Featured Playlists
Mary Oliver
The poems of Mary Oliver, read by the poet as well as Maria Shriver and Vice President Joe Biden
Alfie Kohn
Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on human behavior, education, and parenting. The author of several books and scores of articles, he lectures at education conferences and universities as well as to parent groups and corporations.
Kohn's criticisms of competition and rewards have been widely discussed and debated, and he has been described in Time magazine as "perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades [and] test scores."
Raceball: videos about people in the book
Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latino Game
by Rob Ruck (Beacon Press, 2011)
The colliding histories of black and Latin ballplayers in the major leagues have traditionally been told as a story of their shameful segregation and redemptive integration. Jackie Robinson jumped baseball's color line to much fanfare, but integration was painful as well as triumphal. It gutted the once-vibrant Negro Leagues and often subjected Latin players to Jim Crow racism. Today, Major League Baseball tightens its grasp around the Caribbean's burgeoning baseball academies, while at home it embraces, and exploits, the legacy of the Negro Leagues.
After peaking at 27 percent of all major leaguers in 1975, African Americans now make up less than one-tenth-a decline unimaginable in other men's pro sports. The number of Latin Americans, by contrast, has exploded to over a quarter of all major leaguers and roughly half of those playing in the minors. Award-winning historian Rob Ruck not only explains the catalyst for this sea change; he also breaks down the consequences that cut across society. Integration cost black and Caribbean societies control over their own sporting lives, changing the meaning of the sport, but not always for the better. While it channeled black and Latino athletes into major league baseball, integration did little for the communities they left behind.
By looking at this history from the vantage point of black America and the Caribbean, a more complex story comes into focus, one largely missing from traditional narratives of baseball's history. Raceball unveils a fresh and stunning truth: baseball has never been stronger as a business, never weaker as a game.
Food Activist and Author Mark Winne
Mark Winne is the author of Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners and Smart-Cookin' Mamas and Minding the Food Gap. From 1979 to 2003, Mark Winne was the Executive Director of the Hartford Food System, a private non-profit agency that works on food and hunger issues in the Hartford, Connecticut area. During his tenure with HFS, Mark organized community self-help food projects that assisted the city's lower income and elderly residents. Mark's work with the Food System included the development of commercial food businesses, Connecticut's Farmers' Market Nutrition Program, farmers' markets, a 25-acre community supported agriculture farm, a food bank, food and nutrition education programs, and a neighborhood supermarket.
When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps
President John F. Kennedy signed the executive order creating the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961, and his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver went on to build an institution that has changed the world in the fifty years since. Stanley Meisler is the author of When the World Calls: The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years. This playlist contains videos of Meisler as well as some historical materials of interest to those who want to learn more about the history of the Peace Corps
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