From its inception, our media has offered both promise and peril. In this encore presentation, Peter joins two previously separate interviews on this common theme: – In the first half, Penn communications professor Victor Pickard illuminates a period in our...
Most of us think of “geography” as the study of continents, the names of capitals, perhaps the impact of rivers on human cultures. And certainly geography is all of those. But what if its lens could also bring into focus how one’s place impacts identity, how housing...
In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi and a handful of supporters marched some 240 miles to the sea to “make salt.” That is to say, they gathered up and thereby claimed that life-sustaining mineral as their birth right, not a commodity controlled exclusively by their British...
Today’s world is one fraught with complexity. And in order to understand it, and have an impact on it, we’re sometimes best served by stepping back, getting a sense of the whole and perhaps enlisting the guidance of others familiar with the challenge. Joining Peter to...
When Allan Johnson asked his dying father where he wanted his ashes to be placed, his father replied–without hesitation–that it made no difference to him at all. Ultimately troubled by this response, Johnson set off on a 2,000 mile journey across the Upper...
Few Supreme Court decisions in recent memory have so captured the attention of the American public as Citizens United. To help me explore the road to Citizens United, as well as consider the potential paths leading beyond it, is Timothy Kuhner, associate professor at...
We’ve been hearing statistics like these with growing regularity: the top 1% of Americans controls 42% of the nation’s wealth; the wage gap between CEOs and average workers has grown to 587 to 1; and the top 1% pay state taxes around 5.5%, while the bottom 20% pay...
Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the incarceration rate in this country skyrocketed some 400%, far outpacing any other industrialized democracy. And for some time since, scholars have so thought they understood why that happened it has become almost an unquestioned...
