s – when the Nazis took power in Germany.
In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America’s constitutional foundation in 2019 – an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority – is not positioned to withstand Donald Trump’s extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, “Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?,” extensively details Trump’s mimicry of Hitler’s pre-war rhetoric and strategies.

Posted on August 12, 2019

‘Warspeak’ Permeates Everyday Language. Why It Matters.

By Robert Myers/The Conversation

In a manifesto posted online shortly before he massacred 22 people at an El Paso Walmart, Patrick Crusius cited the “invasion” of Texas by Hispanics. In doing so, he echoed President Trump’s rhetoric of an illegal immigrant “invasion.”
Think about what this word choice communicates: An enemy that must be beaten back, repelled and vanquished.
Yet this sort of language – what I call “warspeak” – has relentlessly crept into most aspects of American life and public discourse.

Posted on August 9, 2019

UChicago Shakespeare Specialist David Bevington Remembered

‘Heaven Better Informed Tonight’

“Professor Emeritus David Bevington, the extraordinarily prolific editor of Shakespeare’s full canon and author of seminal books about English Renaissance playwrights, died peacefully at home in Chicago on Aug. 2. He was 88 years old,” the University of Chicago said Monday.
“Remembered by friends and family as a vibrant, generous and intellectually inquisitive man, the longtime University of Chicago professor possessed an infectious enthusiasm for the works he taught. He lived life with boundless energy – teaching, writing, hosting social events and playing chamber music with friends until just before he died.
“As a scholar, Bevington helped build UChicago’s Department of English Language and Literature into a national center for graduate study in the English Renaissance.”

Posted on August 6, 2019

Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record

“Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down,” Macmillan Publishers says.
“Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online – a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.”

Posted on August 1, 2019