Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

Released in 1974, Sweet Home Alabama has become synonymous with Southern rock. From its opening guitar riff, it is instantly recognizable, a raucous, irreverent defense of a Deep South state and its segregationist governor against the jabs of Neil Young. But the roots of Lynyrd Skynyrd's best-selling anthem go much deeper than regional pride or resentment of a fellow rocker.

Compared with the most sophisticated weapons systems in use today, tunnels have withstood the test of time. There’s no way to know how long drones or lasers or anti-missile defense systems will last, but as long as there is warfare, tunnels will almost certainly be part of the fight.

Henry Spearman, the balding economics professor with a knack for solving crimes, returns in The Mystery of the Invisible Hand - a clever whodunit of campus intrigue, stolen art, and murder. Having just won the Nobel Prize, Spearman accepts an invitation to lecture at Monte Vista University. He arrives in the wake of a puzzling art heist with plans to teach a course on art and economics - only to be faced with the alleged suicide of womanizing artist-in-residence Tristan Wheeler.

Why are gay rights advancing while organized labor retreats? Because of a longterm trend in which the American left has largely succeeded in pushing its social agenda but not its economic one.

Divisions among Democrats exist just like they do among Republicans, but have largely festered beneath the surface for lack of a spokesperson to challenge the party’s economic elites. In Elizabeth Warren, grassroots Democrats may have found their champion.

A loose confederation of conservative thinkers and politicians is developing a new strategy for reaching out to the American middle class. These reformers could save the Republican Party - if only they could win over their fellow conservatives.

Global investors usually focus on economic data such as GDP growth, employment, and trade. But in today’s trying economic climate, they have started to train their gaze elsewhere: on national political leadership and the prospects for reform.

Three big trends - a growing reliance on older voters, an extremist ideological turn, and an increasing internal rigidity - have changed the Republican Party over the past decade, weakening its ability to win presidential elections and inhibiting its ability to govern.

The Tea Party and its European cousins have emerged from the enduring inability of democratic governments to satisfy their citizens' needs. Today’s populist movements won’t subside until the legitimate grievances driving them have been addressed.

Life in Nigeria's largest city is changing for the better, offering a potential lesson for struggling states looking to stage a turnaround: mayors and city councils are more likely to embrace positive change than legislatures and presidents -- and far more quickly and effectively.

Ally Lane survived the sinking of the Betty Loo, escaped imprisonment, and averted an all-out war between the nations that would have destroyed the world. Now she is faced with her greatest challenge: She must cross the country, avoiding hordes of the undead and groups of people willing to do anything to survive. While she travels with a ragtag group of survivors and new additions, the reality of their situation hits home.

Wardah Nur never imagined that she would become a soldier. And, until ten years ago, she couldn’t have. Nur belongs to a small, elite group - the 2013 "lady cadets," as they are called - the latest batch of women to train at the Pakistan Military Academy since it began accepting them in 2006 during General Pervez Musharraf’s presidency.

During the early Cold War, the Dulles and Bundy brothers played critical roles in shaping U.S. foreign policy. New biographies make clear that the all four men had some common ideological blindspots. But how much of their worldview and behavior can be attributed to their WASP establishment backgrounds is an open question.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama called himself "a strong supporter of net neutrality". But under his leadership, the Federal Communications Commission appears to have given up on the goal of maintaining an open Internet. Obama now has second chance to fix his Internet policy; here’s what he should do.

The crisis in Ukraine has pushed Moscow and the West into a new Cold War. For both sides, the top priority must now be to contain the conflict, ensuring that it ends up being as short and as shallow as possible.

Shinzo Abe is trying to restore Japanese consumer confidence by boosting inflation. But confidence must rest on something more substantive: meaningful structural reforms to reverse Japanese companies' lagging competitiveness. Otherwise, any temporary economic boost will soon give way to disillusion.

Latin America’s new regional groups claim to share lofty goals, from resolving conflicts to coordinating political and economic policies. But there is little reason to believe that they are capable of achieving them.

There is an emerging consensus that all is not well with today's market-centric economic model. Although it has delivered wealth over the last half century and pulled millions out of poverty, it is recession-prone, leaves too many unemployed, creates ecological scarcities and environmental risks, and widens the gap between the rich and the poor. Around $1 trillion a year in perverse subsidies and barriers to entry for alternative products maintain "business-as-usual" while obscuring their associated environmental and societal costs.

In Eyes of the Storm, Roksana Badruddoja explores the perceptions of second-generation South Asian-American women about daily social practices in the U.S. and how they view themselves in comparison to broader American society. She accomplishes this by engaging in a year-long feminist ethnography (in 2004) with a cross-national sample of twenty-five women in the U.S., spending a day in the life of each woman eating, drinking, and talking about work, partners, families, food, clothing, and how they feel about being children of immigrants, among other things. The research on which Eyes of the Storm is based explores the meaning of national belonging (and lack of belonging) for a group of "second-generation" South Asian women in America. Here, Badruddoja focuses on both the conceptual and theoretical perspectives of the social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and political dimensions of transnational migration, which includes the effects of population circulations and demographic change (community formation, segregation, and integration).

In 1982, at the height of Guatemala’s civil war, 20 soldiers from the army’s commando unit, called the Kaibiles, invaded the farming village of Dos Erres. Masquerading as leftist guerillas, the squad members cut their way through the small town, killing more than 250 men, women, and children. Only a handful of people survived. One of them, a young boy, was adopted by Kaibil lieutenant Ramrez and raised by Ramrez’s family, who named him Oscar. Just three years old at the time of the massacre, Oscar grew up unaware of his true origins. It wasn’t until almost 30 years later, living in the suburbs of Boston with a family of his own, that Oscar would learn the truth.