By Liz Willen/The Hechinger Report

Nachae Nez is a basketball star at the largest high school on the Navajo Nation, 17.5 million acres sprawling across parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. He lives in a trailer next to his two grandmothers and earns grades good enough for a four-year college.
Yet on the morning of the SAT college admissions exam, Nachae drives to the testing site from his home near Chinle, Arizona, looks around – and drives away.
“I couldn’t see my future off the reservation,” he tells Michael Powell, author of the new book Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation, due out from Blue Rider Press this month.

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Posted on November 12, 2019

By Gennie Gebhart/Electronic Frontier Foundation

Macmillan, one of the “Big Five” publishers, is imposing new limits on libraries’ access to e-books – and libraries and their users are fighting back.
Starting last week, the publisher is imposing a two-month embargo period on library e-books. When Macmillan releases a new book, library systems will be able to purchase only one digital copy for the first eight weeks after it’s published.
Macmillan is offering this initial copy for half-price ($30), but that has not taken away the sting for librarians who will need to answer to frustrated users.
In large library systems in particular, readers are likely to experience even longer hold queues for new Macmillan e-book releases.
For example, under the new Macmillan embargo, the 27 branches of the San Francisco Public Library system, serving a city of nearly 900,000 people, will have to share one single copy right when the demand for the new title is the greatest.

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Posted on November 9, 2019

Peter Pero Presented By The Chicago Public Library and CAN TV

“Author Peter Pero pays tribute to Italian-American heritage, but the focus is not on Columbus, Mother Cabrini, or Michaelangelo. Instead, he looks to the working men and women of Italian Chicago who have built our city, brick-by-brick. They funded our churches, built Chicago’s skyline, and raised generations of children from immigrant succession to ethnic success.”
At Little Italy on October 25.

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Posted on November 4, 2019

By The American Writers Museum

American Writers Museum celebrates refugee and immigrant writers with its newest exhibit called My America: Immigrant and Refugee Writers Today, which explores the influence of modern immigrant and refugee writing on our culture, history and daily lives.

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Posted on November 1, 2019

By Mark Press/Electronic Frontier Foundation

Last week was Open Access Week and we joined SPARC and dozens of other organizations to discuss the importance of open access to scientific research publications.
An academic publisher should widely disseminate the knowledge produced by scholars, not hold it for ransom. But ransoming scientific research back to the academic community is essentially the business model of the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals: Elsevier.

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Posted on October 30, 2019

Lewis Black wants you to come on out to the grand opening on November 9th.
543 Indiana Avenue, in Indianapolis, Vonnegut’s hometown.
Coinciding with this year’s VonnegutFest.

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Posted on October 28, 2019

By UIC

National Book Award-nominated author Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor will discuss her book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Social Justice Initiative next Wednesday.
Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University, writes and speaks on politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the U.S. She will appear in conversation with Elizabeth Todd-Breland, UIC associate professor of history and author of A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Post-Civil Rights Chicago.

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Posted on October 25, 2019

By Isaac Arnsdorf/ProPublica

President Donald Trump personally directed administration officials to report to one of his largest donors, Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter, according to a new book by former Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin.
Starting with Shulkin’s interview for the cabinet post, Trump routinely dialed Perlmutter into meetings and asked if the secretary was keeping Perlmutter informed and happy, Shulkin wrote.
Perlmutter would call Shulkin as often as multiple times a day, and White House officials such as Stephen Miller would scold Shulkin for not being in close enough contact with Perlmutter and two of his associates at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Florida.
“I didn’t reach out to these guys – these guys had a prior relationship with the president and were advising him,” Shulkin, who was fired by tweet in March 2018, said in an interview. “There probably wasn’t too many times I met with the president when he didn’t say, ‘What’s happening with Ike?'”

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Posted on October 23, 2019

It Was Himself

Director of White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro claims made-up expert merely a “whimsical device” to lighten the tone of his racist tomes.

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Posted on October 22, 2019

By Allison Stanger/New America

While whistleblowers often bring about changes that serve their fellow citizens, their personal sacrifice is immense. Legitimate whistleblowers are risk-takers for the truth, and what they risk, above all, is their own well-being. They pay dearly after they jump ship to expose corruption or abuse. When they regret their decision, it is generally because they vastly underestimated the potential damage, especially for their families. When whistleblowing succeeds, there is always a loss of innocence – not only among the public, but for the whistleblowers themselves.

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Posted on October 11, 2019