NewAmerica

A Journey Into the Heart of the American RightThey 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 Louisia...

Populism is making a bold, modern comeback. Over the next year the "people's movement" will play a decisive role in elections at home and across the world. In 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 Europea...

The 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 ba...

When you wage war against a nameless, stateless, formless enemy – an enemy with goals as uncertain as its methods – it's hard to see how war can ever end. – Rosa Brooks In 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 combat...

Kevin and Libby welcome Jesse O'Connell as our first guest host / drinks-master to dive deep into FAFSA reform and prior-prior year. Also, presidential election developments and pretending Northeastern's football season didn't start until last week.

It sounds like a dystopian sci-fi novel, but all around the world, governments are increasingly breaking into personal computers and smartphones to carry out spy operations. Amie Stepanovich, who specializes in cybersecurity and privacy law at digital rights group Access Now, joins the Cybersecurity Podcast to discuss her new report that looks at government hacking from a human rights perspective....

Heather Lawrence is the president of Hack@UCF, the team of college students from the University of Central Florida that won this summer's National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition. She and her teammate, Alex Davis, are part of a 180-student club that has taken three consecutive championships in the country’s largest cyberdefense competition of its kind. On this episode of the Cybersecurity Pod...

On this extra episode of The Cybersecurity Podcast, reporter Jack Detsch brings you the highlights of a live discussion Passcode hosted in Washington on cybersecurity and the US power grid, featuring Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, deputy secretary of Energy; Thomas Fanning, chief executive officer of Southern Company; Congressman Will Hurd of Texas; and Robert Lee, cofounder of the cybersecurity firm...

Filmmaker Alex Gibney is known for his awardwinning documenteries on topics that range from Enron to Wikileaks, but now he's taken on a tough challenge: Making a movie about a secret program that few people will publicly acknowledge. "Zero Days" focuses on the Stuxnet computer virus that's believed to be the world’s first digital weapon. News outlets had reported that both the US and Israel were b...

A massive power outage in December left more than 200,000 people in the dark in Western Ukraine. It was the first time a cyberattack successfully took down a portion of a country’s power grid. Rob Lee, cofounder of cybersecurity company Dragos Security and a former US Air Force Cyberoperations Officer, personally investigated the Ukraine hack. He joins the Cybersecurity Podcast to discuss how hack...

Andrew says goodbye to the podcast, we drown our sorrows in wine, then debate defense to repayment and the upcoming NACIQI vote to de-certify ACICS.

It 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 (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) 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 ex...

In 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...

“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 th...

What will be the state of digital security in five and 10 years? That's the question Steve Weber, director of the University of California - Berkeley's Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and his team tried to tackle in a major research project. Weber joins The Cybersecurity Podcast to talk about the maybe not-so-far out possibilities that people may soon start to see insecurity as the status quo...

Kevin, Libby, and Andrew pray for sunshine and drink beer while they break down the good, bad, and ugly of the Trump higher education agenda.

Four 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 sig...

Catherine "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 g...

Are intercollegiate athletics a moral garbage fire headed for an apocalypse of greed, money, and shame? Or not quite that bad? Kevin, Libby, and Andrew debate.

For 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 unprecedente...

Jack Harrington, vice president for cybersecurity and special missions at Raytheon, joins The Cybersecurity Podcast to discuss the role the private sector can play in helping government improve its security, the Defense Department’s cyber strategy, and innovative technical solutions to bridge the vast talent gap in this field. Also joining New America's Peter Singer and Passcode's Sara Sorcher is...

Popular 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...

The 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 spiri...

Participatory 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 demo...

New America's Peter Singer and Passcode's Sara Sorcher interview Walter Parkes, the noted screenwriter-turned-film producer who’s behind many of your all time favorite cybersecurity movies: Sneakers and WarGames. They talk about the hacker archetypes depicted in pop culture, why these movies resonate with this community, how fiction sometimes inspires real policy change in this field – and whose c...