New America NYC
97 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 6 years ago -Events from New America NYC featuring innovative policy ideas from some of the best minds of our time.
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2020 Census: A Tech Revolution or Risk?
July 18, 2018 19:05 - 1 hour - 734 MBNew America NYC and NYU's McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research have teamed up to produce an inaugural conversation on June 18th to highlight the necessity of early and sustained census preparation in keeping our democratic institutions equitably funded and accessible.
Digital Democracy
May 03, 2018 22:43 - 1 hour - 141 MBImagine a centralized database replete with your personal information that links together your and your family’s vital health, education, and social welfare records. Now imagine the database includes an entire country’s population. Fifty years ago this year, Denmark launched the world's first nationalized big data project. The country's Civil Personal Registration (CPR) system assigns every resident a "digital ID" that directly connects them with the Danish state to facilitate government-...
The China Hustle
April 03, 2018 15:21 - 51 minutes - 69.6 MBThere are no good guys in this story, including me. – Dan David, GeoInvesting After the 2008 financial collapse, U.S. investors began scouring global markets for new opportunities for high returns, and they turned to China to take part in its explosive economic growth. Looking beyond profits that seemed too good to be true, a band of rogue Wall Street outsiders uncovered a massive web of multibillion-dollar fraud. From the producers of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, The China Hust...
Bending the Arc
January 17, 2018 19:48 - 52 minutes - 60.2 MBOptimism is a moral choice. – Dr. Jim Yong Kim Thirty years ago, as much of the world was being ravaged by horrific diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, three young people, not yet out of medical school, set out to provide healthcare for Haiti's rural poor. They went on to spend the next three decades on the frontlines of health crises across the globe. Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, and Ophelia Dahl came together to deliver a world-class level of care — the kind they would expect for t...
500 Years
January 12, 2018 20:42 - 47 minutes - 65.5 MBIn January 2013, on an early morning in Guatemala City, soldiers with automatic weapons are standing on street corners. A long line of Mayan women and men head into the high court, an institution historically dominated by the interests of a small white elite minority. Just three decades earlier, the ruling elite, with U.S. backing, engineered a coup that would topple a democratically elected government and unleash a dark period of repression and massacres. 200,000 mostly indigenous people we...
Making Health Work
January 11, 2018 15:24 - 1 hour - 100 MBMany American workers are unwell. They live with serious economic insecurity; succumb to diabetes, depression, and addiction at alarming rates; and struggle to balance the conflicting needs of their employers, their families, and their own well-being. That outlook won’t improve until we think of health as the driver of prosperity — not just the product of it. In the U.S., we spend extravagantly on treating illness but spend proportionally less on keeping people healthy than most developed ...
The Quantum Spy
December 13, 2017 20:28 - 37 minutes - 54.3 MBThe United States and China are in a race to build the world’s first quantum machine, and whoever crosses the finish line first will attain global dominance for generations to come. In The Quantum Spy, a new genre-bending thriller, New York Times bestselling author and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius tells the fictional story of a hyper-fast quantum computer—the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb—able to shred any encryption and break any code in existence. When top-secret U.S. ...
The End of Loyalty
November 30, 2017 19:44 - 1 hour - 77.6 MBToday, almost half of the American workforce earns less than $15 per hour and a third of working-age men are either unemployed or unable to keep a family of four out of poverty. Few have sufficient savings to retire with, while businesses continue to push healthcare and other social safety costs onto their employees. Yet American companies are far from struggling. Is the contract between employee and employer broken? In his new book, The End of Loyalty, Rick Wartzman chronicles the erosion...
The Color of Money
November 14, 2017 15:58 - 1 hour - 107 MBWhen the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States’ total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. According to a new book by Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money, this absence of wealth isn't just a failure to atone for oppression imposed by slavery and Jim Crow — it's the product of contemporary acts to maintain their legacies. Today, the racial wealth gap persists in building wealth for t...
Human Flow
November 13, 2017 18:25 - 42 minutes - 48.7 MBOn Sunday, October 8th, join New America NYC for a private screening of Human Flow, a sweeping new film by world-renowned artist, activist, and icon Ai Weiwei, followed by a conversation with Richard Gere and David Miliband on the plight of refugees all over the world. More than 65 million people have been forcibly displaced due to war, persecution, climate change, and crushing poverty in the greatest human displacement since World War II. Setting out on a journey across 23 countries, Ai ...
A Moonless, Starless Sky
October 10, 2017 20:47 - 1 hour - 96.4 MBExtremism across the continent of Africa has been widely researched and reported; less covered are the stories of those who have been survivors—and resisters—of it. A Moonless, Starless Sky, the debut book by New America National Fellow, Alexis Okeowo, is a vivid account of Africans who are courageously countering their continent's wave of fundamentalism. Okeowo weaves together four narratives that form a powerful tapestry of modern Africa: a young couple, kidnap victims of Joseph Kony's ...
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
October 10, 2017 20:29 - 41 minutes - 47.4 MBThe only United States bank indicted for mortgage fraud related to the 2008 financial crisis is the one you’ve never heard of. Charged with securities fraud, mortgage fraud, and conspiracy, Chinatown’s Abacus Federal Savings Bank — the country's 2,531st largest bank and a cornerstone of the Chinese immigrant community — became the only bank in the U.S. to face criminal charges in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Part legal thriller, part underdog saga, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail,...
I Was Told to Come Alone
September 01, 2017 14:25 - 1 hour - 74.8 MBFor her entire life, German-born and -educated Souad Mekhennet has had to balance the two sides of her upbringing—Muslim and Western—and provide a mediating voice between these cultures, which too often misunderstand each other. In Mekhennet's new memoir, I Was Told To Come Alone, she journeys behind the lines of jihad, starting in the German neighborhoods where the 9/11 plotters were radicalized and culminating on the Turkish-Syrian border where ISIS is a daily presence. Traveling across ...
I Am Not Your Negro
September 01, 2017 14:22 - 51 minutes - 59.2 MBThe future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country.— James Baldwin In the final years of his life, James Baldwin began writing Remember This House, a personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his closest friends—Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Now, more than 30 years later, a new documentary picks up those letters and unfinished manuscripts to explore how race became the defining struggle of America...
Trans Youth
September 01, 2017 14:18 - 27 minutes - 31.2 MBAs the debate about which bathroom transgender people should use continues, a more complex question is emerging about how early the medical transition begins for trans kids. Families and doctors are rewriting the rules as they decide when and how to start medical intervention before transgender youth hit puberty. In a special VICE on HBO episode, VICE correspondent Gianna Toboni explores this emotionally charged and rapidly evolving issue with trans youth and their parents in the midst of ...
The War Show
September 01, 2017 14:16 - 41 minutes - 47.6 MBThe regime’s biggest fears were those who held cameras, so they were the first to be eliminated. — Obaidah Zytoon, co-director, The War Show When the Arab Spring reached Syria in 2011, 35-year-old radio DJ Obaidah Zytoon joined the revolution armed with two things: a video camera and hope. The portrait that resulted—encapsulating both the euphoria of protest and the devastating violence—is the subject of the 2016 Venice Days Award-winning documentary, The War Show. Against the brutal bac...
Step
August 11, 2017 15:49 - 57 minutes - 65.5 MBBaltimore is a city fighting to save its youth. In the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, the inaugural class of the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women began their senior year. Established in 2009, the charter school had a simple mandate: send every girl to college, regardless of any barriers their home lives and communities might present. Step, the 2017 Sundance Special Jury Award winner for Inspirational Filmmaking by director Amanda Lipitz, chronicles this pressure-filled year...
Whose Streets?
August 11, 2017 15:47 - 52 minutes - 59.7 MBWhen unarmed teenager Michael Brown, Jr. was killed by police and left lying in the street for hours, it marked a breaking point for the residents of St. Louis, Missouri. Grief, long-standing racial bias, and renewed anger brought together residents and activists from across the nation to confront this flashpoint in a long history of injustice. Their stories are the subject of Whose Streets?, a new film narrated by the artists, parents, teachers, and children of Ferguson working to counter...
The Financial Diaries
August 03, 2017 14:04 - 1 hour - 83.7 MBThe traditional narrative of the American Dream — hard work, steady saving, and a little bit of luck will lead to security today and mobility tomorrow — has all but become an American Myth. Today, insecurity is so pronounced that 92 percent of Americans, when asked to choose between being a little richer or more financially stable, chose stability. But amidst 30 years of wage stagnation and radically decreased mobility, neither has been attainable. In The Financial Diaries, authors Jonat...
Putin's World Tour
August 03, 2017 13:57 - 1 hour - 95.3 MBAmidst daily revelations about Russia's global web of influence, is there a way to chart a path ahead? Not since the end of the Cold War has Russia received as much front page media attention as it gets today. Russia has been blamed for several recent global upsets — Trump's election, Le Pen's surge, and Assad's ability to remain in power. At the same time Russian oligarchs have structured a network of financial influence across Europe and into the U.S., Russian media has been charged with...
Unwarranted: A Conversation on Policing
August 01, 2017 17:24 - 1 hour - 89.6 MBPolice play an indispensable role in our society. But the responsibility for keeping them accountable may lay with us, the people. In June 2013, documents leaked by Edward Snowden sparked widespread debate about secret government surveillance of Americans. Just over a year later, the shooting of Michael Brown, a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, set off protests and triggered concern about militarization of law enforcement and discriminatory policing. In his new book, Unwarranted, Ba...
Nobody Speak
July 25, 2017 14:46 - 43 minutes - 49.9 MBWhen the online blog Gawker posted an excerpt of a secretly filmed sex tape of professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, it ignited a high stakes legal battle that pitted privacy rights against the First Amendment.
Water and Power
April 07, 2017 15:14 - 33 minutes - 39.1 MBGonna be a lot of irate citizens when they find out that they’re paying for water they’re not gonna get. — Jack Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes in Chinatown In 1994, a handful of California state officials met in secret with representatives from big agriculture to transform wide swaths of formerly arid land into some of the country's most fertile megafarms. Two decades later, amidst an historic drought, the Monterey Amendments have all but depleted the state's river waters, leaving homeown...
A Question of Order
April 05, 2017 20:40 - 54 minutes - 63.2 MBWhat happens when a democratically elected leader evolves into an authoritarian ruler? India and Turkey are two of the world's biggest democracies—multi-ethnic nations that rose from their imperial past to be founded on the values of modernity. The have fair elections, open markets, and freedom of religion. But despite their democratic values, each of their charismatic leaders—Narendra Modi in India and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey—have used their electoral support to amass significant ...
Lower Ed
March 02, 2017 17:24 - 1 hour - 78.3 MBA former insider discloses the story behind for-profit schools to explain the exorbitant price tags, the questionable credentials, and the lose-lose options for Americans seeking a better life. More than two million students are enrolled in for-profit colleges, from the small family-run operations to the behemoths brandished on billboards, subway ads, and late-night commercials. These schools have been around just as long as their not-for-profit counterparts, yet shockingly little is know ...
Generation Revolution
February 23, 2017 16:37 - 48 minutes - 55.3 MBWhat happens when a revolution unravels? While motivations vary widely, revolutions are, at their core, a clash between old and new ideas. The Tahrir Square uprisings were no different. Nearly two-thirds of Egypt's 70 million citizens were under thirty years old and newly online, and it became harder for the regime to isolate the public from radical ideas. That influx of ideas—and the political sentiments that followed—created a new wave of turmoil for many young people torn between the ev...
The Bad Kids
December 22, 2016 18:07 - 33 minutes - 45.8 MBIf you're looking for a place to hide, this isn't it. At our school, we want you to demand that we help you. There is no shame in asking for help. – Vonda Viland, Principal, Black Rock High School At a remote Mojave Desert high school, educators believe that empathy and life skills, more than academics, give at-risk students command of their own futures. At Black Rock High School, the methods are unique and the model is innovative: no punitive measures, no end-date, and no formal graduatio...
Do Not Resist
November 21, 2016 20:10 - 24 minutes - 33.1 MBOver the past 25 years, the United States has seen a disturbing militarization of its sworn law enforcement offices – a 25 percent increase in SWAT team raids, a mass influx of military-grade equipment in small-town communities, and the seeming immunity of a new force of violent warrior-cops. Starting on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., as the community grapples with the death of Michael Brown, Tribeca Film Festival award winner Do Not Resist offers a disturbing glimpse at the current state o...
Terror: A Post-Screening Conversation with VICE
November 18, 2016 17:09 - 40 minutes - 55.7 MBWith the death of Osama bin Laden and the explosion of the Arab Spring five years ago, it seemed like the war on terror might be ending. Instead, the Arab Spring inaugurated civil war in much of the Middle East, out of which sprang brutal attacks by a rising global presence: the Islamic State. Exactly on year ago, ISIS-trained militants killed 130 people at the Bataclan concert hall and several other locations across Paris. Ever since, extremism has moved beyond the spheres of the military...
Democracy Restored Reinventing Our Politics to Fix the Inequality Crisis
November 10, 2016 18:31 - 44 minutes - 61.3 MBIn 2008, the collapse of the US financial system plunged the economy into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Between 2008 and 2009, the U.S. labor market lost 8.4 million jobs – 6.1% of all payroll employment – and the average household brought in roughly $5,000 less in 2009 than it did in the year 2000. Since then, the wealth gap has only gotten worse: the top 10 percent now averages nearly nine times as much income as the bottom 90 percent. It should be no surprise, ...
Strangers in Their Own Land
October 07, 2016 16:10 - 53 minutes - 73.4 MBThey stomp on our neck, and then they tell us, ‘Just chill, O.K., just relax.’ Well, look, we are mad, and we’ve been had. —Sarah Palin, endorsing Donald Trump for president, January 19, 2016 More than five years ago, renowned sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild embarked on a journey from her liberal hometown of Berkeley, California, deep into Louisiana bayou country—a stronghold of the conservative right. As she got to know people who strongly oppose many of the ideas she champions, Hoch...
The Populist Explosion
October 07, 2016 15:20 - 41 minutes - 57.3 MBIn the spring and summer of 2016, the world's richest democracies witnessed a collective upheaval that shocked the globe. As if overnight, many Democrats backed a socialist named Bernie Sanders; the United Kingdom voted to the leave the European Union, in a stunning rebuke; the nativist billionaire Donald Trump became the presidential nominee of the Republican Party; and a slew of extreme parties continued to win election after election in countries like Norway, Austria, and Greece. A new ...
Command and Control
October 07, 2016 14:08 - 25 minutes - 35.6 MBThe only warheads we thought would go off in the United States were Soviet warheads. We never considered that our own warheads could detonate our own continent. – Allan Childers, Missile Combat Crew It is September 19, 1980, and a nuclear disaster is playing out in a missile silo outside Little Rock, Arkansas. A worker accidentally drops a socket, puncturing the fuel tank of an intercontinental ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead in our arsenal. It sets in motion a...
How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything
October 06, 2016 21:37 - 28 minutes - 39.8 MBIn a world in which the instant push of a button can lead to the death of a particular individual more than eight thousand miles away, is it possible to define "war" with any clarity? What separates the targeting of an enemy combatant under lawful wartime from the extrajudicial murder of someone suspected of wrongdoing? What is the purpose of a modern military in a world where future threats come from computer hackers, terrorists, and other nonstate actors? These are some of the questions ...
Trapped
June 17, 2016 13:30 - 46 minutes - 64.5 MBIt has been 43 years since Roe v. Wade passed 7-2, yet the war against reproductive health clinics has not subsided. In the past six years, 288 TRAP () laws have been passed by state legislatures, subjecting reproductive health clinics and abortion providers to legal restrictions not imposed on any other medical professionals. Unable to comply with these extensive laws, dozens of clinics in states like Alabama and Texas have been forced to close, leaving scores of women under-served, witho...
Chain of Title
June 13, 2016 14:00 - 50 minutes - 69.2 MBIn the wake of the Great Recession, as the housing bubble burst and unemployment rose, millions of American families experienced a precipitous decline in their net worth. Those who were able to stay in their homes were able to weather the storm, but others couldn't. Tragically, something more nefarious – and preventable – was also in play: foreclosure fraud. In his new book, Chain of Title, David Dayen chronicles how a small group of ordinary people uncovered the large-scale corporate malf...
Time To Choose
June 01, 2016 20:24 - 45 minutes - 62.8 MB“By the middle of this century we will trigger runaway climate change — a process beyond our control. What do you do if you have that information? What do you do?” – Dr. Steven Chu, Former U.S. Energy Secretary and Nobel Prize winner Climate change may be the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced. There are solutions, but we are in a race against the clock to respond to this critical global threat. In Time To Choose, Academy Award® winner Charles Ferguson (Inside Job, No End In Sight)...
The Morning They Came For Us
May 06, 2016 19:51 - 31 minutes - 36.6 MBFour years ago – in the infancy of Syria's civil war – Janine di Giovanni traveled to Syria on assignment for the New York Times. That trip became the first of many as conflict in the region escalated tragically, reaching far beyond borders and affecting millions of lives. When di Giovanni, a seasoned war correspondent, first arrived in Damascus in 2012, she immediately recognized the familiar sight of a country trembling on the brink of war. Through the intimate stories of the ordinary ...
The Witness
May 03, 2016 20:26 - 35 minutes - 40.9 MBCatherine "Kitty" Genovese was stabbed to death on a street in Queens, New York, in 1964, and 38 witnesses, it was claimed, did nothing. More than 50 years later, her brother uncovers a lie that transformed his life, condemned a city, and defined an era. The murder of Kitty Genovese transfixed New York and the world; it came to symbolize the apathy and indifference of urban life, and for many, a great social breakdown. Now, The Witness, a new film by James Solomon, follows Kitty's brother B...
Breaking the Silence Surrounding Antenatal Depression
April 14, 2016 16:00 - 46 minutes - 53.8 MBPopular awareness of postpartum depression has improved tremendously in recent years. Obstetricians now regularly screen patients for post-delivery symptoms of sadness and anxiety, and depressive illness in new parents is discussed in thousands of books, articles, support groups, and online forums. Yet there has been no such growth in public understanding of prenataldepression. Though studies show that depression during pregnancy is just as common, and equally dangerous, many newly pregnant...
On the Frontier: Profits, Purpose, and the Future of Impact Investing
April 08, 2016 16:00 - 55 minutes - 63.2 MBFor many investors, emerging markets appear to be a turbulent and risky frontier; for others, they represent an opportunity to transform lives and communities. In recent years, impact investing has gained significant momentum as a way to match socially-minded entrepreneurs with risk capital. This investment movement has occurred alongside massive technological innovation – and with it unprecedented ways to reach and connect the developing world. Increasingly, business solutions to entrenche...
American Amnesia: The War on Government and Getting Back to Prosperity
April 04, 2016 16:00 - 1 hour - 74.1 MBThe mixed economy was the most important social innovation of the twentieth century. It spread a previously unimaginable level of prosperity and enabled steep increased in education, health, and economic security. And yet, extraordinarily, it is anathema to many current economic and political elites. Like every other prospering democracy, the U.S. developed a mixed economy that channeled the spirit of capitalism intro strong growth and health social development. In this bargain, government ...
Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in America
March 23, 2016 14:00 - 48 minutes - 44.7 MBParticipatory budgeting is perhaps the greatest experiment in democracy that could redefine how public budgets are decided in the United States. A “revolutionary civics in action” that came to the U.S. in 2009, this global phenomenon bridges a citizen-government divide in not only what public projects get funded, but who decides. But for participatory budgeting to work, the health of American democracy is a must. According to Hollie Russon-Gilman's new book, Democracy Reinvented, current ci...
Envisioning the Good Divorce
March 16, 2016 14:00 - 1 hour - 57.2 MBAmerican attitudes toward marriage have undergone a seismic shift in recent decades. Gay marriage has become mainstream, nearly half of American households have female breadwinners, and gendered expectations of domestic roles have changed as well. Yet our attitudes toward divorce remain surprisingly unchanged. Even as marriage rates overall have fallen and long-term unmarried partnerships are increasingly accepted, ending a marriage is still widely regarded as a failure and is stigmatized a...
Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran
March 03, 2016 21:02 - 51 minutes - 59.3 MBIn 1979, seemingly overnight, Iran became the first revolutionary theocracy in modern times. Since then, the country has largely been a black box to the West, a sinister presence looming over the horizon. But inside Iran, according to Laura Secor's Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran, a much different picture has unfolded. With traditions drawn as deeply from the West as from the East, religious thinkers, political operatives, poets, journalists, and activists have wrest...
How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
March 02, 2016 19:35 - 33 minutes - 38.5 MBWorkers lose to automation, investors lose to algorithms, and even tech developers lose their visions to the demands of the startup economy. According to Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, the digital economy has gone wrong, and no one quiet knows how to fix it. The problems lie not with digital technology itself, but in the ways we are deploying it: instead of building a distributed digital economy that new networks cou...
The Industries of the Future
February 22, 2016 17:00 - 46 minutes - 53.6 MBWithin 20 years, we’ll see robot suits that allow paraplegics to walk and new drugs able to melt away most cancers. But we’ll also see definitions of money blur the line between corporation and citizen and computer code being used as a weapon to destroy physical infrastructures halfway around the world. Those are some of the predictions leading innovation expert Alec Ross, author of The Industries of the Future, claims will drive the next two decades of change in our economies and societies...
Broad Influence: How Women Are Changing the Way America Works
February 19, 2016 19:32 - 56 minutes - 64.7 MBExactly a century ago the first woman was elected to national office; 32 years ago we got the first female Supreme Court justice; and 23 years ago women got their own bathroom off the Senate floor. With more than 100 women serving in Congress today, they make up more than 20 percent of the Senate body and have finally achieved a "critical mass" of representation in American politics. Representation, though, is hardly winner-take-all. According to Jay Newton-Small's Broad Influence: How Wome...
Do Silicon Valley and Ancient Greece Share a Recipe for Innovation?
February 17, 2016 19:33 - 42 minutes - 48.2 MBCreativity and ingenuity aren't spread evenly. Throughout history, certain locations have become hubs for artistic, business, and technological innovation, for reasons that aren't always readily apparent. Why Silicon Valley right now? Why Florence during the Renaissance? In search of answers, acclaimed travel writer and former NPR correspondent Eric Weiner traveled the world to investigate the relationship between society's innovative ideas and their surroundings. The result is his new book...
Where to Invade Next: A Social Cinema Screening
February 08, 2016 22:17 - 28 minutes - 26.6 MBIn his most light-hearted and optimistic effort yet, filmmaker and provocateur Michael Moore becomes a one-man American army and sets out to "invade" several foreign nations to steal their good ideas. Where to Invade Next comedically pursues the serious mission of challenging the conventions and inequities of U.S. social policy and the mythology of the American Dream. On his global tour, he looks to Italy where workers are given 30 days of vacation and new mothers get five weeks of full pai...