New America Nyc

With 37 states recognizing legal same-sex marriage and increased visibility of LGBT characters on television shows like Transparent and Orange Is the New Black, the gay rights movement is claiming an unprecedented victory. But the future of gay rights is far from inevitable. Despite massive gains, Michelangelo Signorile’s It’s Not Over: Getting Beyond Tolerance, Defeating Homophobia, and Winning True Equality provides stinging evidence that age-old hatred and homophobia are still basic facts of American life. How do we hold the political, social, and media establishments accountable to discrimination? Can we get past mere tolerance and achieve a fuller acceptance? Join New America NYC for a conversation between Michelangelo Signorile and Slate’s June Thomas on the state of LGBT rights and the effort to keep the momentum for equality moving forward.

Lacey Schwartz grew up in a typical household in Woodstock, NY, but her story is far from ordinary. Raised with noticeably dark skin within a white, Jewish family, Schwartz uncovers a family secret that leads her on a personal quest to examine the big issues of race, identity, and belonging. Coming at a moment when the political dialogue on race has reached a fever pitch, Sundance Institute Film Forward participantLittle White Lie confronts a complicated upbringing and asks the question of who we are and what makes us the people we become.

  As China rises to superpower status, the country is challenging the United States not just economically and politically-- but also ideologically. Its leadership is asserting its own political and economic model as an alternative to American-style democracy and capitalism-- one Beijing believes is based on its own non-Western traditions.The ancient Chinese philosopher Confucius is, according to Michael Schuman's new book, Confucius and the World He Created, critical to China's political agenda today. The Chinese Communist Party is reviving Confucius as an attempt to legitimize its authoritarian rule by linking it to the country's political history. Confucius, they believe, can also act as a bulwark against dangerous democratic ideals from the West. Whether or not this Confucian campaign succeeds will have huge implications for China's political future, its role in the world, and Beijing-Washington relations.Join New America NYC for a conversation with journalist and author Michael Shuman, along with Hua Hsu

In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote that the crisis of his time consisted in the fact that "the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."Our polarized ideologies and traditional solutions seem inadequate to many of today's challenges around the revival of class hierarchy, the de-skilling of labor, the erosion of national identity, the fragmentation of the public sphere, and the global resurgence of religion as a political force. Do we once again find ourselves in one of these morbid intellectual periods when an interregnum of ideas leaves us struggling to understand the world around us?   Join New America NYC and The Nation as we discuss the possible responses to these challenges, from those who say that the old ideas are not at all dying, those who think that we need to look for new ones, and those who claim that new ideas are already here.

American higher education is in crisis. The price of college has grown astronomically, forcing students and parents to take out loans that now exceed $1.2 trillion in outstanding debt. Many of those loans are falling into default as graduates struggle to find good work. The latest research suggests that our vaunted universities are producing graduates who learn little while they're in school.But the disruptive power of information technology is about to change all of that, upending centuries-old institutions and creating a new landscape of opportunity for students in America and around the world. In his new book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, New America education policy director Kevin Carey tells the story of how traditional colleges become so confused, ineffective, and expensive, and how a new generation of researchers and entrepreneurs are building a digital learning ecosystem to take their place.

Last summer’s 50-day military conflict in Gaza received saturated global media coverage and elicited a great deal of controversy, partly due to the high casualty rate among non-combatants in the Palestinian territory. Israel said it went to great lengths to avoid civilian deaths, while others — journalists on the scene and Palestinians in Gaza — said the Israeli military deliberately attacked non-military targets. Physicians for Human Rights - Israel is the only independent international organization that was granted access to Gaza during the war. Now the organization has released its report, “No Safe Place,” based on 68 interviews with victims in Gaza hospitals, those in the field and at hospitals in Jordan, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem.

In 2015, the Millennial generation will surpass the outsized Baby Boom generation as the nation’s largest living generation. And while our country’s new largest constituency is optimistic about its future, current policies and resources aren’t keeping up. In a country gridlocked by ideological standoffs and still recovering from the Great Recession, young people are proving to be innovators in a rapidly changing political, cultural, and technological world. But for all the diversity, education, and community experience they represent, support for their values of civic engagement isn't being met. As less Millennials agree with standard definitions of patriotism andengage less in traditional forms of political participation, how can we harness their assets and empower them to pursue their desires for change? What does meaningful citizenship look like in the future?

For all the global obsession with oil that has marked the past decades, the real future of energy might be something quite different. An advanced lithium-ion battery could power our electric cars and help relieve climate change. But the race is on in laboratories all over the world to be the first to solve this scientific enigma -- and the United States may not necessarily be the winner. Steve Levine, Washington correspondent for Quartz, will discuss his new book, The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World, with Andrew Revkin, senior fellow at Pace University's Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies and author of the New York Times'Dot Earth blog. They will explore how geopolitics, competition, and the scientists themselves could shape technology's next great watershed.

Decades before the world knew the names of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, there was the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. During the height of the Vietnam War, eight ordinary citizens covertly entered their local FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania with the objective of stealing potentially incriminating files and leaking them to the press. What they left with would unearth a highly classified civilian surveillance and intimidation program and change the protocol of government surveillance in America forever. In 1971, director Johanna Hamilton skillfully splices together archival footage and confessions to reveal the methods and identities of the perpetrators for the first time. Created on the heels of the NSA scandal and in the era of WikiLeaks, the striking expose begs the question: who's watching the watchmen? Join New America NYC and the Brennan Center for Justice for a screening of 1971 and a conversation with the film's director and key figures in the landmark heist that forever changes the

When President George W. Bush approved the first American-Afghan war, Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad from 1999-2002, found himself directing it. Grenier launched the “southern campaign,” orchestrating the final defeat of the Taliban and Hamid Karzai’s rise to power in eighty-eight chaotic days. Grenier’s new book, 88 Days to Kandahar, recounts the crucial players during this critical time: General Tommy Franks, who balked at CIA control of “his” war; General Jafar Amin, the Pakistani intelligence officer who saved Grenier from committing career suicide; and Pakistan’s brilliant ambassador to the US, Maleeha Lodhi; among others. What results is a post-9/11 race to unseat the Taliban and al-Qaida, forever changing the U.S.’s relationship to Afghanistan.

"Hope is like a path in the countryside," wrote Chinese essayist Lu Xun. "Originally there is nothing. But as people walk this way again and again, a path appears." In Half the Sky, award-winning journalists and husband and wife team Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof examined the stories of struggles facing women and girls around the world. Now, in A Path Appears, they focus on poverty -- its complex causes, symptoms and cycles -- and on solutions to this global scourge: innovative strategies for making a difference. Through a mix of research, reporting and extraordinary storytelling, WuDunn and Kristof introduce us to people who are using exceptional ideas and evidence-based approaches to tackle severe problems, inspire hope, and make the world a better place. Participants Nicholas KristofColumnist, New York TimesCo-author, A Path Appears@NickKristof Maro ChermayeffFounder and Chair, MFA in Social Documentary, The School of Visual ArtsExecutive Producer and Director, A Path Appears@APathAppears Georgia Le

In collaboration with Future Tense Americans are obsessed with tracing their family trees. Enabled by the Internet and advances in genetic technology, millions of people are diving deep into their family histories on WikiTree and Ancestry.com, or discovering their ethnic make-up down to the decimal point using 23andMe. Someday, the explosion of DNA-based genealogy could even create a universal family tree. So, how could these data sets alter how we think about ourselves? Should you feel a connection with someone because a genetic test says she's your seventh cousin?

The world's greatest manufacturing juggernaut -- the $2 trillion automotive industry -- is in the throes of a revolution. Its future will include cars Henry Ford and Karl Benz could have scarcely imagined. They will drive themselves, won't consume oil, and will come in radical shapes and sizes. But the path to that future is fraught. Today, the top contenders are two traditional manufacturing giants, the United States and Japan, and a newcomer, China. The outcomes of this global competition will shape how we move, how we work, and how we live on Earth.

Your child is more than a score. But in the era of No Child Left Behind and the Common Core, many are accusing America's public education system of sacrificing substantial learning and taxpayer dollars in favor of high-stakes testing that doesn't measure what really matters. In The Test: Why Our Schools are Obsessed with Standardized Testing -- But You Don't Have to Be, Anya Kamenetz dives into the surprising history and tempestuous politics that have led to the ubiquitous tests we see in public K-12 classrooms across the country. Beyond dilemmas about measuring the performance of students, Kamenetz also explores alternatives to the over-testing crisis in an effort to ask: what and how should we be teaching in a competitive and increasingly globalized world? And how can we best measure the progress of education in a way that allows us to hold teachers, education administrators, and policymakers equally accountable?

Inspired by the acclaimed book by Harvard historian Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt is a satiric yet serious examination into the heart of conjuring American spin. Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the curtain on a secretive group of charismatic pundits-for-hire and pseudo-scientists, paid for by multinational energy businesses, who present themselves in the media as scientific authorities -- yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied threats ranging from smoking and toxic chemicals to pharmaceuticals and, in recent years, climate change. By fabricating false arguments, they work to muddle the scientific debate on global warming to slow the cause of progress and defer public action for as long as possible. Join New America NYC and the Environmental Defense Fund for a screening of Merchants of Doubt, followed by a conversation with leaders in the science, environmental, and media communication fields to discuss the state of our environment in the era of polarized 

The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; the War on Poverty; Medicare and Medicaid; the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities – these are just a few of the programs Lyndon Johnson spearheaded in what became known as the most transformative agenda in American political history since the New Deal. But his plans for a “Great Society” didn’t come without bitter resistance. While most recount this era as an unprecedented “liberal hour” in America, Julian Zelizer’s The Fierce Urgency of Now paints a more complex picture in which Congress, religious groups, media, political action groups, and activists often had divergent views about the legacies they would leave. Our politics may have changed, but in many ways the Great Society legislation remains a center of gravity for the country we live in today. Join New America NYC for a conversation with Julian Zelizer and Jonathan Alter about the hard-fought path to the Great Society and the role its agenda continues to have on the political and policy landscap