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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United States Of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists
February 04, 2016 14:30 - 50 minutes - 45.9 MBSince 9/11, more than three hundred Americans – born and raised in Minnesota, Alabama, New Jersey, and elsewhere – have been indicted or convicted of terrorism charges. Among the perpetrators are Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born radical cleric who became the first American citizen killed by a CIA drone, and Omar Hammami, an Alabama native and hip hop fan who became a fixture in al Shabaab's propaganda videos. While some have taken the fight abroad, many others have acted on American soi...
The Mind of Mark DeFriest
January 21, 2016 19:47 - 35 minutes - 32.9 MBA Social Cinema Screening with The Marshall Project For 33 years, Mark DeFriest has struggled against what he considers to be unjust imprisonment: he has escaped seven times and accrued hundreds of disciplinary write-ups, turning his original four-year sentence into one of life in prison. Known as the "Houdini of Florida" for his multiple and improbable jailbreaks, DeFriest was condemned to Florida's worst prison after a lone psychiatrist reversed the opinions of four court-appointed psychi...
China's Most Radical Experiment: The One-Child Policy and the Future Beyond It
January 07, 2016 20:37 - 47 minutes - 43.4 MBIn collaboration with ChinaFile When Communist Party leaders adopted a one-child policy in 1980, they hoped curbing birth rates would help lift China's poorest and increase the country's global stature. But at what cost? Now, as China moves to a nationwide two-child policy, it faces a population grown too old and too male, with a vastly diminished supply of young workers. Mei Fong's latest book, One Child: The Story's of China's Most Radical Experiment, explores the human impact of the one...
Engendering Change: Could Corporate Board Quotas Be Better For Business?
December 18, 2015 17:00 - 1 hour - 56.9 MBPlease join us as we welcome the CORE Club and the Royal Norwegian Consulate General for a discussion on corporate board quotas. What do gender roles mean for business? What effect does the increasing visibility of women on boards have on women in the earlier stages of their careers? Do women leaders lead differently? When, in 2002, Norwegian trade minister Ansgar Gabrielsen unveiled a radical new plan to put more women into his country's boardrooms, many Oslo business leaders were appalled...
Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning)
November 23, 2015 17:00 - 37 minutes - 34.3 MBThe question of whether to regulate soda consumption has become a major political issue. Rising rates of obesity and diabetes, as well as the omnipresence of soda marketing and advertisements, have raised the powerful profiles of soda corporations and soda's impact on our national health. From the fight over New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's unsuccessful 2013 attempt to restrict soda sizes to Berkeley, California's first-on-its-kinda 2015 soda tax, soda regulation is currently one of t...
The Armor Of Light
November 18, 2015 17:00 - 44 minutes - 41.2 MBAs calls for criminal justice reform in the U.S. are becoming all the more urgent, and the toll of gun violence mounts daily, Abigail Disney's The Armor of Light turns to the unlikely journey of Evangelical minister Reverend Rob Schenk to explore the intersection of religion and the politics of gun control. Faced with a national epidemic of mass shootings and his own personal moral convictions, Schenk, a fixture of the political Right, is forced to confront conservatives and evangelicals wit...
Runaway Capitalism: Is the "Uber Economy" Slighting American Workers?
November 09, 2015 17:00 - 57 minutes - 52.5 MBThe U.S. workforce, which has been one of the wealthiest and most productive in the world, is undergoing an alarming transformation. Increasing numbers of workers find themselves on shaky ground, turned into freelancers, temps and contractors. Even many full-time and professional jobs are experiencing similar shifts. Add to that the steamroller of automation, robots and artificial intelligence already replacing millions of workers and projected to "obsolesce" millions more, is there at all a...
Living City, Living Wage: The New New York Activists
November 04, 2015 15:53 - 47 minutes - 54.4 MBNew York's economic dynamism has long been a hallmark of the city; for centuries, jobs and opportunity have attracted people to New York from across the nation and around the globe. Yet today, many New Yorkers find themselves unemployed or working in unsafe conditions for unsustainably low wages. At a moment of impassioned debate about the right to a "living wage," join New America NYC and the Museum of the City of New York to hear from a new generation of activists, journalists, and entre...
Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing
November 03, 2015 19:53 - 48 minutes - 56.1 MBToday we carry around an almost infinite amount of information in our pockets, allowing us to instantaneously search for answers to almost any question. We hardly ever feel in the dark anymore, and we naturally tend to think that is a good thing. But is it always? In his provocative new book, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing, Future Tense Fellow Jamie Holmes argues that our informational instant gratification isn't necessarily making us wiser. He explores the positive role of ambiguity an...
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age
October 19, 2015 15:17 - 38 minutes - 35.6 MBWe text, tweet, snap, and chat all day but are we ever engaging in meaningful conversation that surpasses 140 characters? Our constant social digital engagement can prevent us from feeling alone, but are we truly connected? In her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age, media scholar Sherry Turkle deplores the consequences of our excessive reliance on tech devices to communicate with each other. Future Tense invites you to look up from that screen, put away...
Breaking News: Disrupting the Status Quo in Storytelling
October 16, 2015 15:37 - 48 minutes - 44.8 MBThe media landscape in America these days looks like it's been hit by an earthquake. Indeed, the shifting tectonic plates of media have left legacy print and broadcast outlets in crisis – cutting columns, staff, and even entire bureaus. International reporting has been acutely impacted amid all this disruption. But the picture isn't entirely one of destruction and despair: emerging and digital-native media companies are successfully cultivating a talented generation of new reporters and inve...
(T)ERROR
October 05, 2015 16:12 - 30 minutes - 34.7 MBA real-life thriller, (T)ERROR is the first documentary to place filmmakers on the ground during a live FBI counterterrorism sting operation of a suspected jihadist. With unprecedented access to an active informant – Saeed "Shariff" Torres, a 63 year old former Black Panther – viewers get an unfettered glimpse of the government's counterterrorism tactics and the murky justifications behind them. (T)ERROR illuminates the fragile relationships between individual and surveillance state in moder...
From Application to Enrollment
October 05, 2015 15:44 - 37 minutes - 42.6 MBProspective students often start their college searches with high expectations, and soon into their exploration, high anxiety. Both students fresh out of high school and older adults returning to school are making crucial choices about their educations without key information and resources and with misconceptions about everything from application requirements to financial aid and sound student loan options. According to recent research from New America's Education Policy Program and Public ...
Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places: Stories of Innovation from the Other Side of the World
September 11, 2015 16:18 - 49 minutes - 56.4 MBThe next Steve Jobs is just as likely to come from Lagos, Lahore, Monterrey or Mumbai as from Silicon Valley. According to Elmira Bayrasli's From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places, high-growth entrepreneurs are overcoming vexing obstacles to not only build businesses and jobs and contribute to economic growth, but also to change mindsets. Whether in Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan or Turkey, people in some of the world's most challenging societies are buil...
Tomorrow We Disappear
August 31, 2015 15:09 - 44 minutes - 51.6 MBI wish I could stop the world for a moment. - Puran Bhat, puppeteer Puran the Puppeteer, Rahman the Magician, and Maya the Acrobat are just three of the talented residents of India's Kathputli Colony of street performers who, for more than sixty years, have built their tiny, patched shacks and workshops and a vital, tight-knit community in the alleyways of western Delhi. The colorful, clamorous Rajasthani slum, celebrated in Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, was home to 3,000 prac...
Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America
August 14, 2015 20:18 - 21 minutes - 25.1 MBThe Voting Rights Act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. The historic march from Selma to Montgomery, grassroots demonstrations across the South, and legislative pressures in both Congress and the courts radically transformed American politics. And yet fifty years later we're still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power. As chronicled in Ari Berman's new book, Give Us the Ballot:...
We Come As Friends: A Social Cinema Screening in collaboration with the African Leadership Academy
August 14, 2015 19:14 - 41 minutes - 48.1 MB"I am intrigued by this strange collision of people from around the globe in Africa. What interests me is how fantastic, horrific, and how transparent, human stories unfold in this beautiful place from which we humans originate." - Hubert Sauper Six years in the making, Hubert Sauper's We Come As Friends observes the precarious start of South Sudan, the African continent's newest country. With an eye for both haunting beauty and sorrow, the film captures South Sudan's earliest days of indep...
(Dis)honesty: The Truth About Lies
August 04, 2015 17:09 - 22 minutes - 26.2 MBYou can't win; if you tell lies people will distrust you. If you tell the truth people will dislike you. - Oscar Wilde From little white lies to criminal deceit and global deceptions, dishonesty is a universal constant of the world we live in. Commonplace acts of make clear cheating isn't just happening on a newsworthy scale, but in smaller, more mundane ways everywhere. (Dis)Honesty - The Truth About Lies shows us that lying is a part of human nature, but little fibs can snowball into lar...
Paying the Price: How College Debt is Eroding the American Dream
July 14, 2015 18:47 - 36 minutes - 41.4 MBOnce seen as the Great Equalizer, the value of higher education in the era of soaring college debt has come into serious question. In their new book, The Real College Debt Crisis: How Student Borrowing Threatens Financial Well-Being and Erodes the American Dream, William Elliott III and Melinda K. Lewis argue that our current system of financial assistance is failing the very students it's intended to serve. For many students, even crippling student debt seems a small price to pay for a col...
Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War
July 02, 2015 16:14 - 50 minutes - 58.1 MBWhat will World War III look like? A new book from P. W. Singer and August Cole answers this by smashing together the technothriller with nonfiction. Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War explores what would happen if the brewing cold war between the US and China/Russia were ever to turn hot. It is a fictional scenario, but a real risk in the years ahead. Amid escalating tensions over Ukraine and the South China Sea, China's regime newspaper recently warned that "war is inevitable" if ...
Southern Rites
June 29, 2015 16:44 - 27 minutes - 32 MBIn 2009, photographer Gillian Laub went to rural Georgia to document Montgomery County's two segregated high school proms. Her New York Times essay that followed stirred a powerful outcry and forced the school district to bring the longstanding tradition to an end. Back a year later to photograph the school's first integrated proms, her welcome had run out and, despite the school district gains, she encounters a world still strongly divided and shaped by the legacy of Jim Crow. Another year...
Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America
June 15, 2015 16:01 - 48 minutes - 55.6 MBInside the secretive and mysterious world of North Korea, Joseph Kim lived a young boy's normal life. But when he was five, disaster struck: the first wave of the Great Famine killed millions, including his father, and forced the rest of his family to desperate escape routes into China. Alone in the streets, he had nothing but his street-hardened instincts for survival. But through the eventual support of an underground network of activists who kept him hidden from authorities, Kim eventual...
Achieving a Just Peace in Israel/Palestine: A debate between Peter Beinart and Yousef Munayyer
June 05, 2015 22:05 - 1 hour - 96.4 MBIn the wake of the formation of the new Israeli government and as the Vatican formally recognizes the the state of Palestine, the debate about Israel/Palestine in the United States is shifting. As many look past a two state solution that seems increasingly difficult to achieve, more fundamental debates about Zionism, partition and equality are gaining greater prominence. Join New America NYC for a debate over these questions between Peter Beinart, Senior Fellow at New America, and Yousef M...
Unvarnished: A Conversation with Sarah Maslin Nir
June 03, 2015 20:45 - 33 minutes - 38.3 MBLess than a month after it first appeared, Sarah Maslin Nir's two-part report on systemic wage theft, rights violations, and dangerous working conditions in New York City nail salons already looks like a journalistic parable for the ages. Within hours, the exposé had sparked thousands of conversations, in news broadcasts and on social media, about how best to help the vulnerable employees Maslin Nir had described. As a result, New York governor Andrew Cuomo ordered, on an emergency basis, br...
This Is How We Fought In Gaza
May 29, 2015 14:44 - 32 minutes - 37.6 MBIn a just released report, the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence presents oral testimonies collected from more than 60 Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza during last year's 50-day combat operation. More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the assault, the vast majority civilians. On Israel's side, 73 people were killed, all but six of them soldiers. More than 2,200 Palestinian homes were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced. This is How We Fought i...
Less than 9 to 5: Part-Time Workers and the Policies To Help Them
May 21, 2015 20:04 - 50 minutes - 57.5 MBToo many Americans are working too few hours for too little money. As federal, state, and local policymakers debate everything from minimum wages to budgetary goals to global trade policy, more attention has been appropriately focused on those left behind in the economic recovery. Among them are the 27 million part-time workers in America – while the country's overall employment rate has fallen, many remain stuck in part-time jobs. For older workers and those with child care obligations, a p...
When Business Gets Political: The Close Relationship Between Corporations and Capitol Hill
May 15, 2015 19:35 - 56 minutes - 65.3 MBCorporations are the dominant actors in Washington. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 represent business, and the largest companies now have upwards of 100 lobbyists representing them. How did American businesses become so invested in politics? And what does all their money buy? In his new book, The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate, Lee Drutman draws on extensive data and original interviews wi...
The New New York Activists: Urban Green Innovators
April 29, 2015 18:50 - 56 minutes - 64.3 MBNew York may be known as a concrete jungle, but it is also an important center of green activism. To mark the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, we're partnering with the Museum of the City of New York to discuss how citizens, entrepreneurs, and policy makers are making an impact on our city's environment, today and for the future. Join our panelists for a conversation about how we can connect environmental and economic justice, balance ecological and development concerns, and strive for a gr...
New America NYC: One Of Us
April 22, 2015 16:32 - 59 minutes - 68 MBOn July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then drove to the island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenagers. In her new book One of Us, journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day, Norway's own September 11. She delves deep into Breivik's childhood, showing how a hip-hop and graffiti aficionado became a right-wing activist and then an Internet game...
This Is What's Breaking the Drug War
April 16, 2015 23:25 - 50 minutes - 58.1 MBIn collaboration with Pacific Standard Magazine An onslaught of new "psychoactive substances" -- an ever-shifting range of chemical products marketed in stores under names like "bath salts" and "spice" -- has transformed the global market for recreational drugs and reduced drug enforcement efforts to a hopeless game of Whac-a-Mole: as soon as one of these substances gets banned, a slightly different formula pops up, untested and potentially dangerous. In Pacific Standard's March/April cov...
MH370: A Year Later : What One Plane's Disappearance Taught Us About the Future of Global Travel
April 16, 2015 16:59 - 41 minutes - 47.8 MBIn the year since MH370 vanished over the South China Sea, private pilot and science writer Jeff Wise has appeared on CNN more than 50 times to lend his insights on where he thinks the plane has ended up. In the same time Wise was dubbed CNN's new "aviation analyst," a million theories bloomed about MH370's whereabouts, including his own. Despite the unprecedented and technically complex turn of events, aviation experts, governments, and amateur plane hobbyists all thought they had the answ...
It's Not Over: Winning True Equality
April 08, 2015 19:20 - 53 minutes - 61.4 MBWith 37 states recognizing legal same-sex marriage and increased visibility of LGBT characters on television shows like Transparent and Orange Is the New Black, the gay rights movement is claiming an unprecedented victory. But the future of gay rights is far from inevitable. Despite massive gains, Michelangelo Signorile’s It’s Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality provides stinging evidence that age-old hatred and homophobia are still basic fact...
Little White Lie
March 18, 2015 19:39 - 48 minutes - 44.2 MBLacey Schwartz grew up in a typical household in Woodstock, NY, but her story is far from ordinary. Raised with noticeably dark skin within a white, Jewish family, Schwartz uncovers a family secret that leads her on a personal quest to examine the big issues of race, identity, and belonging. Coming at a moment when the political dialogue on race has reached a fever pitch, Sundance Institute Film Forward participantLittle White Lie confronts a complicated upbringing and asks the question of w...
Confucius and the World He Created
March 12, 2015 20:07 - 1 hour - 59.4 MBAs China rises to superpower status, the country is challenging the United States not just economically and politically-- but also ideologically. Its leadership is asserting its own political and economic model as an alternative to American-style democracy and capitalism-- one Beijing believes is based on its own non-Western traditions. The ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius is, according to Michael Schuman's new book, Confucius and the World He Created, critical to China's political ...
The Age of Exhaustion
March 11, 2015 18:52 - 31 minutes - 29 MBIn his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote that the crisis of his time consisted in the fact that "the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." Our polarized ideologies and traditional solutions seem inadequate to many of today's challenges around the revival of class hierarchy, the de-skilling of labor, the erosion of national identity, the fragmentation of the public sphere, and the global resurgence of religion as a poli...
The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
March 04, 2015 20:22 - 45 minutes - 52.1 MBAmerican higher education is in crisis. The price of college has grown astronomically, forcing students and parents to take out loans that now exceed $1.2 trillion in outstanding debt. Many of those loans are falling into default as graduates struggle to find good work. The latest research suggests that our vaunted universities are producing graduates who learn little while they're in school. But the disruptive power of information technology is about to change all of that, upending centuri...
No Safe Place: An Investigation into Military Tactics in Gaza
March 03, 2015 22:47 - 40 minutes - 45.9 MBLast summer’s 50-day military conflict in Gaza received saturated global media coverage and elicited a great deal of controversy, partly due to the high casualty rate among non-combatants in the Palestinian territory. Israel said it went to great lengths to avoid civilian deaths, while others — journalists on the scene and Palestinians in Gaza — said the Israeli military deliberately attacked non-military targets. Physicians for Human Rights - Israel is the only independent international o...
The Millennial Future
February 13, 2015 16:09 - 32 minutes - 37.4 MBIn 2015, the Millennial generation will surpass the outsized Baby Boom generation as the nation’s largest living generation. And while our country’s new largest constituency is optimistic about its future, current policies and resources aren’t keeping up. In a country gridlocked by ideological standoffs and still recovering from the Great Recession, young people are proving to be innovators in a rapidly changing political, cultural, and technological world. But for all the diversity, educat...
The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World
February 10, 2015 20:07 - 41 minutes - 48 MBFor all the global obsession with oil that has marked the past decades, the real future of energy might be something quite different. An advanced lithium-ion battery could power our electric cars and help relieve climate change. But the race is on in laboratories all over the world to be the first to solve this scientific enigma -- and the United States may not necessarily be the winner. Steve Levine, Washington correspondent for Quartz, will discuss his new book, The Powerhouse: Inside th...
1971: Before Watergate, WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, there was Media, Pennsylvania
February 09, 2015 16:32 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MBDecades before the world knew the names of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, there was the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. During the height of the Vietnam War, eight ordinary citizens covertly entered their local FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania with the objective of stealing potentially incriminating files and leaking them to the press. What they left with would unearth a highly classified civilian surveillance and intimidation program and change the protocol of government su...
88 Days to Kandahar
February 04, 2015 15:10 - 56 minutes - 65.1 MBWhen President George W. Bush approved the first American-Afghan war, Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad from 1999-2002, found himself directing it. Grenier launched the “southern campaign,” orchestrating the final defeat of the Taliban and Hamid Karzai’s rise to power in eighty-eight chaotic days. Grenier’s new book, 88 Days to Kandahar, recounts the crucial players during this critical time: General Tommy Franks, who balked at CIA control of “his” war; General Jafar Amin, ...
A Path Appears
February 02, 2015 22:09 - 37 minutes - 34 MB"Hope is like a path in the countryside," wrote Chinese essayist Lu Xun. "Originally there is nothing. But as people walk this way again and again, a path appears." In Half the Sky, award-winning journalists and husband and wife team Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof examined the stories of struggles facing women and girls around the world. Now, in A Path Appears, they focus on poverty -- its complex causes, symptoms and cycles -- and on solutions to this global scourge: innovative strate...
How Technology is Changing the Family Tree
January 23, 2015 16:43 - 33 minutes - 38.7 MBIn collaboration with Future Tense Americans are obsessed with tracing their family trees. Enabled by the Internet and advances in genetic technology, millions of people are diving deep into their family histories on WikiTree and Ancestry.com, or discovering their ethnic make-up down to the decimal point using 23andMe. Someday, the explosion of DNA-based genealogy could even create a universal family tree. So, how could these data sets alter how we think about ourselves? Should you feel a c...
The Great Race
January 21, 2015 20:55 - 46 minutes - 37.2 MBThe world's greatest manufacturing juggernaut -- the $2 trillion automotive industry -- is in the throes of a revolution. Its future will include cars Henry Ford and Karl Benz could have scarcely imagined. They will drive themselves, won't consume oil, and will come in radical shapes and sizes. But the path to that future is fraught. Today, the top contenders are two traditional manufacturing giants, the United States and Japan, and a newcomer, China. The outcomes of this global competition...
Measuring Up
January 16, 2015 19:39 - 52 minutes - 42.5 MBYour child is more than a score. But in the era of No Child Left Behind and the Common Core, many are accusing America's public education system of sacrificing substantial learning and taxpayer dollars in favor of high-stakes testing that doesn't measure what really matters. In The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing -- But You Don't Have to Be, Anya Kamenetz dives into the surprising history and tempestuous politics that have led to the ubiquitous tests we see in p...
Merchants of Doubt
January 14, 2015 19:01 - 23 minutes - 19.2 MBInspired by the acclaimed book by Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt is a satiric yet serious examination into the heart of conjuring American spin. Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the curtain on a secretive group of charismatic pundits-for-hire and pseudo-scientists, paid for by multinational energy businesses, who present themselves in the media as scientific authorities -- yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied threats ra...
The Fierce Urgency of Now
January 09, 2015 20:21 - 44 minutes - 35.4 MBThe Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; the War on Poverty; Medicare and Medicaid; the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities – these are just a few of the programs Lyndon Johnson spearheaded in what became known as the most transformative agenda in American political history since the New Deal. But his plans for a “Great Society” didn’t come without bitter resistance. While most recount this era as an unprecedented “liberal hour” in America, Julian Zelizer’s The Fierce Urgency...