By SIU Press

“This engaging biography of Augustus Garrett and Eliza Clark Garrett tells two equally compelling stories: an ambitious man’s struggle to succeed and the remarkable spiritual journey of a woman attempting to overcome tragedy. By contextualizing the couple’s lives within the rich social, political, business, and religious milieu of Chicago’s early urbanization, author Charles H. Cosgrove fills a gap in the history of the city in the mid-nineteenth century,” SIU Press says.
“The Garretts moved from the Hudson River Valley to a nascent Chicago, where Augustus made his fortune in the land boom as an auctioneer and speculator. A mayor during the city’s formative period, Augustus was at the center of the first mayoral election scandal in Chicago. To save his honor, he resigned dramatically and found vindication in his reelection the following year. His story reveals much about the inner workings of Chicago politics and business in the antebellum era.

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Posted on March 5, 2020

By Emily Anthes/Undark

Nearly two decades ago, Donna Jackson Nakazawa’s immune system launched a misguided attack on her own body. Her white blood cells – which typically fight off invading pathogens – went to war against her nerves, destroying the layer of fatty insulation that helps nerve cells transmit their signals. Nakazawa, a journalist and author, had Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare autoimmune condition that caused muscle spasms and left her temporarily unable to walk.
But alongside these physical symptoms, she also began to feel as though something had gone amiss in her mind. She developed severe anxiety and began experiencing troubling memory lapses, even forgetting how to tie her daughter’s shoes.
“I could not shake the feeling that just as my body had been altered, something physical had also shifted in my brain,” Nakazawa writes in her new book, The Angel and the Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell That Changed The Course of Medicine.

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Posted on February 23, 2020

By Michael Winship/Common Dreams

Sitting here next to my computer right now are two, small paperbound books.
One of them is On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Yale University historian Timothy Snyder.
The other is the screenplay from the movie Jojo Rabbit, written and directed by Taika Waititi and based on the novel Caging Skies, by Christine Leunens.
At first, these two slim volumes may seem an odd combination. But one is a warning of encroaching dictatorship written by an academic, the other, “an anti-hate satire” in which Adolf Hitler is the imaginary pal of Jojo Betzler, a 10-year-old boy who is a devoted little Nazi.
So maybe not so odd a combination after all, especially in light of every American day’s further descent into anti-democratic madness. Because, as Timothy Egan of The New York Times wrote last month, “The Trump presidency has shown just how many ostensibly good people will do nothing, and how evil, when given a free rein at the top, trickles down.”

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Posted on February 18, 2020

By Christie Aschwanden/Undark

Their secrets are out – the tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign to undermine the science linking their products to cancer and other deadly diseases has been the subject of numerous media reports, scholarly papers, books, documentary films, and even a Hollywood movie.
In his meticulously documented new book, The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception, David Michaels shows that Big Tobacco’s well-known denial tactics have not faded into history, but instead have become an integral part of corporate America’s standard business practices.

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Posted on February 14, 2020

via New America

Excerpt adapted from Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America by Lee Drutman.
Today, American parties are more united internally around competing visions of national identity than any time since the Civil War. This division defines national partisan conflict and communicates to voters what is important. And because it is binary, it communicates only two, irreconcilable options. Voting means endorsing one of these visions, either implicitly or explicitly. A vote with reservations counts the same as a vote without reservations. An enthusiastic vote for Trump’s anti-immigration policies counts the same as a hesitant vote against Clinton.
A multiparty system in America would not collapse such thinking into reductionist binary generalizations. It would offer more options across the spectrum and give voters more ability to see nuance and shades of gray. A ranked-choice voting system, where voters could order their preferences, would add even more precision and nuance to elections.

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Posted on January 24, 2020

By Doug E. Doug

LOS ANGELES – Based on his viewpoint that the historic contributions of the Hip-Hop generation has largely been ignored by popular culture, actor and comedian Doug E. Doug has released his first novel, titled The Fall of 1987, which tells the dramatic story of a young Black man investigating the mysterious death of his brother during the rise of the Hip-Hop genre.
“I noticed that there was little attention paid to my generation in media,” said Doug. “Mythmakers and storytellers go on and on about the World War II generation – the so-called ‘Greatest Generation.’ The achievements of the Civil Rights generation are chronicled with due heroism and some complexity. Now, we are launching into the voices and perspectives of the Millennials and Gen Y.”

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Posted on January 14, 2020

By Boing Boing

In A Public Service, activist/trainer Tim Schwartz presents the clearest-ever guide to securely blowing the whistle, explaining how to exfiltrate sensitive information from a corrupt employer – ranging from governments to private firms – and get it into the hands of a journalist or public interest group in a way that maximizes your chances of making a difference (and minimizes your chances of getting caught).
Parts of A Public Service read like a spy thriller, covering detailed operational security planning – everything from buying a burner phone to doing research into possible journalists to take your docs to – all without leaving a trail that can be traced back to you.

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Posted on January 10, 2020

By The National Press Club

Reporter Jerry Mitchell, who spent years investigating the most infamous murders of the civil rights movement, will speak at a National Press Club Headliners event on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020 about his upcoming book, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Right Era.
Race Against Time chronicles Mitchell’s quest to unearth the truth behind some of the most gruesome and harrowing unsolved murders of the civil rights era. Mitchell’s reporting is credited with helping to bring killers to justice for the assassination of Medgar Evers, the firebombing of Vernon Dahmer, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Church in Birmingham, and the murder of three civil rights workers commonly referred to as the Mississippi Burning case.

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Posted on January 8, 2020

By Kirsten Menger-Anderson/Undark

Aiming to provide the “sum of all human knowledge,” Wikipedia is one of today’s most highly trafficked websites. Of its content, Katherine Maher, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation – the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia – writes: “We believe in ‘knowledge equity,’ which we define as the idea that diverse forms of knowledge should be recognized and respected.”
But does the encyclopedia live up to this vision, or is it playing a part in perpetuating and entrenching long-standing biases?

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Posted on January 4, 2020

By Boing Boing

In the 1970s, the Soviets managed to intercept top secret communications in the U.S. embassy in Moscow and nobody could figure out how.
While an antenna was eventually found hidden in the embassy’s chimney, it took years to determine how what data was being collected for transmission and how.
As a last resort, all equipment at the embassy was shipped back to the U.S. for analysis.
From IEEE’s Spectrum:

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Posted on January 1, 2020