This SDG is an exploration of thought that is unlimited by category or definition. Our goal is to develop a knowledge base of reasoned thought from human interpersonal, environmental and spiritual perspectives. The sources used are varied; ranging from Emerson to Octavia Butler, where the common purpose of each author is to expand and refine philosophical thought.

One dictionary definition of the word Philosophy is: The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline. We will read and discuss the following philosophers:

 Ralph Waldo Emerson - Nature

Simone de Beauvoir - Ambiguity

Iris Murdoch - Sovereignty of Good

Hannah Arendt - Totalitarianism

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - Phenomenon of Man

Simone Weil - The Self, The Soul

Frederick Douglass - What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time

Octavia Butler - Blood Child

Lao Tzu - The Way of Life

Hermann Hesse - Enlightenment

Thich Nhat Hanh - Buddhism

I chose these philosophers because some have been intellectual heroes/heroines to me, some have spoken to critical issues in our world, and some just have beautiful minds and hearts. Each person chosen has something to offer us now, so join Barbara and I for a very interesting conversation.

In this SDG, we will first examine how our data is being collected and used today by both our government and myriad corporations. We will discover what data is being collected about us, how it is being used, and what this may mean to us in our daily lives. We will discuss ways to increase our cyber privacy. We will also discuss issues such as: who does and who should own and or have access to our data; what rights do we have to privacy?

The core book for this segment is Cyber Privacy, by April Falcon Doss. She spent over a decade at the National Security Agency, where she was the associate general counsel for intelligence law. She also served on Capitol Hill as the senior minority counsel for the Russia investigation in the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

In Cyber Privacy, Doss demystifies the digital footprints we leave in our daily lives and reveals how our data is being used—sometimes against us—by the private sector, the government, and even our employers and schools. She explains the trends in data science, technology, and the law that impact our everyday privacy. She tackles big questions: how data aggregation undermines personal autonomy, how to measure what privacy is worth, and how society can benefit from big data while managing its risks and being clear-eyed about its cost.

Note: Per reviews, the book is very strong on what is happening and it’s implications, but weak on what one should do about it. There is a ton of material about this on the internet.

In the second half we will use recent articles and videos to examine a few key areas in which our increasingly digitized world is changing the way we live and the threats we face. Specifically:

1. Digital Currencies, crypto currencies, and NFTs – how they work and how they may change our lives.

2. Hackers and hacking – they now wear far more hats than just black and white;.

3. Cyber warfare: what and who are the potential threats and how can we address them? What would a cyberwar do and how would it change our world.

4. Cyber Intelligence and Cyber Leaks: What are the dangers?  Were Assange and Snowden whistleblowers or traitors?

5. Robots and AI: what exists now, what is coming and how it could change our world.

Please dive in and join us in our highly provocative SDG using the last two Ferrante novels as our core books. Once you start reading the story, you’re hooked as in paraphrase of the old Lays Potato chip ad: bet you can’t eat read just one. However, attending Part 1 is NOT necessary to understand the story. The story begins in postwar Southern Italy. Elena Ferrante's novels explore the discordant yet loving trajectories of two female friends from childhood to adulthood. This story gained such widespread international acclaim that HBO bought the rights to these books and turned them into one of the most highly watched series in HBO history. Ferrante is that rarest of authors—one who is equally adept at depicting both sides of the romance and not-so-romantic transactions between men and women. 

According to the Los Angeles Review of Books each of the Ferrante books should be not read but “devoured”: Ferrante’s novels — My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), and The Story of the Lost Child (2014) — are often described as “a tale of female friendship,” but that’s  like describing The Beatles as “a band with many hits.”

The four-part saga is so much more than that. It’s the story of Naples as it crawls its way back from the ruins of World War II. It’s an epic of Italian feminism. It’s a sociological study on violence, poverty, and gender — and the vicious cycle that connects all three. I invite all Plato members to join this SDG, reading the first two books is NOT necessary to understand the story. This SDG covers the final half of the Neapolitan Quartet, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child.

The New Yorker review loudly proclaims:

“…the sensation...a hungry, relentless urge to keep

going, the same feeling that drives you to borrow all

someone’s clothes, or pinch them as hard as you can

when they don’t understand you. Ferrante shows us

the friction that generates human heat—she reminds

us what the experience of liking is like.”

Ferrante's gift, one critic argues, is her "unflinching

willingness to lead us toward 'the mutable fury of

things'" —in particular, toward the passion and

bitterness between women and men, and women and

women. Ferrante's novels explore the recesses and

limits of intimacy: "How many words," one of her

heroine's asks, "remain unsayable even between a

couple in love?"

The world has lacked an authoritative history about the role of Franklin Delano Roosevelt the war leader in World War II. He died before beginning an autobiography, although he had accumulated many notes and files. Winston Churchill of course wrote the supposed definitive work on the subject, but, as it develops, did some serious violence to veracity, particularly as to the many areas where he unsuccessfully disagreed with FDR. The British military historian Nigel Hamilton has accessed these and other materials and published a trilogy constituting the definitive history that FDR did not live to write: the story of World War II from FDR’s perspective.  

The trilogy illustrates the personalities of the leaders and their advisors and differs from Churchill’s description of their relationship, especially concerning Winston’s assertion that he was the strategic leader of the war. With due regard to Winston’s amazing feats during 1940, and his admitted gifts, far from being FDR’s “loyal lieutenant,” he was an unruly junior partner and very amateur military strategist at best. A unique perspective on the situation is given by inclusion of notes made by Josef Goebbels about his and Hitler’s contemporaneous views of the events discussed.

PLATO had a successful SD/G in 2018 dealing with the first two books of the trilogy, the first book, entitled “The Mantle of Command" goes from 1941 to the beginning of 1943. (It is not part of this SD/G, though we will discuss key points raised by it.)

We start with the second volume of the trilogy, “Commander in Chief, FDR’s Battle with Churchill, 1943),” which takes us through the Quebec Conference in September of late 1943. The third volume, our second book, called “War and Peace, FDR’s Final Odyssey, D-Day to Yalta, 1943-1945”, begins with the Tehran conference and ends following the Yalta Conference in 1945. It sensitively describes FDR’s decline and death at 63- and the medical malpractice involved- and includes a frank description of FDR’s relationships with Eleanor and with the love of his life, Lucy Rutherfurd.

The two core books, in paperback, are easy to read, and comprise 895 pages, an average of 64 pages per session.

This SDG will explore the finest novels written by Jane Austen, those written during the Regency Period (1811-1817). After briefly exploring her debt to the feminist politics of Mary Wollstonecraft, we will read Emma, Mansfield Park and Persuasion in the order in which they were written. We will place them in the context of the impact of the Prince Regent on English politics, as well as in the context of the social and political debates of this period concerning slavery and the slave trade;  the education, roles and legal standing of women; and the burgeoning culture of consumption. We will also discuss the best (or most controversial) film adaptations of these three novels.

Though it is common knowledge that all living things migrate and consensual that biodiversity is a positive outcome of these moves, for centuries most biologists and paleontologists believed that life was sedentary, that every living thing had its permanent niche.  Differences in species were regarded hierarchically, notably in human racial thinking.  It was only with the mapping of the human genome that scientific theories about human differentiation altered.  Popular opinion has not kept pace.  Sonia Shah tracks the outdated scientific ideas about the role of migrants in nature and history and outlines the crisis mentalities that proliferated.  She then illustrates that migration is an ancient and lifesaving response to environmental change, a biological imperative as necessary as breathing.  She also demonstrates that plants and animals migrate over a far greater range than anyone once thought and that migration is not a one-time event for many people.  Her thesis is that unhampered human migration, rather than being a crisis, actually will create and disseminate the biological, cultural, and social diversity that will help solve the world's problems.

This SDG seeks to examine the life and times of Malcolm X. The core book is The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcom X by Lee Payne and Tamara Payne. The book is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction. It has been hailed as the definitive biography of Malcolm X which takes an unwavering view of him and  the  America in which he was born, raised and  matured. It takes an in-depth, nuanced look at the man, and creates a rich tapestry drawn from friends, family, and adversaries. This SDG also makes use of portions of   Anna Malika Tubbs' book The Three Mothers where she explores the life of Louise Little  the mother of Malcolm X. The book celebrates the  importance of black motherhood  and details how Louise shaped the life of one of America's most important civil rights leaders. To understand the legacy of racial divisions in America  studying and understanding Malcom X and his times is a must.

During the two hundred millennia of our existence, nothing has shaped us  more profoundly than the city.   Led through the centuries by Ben Wilson's remarkable METROPOLIS,  we shall journey through twenty-six world cities and across seven thousand years to learn how the city has spurred humankind's greatest innovations.  As we follow his itinerary, we develop a new slant on human history from religion to war, food to art, from disease to comfort.

Mozart: A Life in Letters

This SDG will combine history, biography, travel, music and culture, studying the career of a musical genius, and has been designed for non-musicians and musicians alike. 

An extensive collection of letters written by Mozart to his close circle of family and friends contains a unique portrait of the world of Vienna at the height of the Enlightenment. Mozart’s father, Leopold, wrote detailed letters describing Mozart's travels to perform for Louis XV at Versailles, George III and his family, and Empress Maria Teresa as well as the Mozart family tours of Paris, London and Germany.  From Mozart’s teens until his early death, Mozart wrote lively correspondence to his parents and his friends tracking the extraordinary arc of his career and containing his candid opinions about society, music and life at the heart of classical music in Vienna.  

Over our 10 weeks together, we’ll hear 10 different works Mozart composed while he was writing these letters, during every stage of his career and in every classical format—Sonata, Concerto, Symphony, Mozart’s operas, and various keyboard pieces.    Reading: “Mozart: A Life in Letters,” edited by Cliff Eisen (“one of the most brilliant Mozart scholars of our time” and editor of the biography “W.A. Mozart.” New York Times Book Review), reading approximately 50 pages per week. Listening: one work weekly online. The schedule specifies one Mozart composition weekly for online listening before our meeting, based upon compositions discussed in the Mozart letters to be read for that week; Discussion leaders are free to substitute different or additional compositions related to the Mozart letters being studied that week or composed within the dates of those letters.

One hundred years ago, after the end of WWI, during the advent of modernist literature, two young Americans writers started their professional careers. Most well known for their novels, Fitzgerald published his first novel This Side of Paradise in 1920, Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald knew each other since 1925, and while they respected each other’s writing capabilities, they sniped at each other over their novels (it is thought because of jealously) and the two didn’t get along.

As well as their novels, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote wonderful short stories, as we will appreciate in this SDG. Fitzgerald wrote short stories throughout his writing days, starting in 1920 with the flapper story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and ending with the Pat Hobby stories written for Esquire in which he wrote about Hollywood; the last of those stories were published posthumously after 1940 (he died an alcoholic). Hemingway’s first story was published in 1921, his second “On the Quai at Smyrna” in 1922. Towards the end of his life (he died a suicide in 1961), after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, Hemingway concentrated on writing novels and publishing (some posthumously) what we now call memoires.

In our SDG we will read, alternating each week, Ernest’s and Scott’s short stories, starting week 1 with Hemingway, then week 2 with Fitzgerald, and so on. We will discuss two or three stories each week, the number of stories discussed depends on the number of pages—see the weekly schedule below. We alternate between Hemingway’s “The Light of the World” on the first week, Fitzgerald’s “The Ice Palace” on week 2, then Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Fitzgerald’s "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”... Many of these short stories, like the novels of Scott and Ernest, were famously made into films.

Come and be a member of our SDG. Enjoy reading remarkable stories by these gifted writers.

Ever wonder how the boundaries were drawn of the Middle Eastern countries, with their confusingly  entangled mix of sometimes warring tribes and overlapping religions?  Are you curious how the shy Oxford scholar, Thomas Lawrence, went from being an archeologist excavating ruins for the British Museum to the flamboyant "Lawrence of Arabia"?   If the Americans, William Yale and Rudolf McGovern, were really on a "pilgrimage" tour, why were they doing geological soundings near the Sea of Galilee? And what was their connection to Standard Oil?  Why was German linguist Curt Profer,  disgraced "Oriental secretary to the German Embassy in Cairo", traveling disguised as a Beduin and what was he saying inside tents to the Mesopotamian tribes?  Did he still hold a grudge against the British who had destroyed his reputation and his career?  Was ex-pat Romanian botanist (and Zionist), Aaron Aaronsohn, really mapping the geographic spread of "wild wheats in their historical settings" or did he have a greater interest in Ottoman troop deployments and military camps?  Take your mind back to the times before WWI.  What was "The Great Loot" and how did it affect the Middle East countries as we know them now? 

These and many other questions will be answered as we read our fascinating core books:  1. (on spies and other odd characters)  "Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East" by Scott Anderson and  2. (on diplomatic intrigues) "A Line in the Sand" by Sir James Barr.   

It seems that each day brings news of another major company moving its offices, and often part or all of its operations, out of California, most often to Texas. Examples: Toyota, Oracle, Tesla, Core-Mark, HP Enterprise, Palantir, CBRE, Kubota Tractor, Charles Schwab, Colony Capital and Jamba Juice. Those large companies are part of over 15,000 companies which have left California in the last 12 years. Two recent headlines in the L.A. Times are illustrative: “Another Firm Leaves California” (Colony Capital) and “Fearing Big Tech’s Steady Move Out of California.”

Every company that leaves decreases good paying jobs and creates unemployed workers, reduced tax payments, increased government expenditures for unemployment and social services, empty buildings and decreasing morale. Indeed, more than 1,000,000 people left California in the years 2008-2018.  Population has remained level only because of legal and illegal immigration.

Why is California losing out? What happened to the days when California was first in everything, including business? Why would anyone leave the state with the best climate, outdoor activities, beaches and lifestyle?   Texas and California are the two most populous states. They represent very different histories and policies. Why is Texas gaining, at California’s expense? Some say Texas regulations are less onerous. Others say that Texas has no income tax, while California’s is among the highest in the U.S.   Still others say that housing and living expenses are much higher in California. And still others say that Texas remains a bastion of free enterprise, while California has become a “nanny” state with unsustainable expenses benefitting the poor. One of the premises of this SDG is that it is important for California to consider what should be done to help California retain its businesses and the sources of good paying jobs and restore its luster for residents and potential residents.

While the answers to the above questions may be arguable, what is not arguable is that the loss of decent jobs is resulting in the serious reduction of the middle class and the hollowing out of the tax base to support the obligations which California has undertaken. What will be the results if only the 1% and the poor remain? Although some businesses are moving to states other than Texas, the large number which are going to Texas and the dramatic differences between the two states puts these issues in broad relief.

This SDG is designed to (1) compare the ideologies and approaches of the two states, (2) try to understand why Texas is gaining in attractiveness and California is losing and (3) discuss what steps California could take to restore its attractiveness to business. Fortunately, a book published in 2020 squarely addresses all of these issues. That core book will be “Texas vs. California: A History of Their Struggle for the Future of America” by Kenneth P. Miller. As if written for us, the book has 14 chapters. They are grouped under the following headings: Paths to Polarization, Competing Visions and Possible Futures.  There is a very detailed bibliography on all of the book’s subjects, including many cites to on-line articles.

The core book, and our discussions, will explore the histories of both states; their respective economic and political development; their differing approaches to taxation, regulation, environment, labor issues, poverty and social issues; current political trends; and the very difficult questions about what can be done here in California to make it attractive for businesses to start and remain here.

When this SDG if offered, I will coordinate.

What has driven the evolution of Homo sapien and the civilizations it created ? Our first response may be biology and ingenuity. But how much has been guided by the natural environment and the opportunities made available by resource recognition? Over a period of 10 weeks, we will explore the answer to this question, by reading and discussing a new work by Lewis Dartnell, entitled Origins. It builds upon, expands  and updates a work by Jared Diamond, entitled Guns, Germs and Steel. We will learn or refresh our understanding of the geography of the earth's geologic, climate, plant and animal evolutions and ponder how the environment in which Homo sapien evolve, provided opportunities for exploitation and limits to development. We can consider how different we and our civilizations might have turned out, had Mother Nature provided a different stage upon which we strut, but we were stuck with the one she did provide and can only debate the extent to which our fate was sealed by that stage.

After two devastating world wars, Europe, as it set out to recover, found itself divided  socially, politically, economically and ideologically into two distinct entities. Caught between two adversarial superpowers, Western Europe and Eastern Europe face a Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. This SDG looks at European development from 1945 to 2021.  We will study the impact of the Cold War on Europe, the making of Western Europe, and the Sovietization of Eastern Europe.  We will compare and contrast Eastern and Western European societies and cultures as we consider significant global events such as student protests and revolts in the 1960s,  the 1973 oil crisis, and the slowing of economic growth. We will then turn to the impact of the end of the cold war, the reunification of Germany, the democracy movement and the expansion of the EU. Lastly, we will study the re-establishment of authoritarian governments, the impact of the 2008 global recession, the resumed Russian aggression and ending with a look at the post-Brexit Europe and its future. 

We will use Ian Kershaw's The Global Age: Europe 1950 to 2017, his second volume of his history  of 20th century Europe (published 2019),  as well as  Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century by Konrad H. Jarausch (2015).

"The word essay we have from the French, in which tongue it signifies a trial or probation"  (Thomas Culpeper, 1671).

We will sample glorious essays by America’s best writers spanning more than 200 years, including Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mark Twain, James Thurber, Willa Cather, and Zadie Smith.  Welcome aboard!

In 1787, 55 men convened in Philadelphia ostensibly “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” However, many, Washington, Hamilton, Madison and Franklin included, recognized that the sovereignty and independence guaranteed to each state by the Articles of Confederation doomed the union. A new document that would establish a government that could address the issues and problems of a new republic and could be amended to address those of the future needed to be written. These 55 men orated and debated in secrecy for four months in the sweltering heat of Philadelphia to frame a document that would define a democratic government for their new nation. They wrote the American Constitution. 

This SDG will explore the issues that made the discussion of a Constitution inevitable, the disputes that took place during the Constitutional Convention, the men who worked to make this document a reality, their political thought, the alliances they made and the compromises that were required. Knowing that what they had created was imperfect, the framers finally had to return to their states to seek ratification.  

In sum, we will learn about the individual men who participated in the Constitutional Convention, but will focus on the arguments, the reasonings 

The Bloomsbury Group has always fascinated people mainly because of the personalities of the members.  What is often lost is their brilliance as thinkers and artists.  Rather than offering the usual parade of personalities, this s/dg will examine the ideas of the members of this remarkable group of creative minds.  It will commence with an excerpt from G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, the foundation of the group’s world view.  We will also read Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, her brilliant essay on women’s equality; John Maynard Keynes’s Can Lloyd-George Do It?, his scathing critique of laissez-faire economics; the chapter on Florence Nightingale from Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, his innovative approach to writing history; E. M. Forster’s novel about homosexuality (unpublished during his lifetime), Maurice; and selections from Roger Fry’s Vision and Design, his ground-breaking theories of modern art.

The COVID-19 pandemic came as a force of disruption in a world already struggling with how to satisfy its energy needs, address climate change and cope with new power relationships in a complex new era of energy transition. Will the pandemic hasten or hinder the energy transition. How rapidly can we achieve an energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables? What role does energy play in the developing cold wars between the United States on one hand, and Russia and China on the other? Has coronavirus opened a new era for world oil – in a year when oil collapsed? In what ways and to what degree can technological innovation change the future of energy? And finally, is the story of energy’s future also the story of the clashing paths of global powers?  How will Biden's energy program fit the new map?  If these issues interest you, this SDG is for you!

Donald Trump has tweeted, "THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People."  Has our free press ever faced as great a threat?  Perhaps not, but the tension between presidents and journalists is as old as the republic itself.  Every president has been convinced of his own honesty and transparency; every reporter who has covered the White House has believed that his or her journalistic rigor protects the country from danger.  Washington was the first president to grouse about his treatment in the newspapers, though he kept his complaints private.  Subsequent chiefs like John Adams, Lincoln, Wilson and Obama were not so reticent, going so far as to wield executive power to overturn press freedoms, and even to prosecute journalists.

Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to actively manage the reporters who followed him, doling out information and squashing stories that interfered with his agenda.  That lesson was lost on Wilson, who never accepted reporters into his inner circle.  Franklin Roosevelt transformed media relations forever, holding more than a thousand press conferences and harnessing the new power of radio.  Kennedy excelled on television and charmed reporters to hide his personal life, while Nixon was the first to cast the press as a public enemy.  From the days of newsprint and pamphlets to the rise of Facebook and Twitter, each president has harnessed the media, whether intentionally or not, to imprint his own character on the office.

In this remarkable new history, acclaimed scholar Harold Holzer examines the dual rise of the American presidency and the media that shaped it.  From Washington to Trump he chronicles the disputes and distrust between these core institutions that define the United States of America, revealing that the essence of their confrontation is built into the fabric of the nation.

Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard philosophy professor, whose lectures on justice attract huge enrollments and audiences on YouTube, has written a book that can be viewed as a companion piece to Thomas Piketty’s books on income inequality.  Sandel limns and critiques the meritocratic ideology that supports and sustains economic and social inequality.  He shows the social harm it does, mainly in giving rise to the angry populism that is evident in many countries of the West.  Taken together, market-driven globalization and the meritocratic conception of success have, he states, unraveled moral ties.  Meritocratic sorting and the notion of “I deserve, he/she does not” has eroded the social bonds and civic attachments necessary to achieve the common good.  In sum, Sandel presents a strong argument against the belief that equal opportunity is morally equivalent to social equality.    

In the four decades since the U.S. established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, the dynamics between the two countries have moved through periods of collaboration, competition, and occasionally, confrontation.  Today, the U.S. and China are competing for military power and positioning in the Indo-Pacific, on trade, for technological power, and in an ongoing debate about democracy versus authoritarianism.  At the same time, the two countries need to work with each other on pressing common global challenges such as climate change, controlling the pandemic, stabilizing the global economy, and other issues.

Why the U.S.-China relationship has been marred by such hostility in recent times?  Can we learn simultaneously to compete and cooperate?  Is a geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China both inevitable and avoidable?  

The goal of this SDG is to begin a process of addressing these complicated questions.  To this end, we need to understand the trajectory that has led us to the current, very troubled period.  By understanding what happened and why, we will set the stage for our discussions over the course of this SDG to get a clear-sighted view of what may shape U.S.-China relations in the future.

We will use two core books: 1) Selected chapters from China and the World (2020), edited by David Shambaugh, one of the world’s leading China specialists, and written by many of the world’s leading scholars on China. The book not only identifies myriad historical factors that continue to impact China’s calculations and its “grand strategy,” but also evaluates a range of contemporary domestic factors that shape and contribute to the decisions taken by China’s policymakers; and 2) Has China Won? (2020) by Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean academic and former diplomat. Taking advantage of over three decades of hands-on diplomatic experience, Mahbubani provides an Asian perspective on both China and the U.S. and makes us re-examine some long-held assumptions.

For technological competition between the U.S. and China, I included articles from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (2020).   In addition, we will use four chapters from Steven Goldstein’s China and Taiwan (2015) dealing with China, Taiwan, and the U.S. entanglement in the Taiwan Strait. Digitized copies of these chapters will be provided. Furthermore, up-to-date articles from scholarly journals and think-tanks will be supplemented during this SDG. 

The romance of the American West cannot be underestimated.  It is a victorious, a sad, and a mammoth story of people wanting more room, more land, and more opportunity to put down fresh roots.  In the American West story, we find all kinds of special participants:  mountain men, explorers, American Indians, engineers, farmers, cattle ranchers, gold seekers, railroaders, conservation specialists, wagon train members, artists, homesteaders, gunslingers, sheep herders, army officers and cavalry, as well as politicians.  All these diverse groups in one form or another wanted to achieve the dream of Manifest Destiny in the Wild West.  This is an overview course, not a heavy concentration on every topic.

What drove all these groups to seek a new life, a better life, and a piece of land they could call their own?  H.W. Brands, the famous Western and historical author, has conceived a well-written book that gives us explorations from the Lewis and Clark expedition to fur trading with Astor to the missionary effort in the Northwest, especially Oregon.  You sense from the book that fur trading was the forerunner of globalism.  I tend to have an emotional attachment to the West, especially being born and growing up in Colorado.  Additionally, I had the privilege of working and teaching in Wyoming and New Mexico.  The West is dear to my heart because of constant Western film viewing, attending rodeos, visiting remote Colorado parts, including Mesa Verde, participating in chuck wagon gatherings, and seeing covered wagon ruts in the Scotts Bluff, Nebraska National Monument landscape.  The West is an idea.  The West is a phenomenon.  The West is a continuing history.  

The short and well-written Brands' chapters give us the flavor of the Westward Movement.  We experience winding wagon trains with terrible hardships, American Indian struggles, growth of Western towns, attacks on forts, and slavery issues for states.  It is a sweeping panorama of a bygone era that resonates with the public even today.  Only a panorama, not a full-blown college course.

Why are we so polarized?   

In our core book-- Why We're Polarized,  the superbly researched and timely  New York Times bestseller--, Washington post journalist,  Ezra Klein,  explains  how  “The American political system—from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face-- but how this collection of functional parts  combine into a dysfunctional whole.” 

He describes and analyzes  the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction,  and   offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.

in our core book, he explains:

1) How America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity.

2) How  and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another.

3) How, over the past fifty years,  in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together, and,

4) Finally he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis, and what we might be able to do about it.

Much of his analysis  is counter intuitive and eye-opening.

“A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), 

Join us as we explore and discuss the ideas in this revelatory, well documented book, eye-opening book  that may change how we look at politics, polarization and ourselves.

About the author of our core book

Ezra Klein was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, a policy analyst at MSNBC, contributor to Bloomberg. and is the editor-at-large and cofounder of Vox, the award-winning explanatory news organization,   

Some Reviewers Comments about our core book

“compelling. . . Powerful [and] intelligent.” —Fareed Zakaria, CNN 

". . A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis.” —Norman Ornstein, New York Times Book Review

"Superbly researched and written . . . outstanding " —Francis Fukuyama, The Washington Post 

"Brilliant and wide-ranging. Absolutely crucial." —Chris Hayes, host of “All In with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC and author of A Colony in a Nation 

“Klein’s careful book explains how different groups of Americans can see politics through such different lenses,—Dan Hopkins, Washington Post 

“Eye-opening . . . brilliant"—O Magazine 

“A fascinating book, rich in politics, history, psychology and more.” —David Leonhardt, New York Times 

“Well worth reading.” —Andrew Sullivan, New York magazine.

"For anyone concerned about how polarized we have become—and why—this book is for you." —Andrew Yang, author of The War on Normal People 

"Klein writes captivatingly well. Reading Why we’re Polarized is like having a conversation with a brilliant, extremely persuasive friend who has read everything and who is armed with scores of studies that he’s able to distill into accessible bites." —Amy Chua, Foreign Affairs 

"thoughtful exploration of American politics, Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author of Good and Mad 

."..clearest and most comprehensive analysis… Klein’s writing is so good that it is a joy to read,” —Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership, New York University— 

“A sharp explanation of how American politics has become so discordant . . . Deeply insightful . . . A clear, useful guide through the current chaotic political landscape.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 

“ timely, thought-provoking precise and persuasive—Publishers Weekly 

"It's been a long time since I learned so much from one book"  —Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realist