Reader Beware

Welcome back to Reader Beware. Season One, Episode Five: The Triumph of Doubt | Written by David Michaels | https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-triumph-of-doubt-9780190922665?cc=us&lang=en& | Music by Tory White | Panel (Name / Area of Focus): Thomas "Roter" / Health Policy | Alixis / Law and Social Justice | Zac / International Business and Marketing | About the Book: Opioids. Concussions. Obesity. Climate Change. America is a country of everyday crises -- big, long-spanning problems that persist despite their toll on the country's health. And for every case of government inaction on one of these issues, there is a set of familiar, doubtful refrains: The science is unclear. The data are inconclusive. Regulation is unjustified. It's a slippery slope. Is it? The Triumph of Doubt traces the ascendance of science-for-hire in American life and government, from its origins in the tobacco industry in the 1950s to its current manifestations across government, public policy, and even professional sports. Amid fraught conversations of "alternative facts" and "truth decay," The Triumph of Doubt wields its unprecedented access to shine a light on the machinations and scope of manipulated science in American society. It is an urgent, revelatory work, one that promises to reorient conversations around science and the public good for the foreseeable future. Quick Links: VW Has a Nazi Past: https://ahvalnews.com/sites/default/files/styles/is_article_featured_top_1200x550/public/2019-11/hitlervw.jpg?h=c673cd1c&itok=j6T3SeFL

Welcome Back to Reader Beware. Season One, Special Episode Two: Policing in America: Racism, Civil Liberties, and Protests | Music by Tory White | Panel (Name / Area of Focus): Thomas "Roter" / Health Policy | Alixis / Law and Social Justice | Zac / International Business and Marketing Featured Piece: How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change, by Former President Barack Obama - https://medium.com/@BarackObama/how-to-make-this-moment-the-turning-point-for-real-change-9fa209806067 Supplementary Reading: Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: Report and Toolkit - https://www.obama.org/wp-content/uploads/Toolkit.pdf

Welcome back to Reader Beware. Season One, Episode Four: The United States of Paranoia A Conspiracy Theory | Written by Jesse Walker | https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062383228/the-united-states-of-paranoia/ | Music by Tory White | Panel (Name / Area of Focus): Thomas "Roter" / Health Policy | Alixis / Law and Social Justice | Zac / International Business and Marketing | About the Book: Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia presents a comprehensive history of conspiracy theories in American culture and politics, from the colonial era to the War on Terror. The fear of intrigue and subversion doesn’t exist only on the fringes of society, but has always been part of our national identity. When such tales takes hold, Walker argues, they reflect the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe them, even if they say nothing true about the objects of the theories themselves. With intensive research and a deadpan sense of humor, Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia combines the rigor of real history with the punch of pulp fiction. Quick Links: Mark D. Phillips Twin Towers image: https://nymag.com/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/satans-face/

Welcome Back to Reader Beware. Season One, Special Episode One: COVID-19: Public Health, Economy, and the Value of Life | Music by Tory White | Panel (Name / Area of Focus): Thomas "Roter" / Health Policy | Zac / International Business and Marketing Featured Piece: Lessons from Past Outbreaks Could Help Fight the Coronavirus Pandemic, by Sara Goudarzi - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lessons-from-past-outbreaks-could-help-fight-the-coronavirus-pandemic1/?fbclid=IwAR0T8HS4sgIBZtAKeoPD5x4FoXwhlbzRGjmnhSLb8TD9APvxymUA-X-eduM Supplamentary Reading: What Should the Government Spend to Save a Life, by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-should-the-government-spend-to-save-a-life/ For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power, by Selam Gebrekidan - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/world/europe/coronavirus-governments-power.html Great Recession, great recovery? Trends from the Current Population Survey - https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/article/great-recession-great-recovery.htm Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates, by Jeff Cox - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/30/coronavirus-job-losses-could-total-47-million-unemployment-rate-of-32percent-fed-says.html How the Great Recession Hurt Americans' Health, by Olga Khazan - https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/03/how-the-great-recession-hurt-americans-health/555431/ CDC Smoking & Tobacco Use: Fast Facts - https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm#:~:text= CDC: 80,000 people died of flu last winter in U.S., highest death toll in 40 years - https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/26/cdc-us-flu-deaths-winter/?fbclid=IwAR2QuRvGqV-lxRqsxXbuivzQlKM8BZ1v2PginvUrPy2cbSOZtjrXdPujiqY Correction and Update Sources: Experts and Trump’s advisers doubt White House’s 240,000 coronavirus deaths estimate, by William Wan, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Joel Achenbach - https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/02/experts-trumps-advisers-doubt-white-houses-240000-coronavirus-deaths-estimate/ Coronavirus batters US economy as 6.65m file for unemployment last week - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/apr/02/us-unemployment-coronavirus-economy

Welcome back to Reader Beware. Season One, Episode Three: Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race | Written by Reni Eddo-Lodge | https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race-9781408870570/ | Music by Tory White | Panel (Name / Area of Focus): Thomas "Roter" / Health Policy | Alixis / Law and Social Justice | Zac / International Business and Marketing | About the Book: In 2014, award-winning journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote about her frustration with the way that discussions of race and racism in Britain were being led by those who weren't affected by it. She posted a piece on her blog, entitled: "Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race." Her words hit a nerve. The post went viral and comments flooded in from others desperate to speak up about their own experiences. Galvanized by this clear hunger for open discussion, she decided to dig into the source of these feelings. Exploring issues from eradicated black history to the political purpose of white dominance, whitewashed feminism to the inextricable link between class and race, Reni Eddo-Lodge offers a timely and essential new framework for how to see, acknowledge and counter racism. It is a searing, illuminating, absolutely necessary exploration of what it is to be a person of color in Britain today. Quick Links: About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge (Podcast): https://www.aboutracepodcast.com/ The Space Traders, written by Derrick Bell (An excerpt from his book Faces at the Bottom of the Well): https://www.iupui.edu/~mpsg/Essays/Bell%20-%20The%20Space%20Traders.pdf

Welcome back to Reader Beware. Episode Two: The Grand Food Bargain | Written by Kevin D. Walker | https://islandpress.org/books/grand-food-bargain | Music by Tory White | Panel (Name / Area of Focus): Thomas "Roter" / Health Policy | Alixis / Law and Social Justice | Zac / International Business | About the Book: When it comes to food, Americans seem to have a pretty great deal. Our grocery stores are overflowing with countless varieties of convenient products. But like most bargains that are too good to be true, the modern food system relies on an illusion. It depends on endless abundance, but the planet has its limits. So too does a healthcare system that must absorb rising rates of diabetes and obesity. So too do the workers who must labor harder and faster for less pay. Through beautifully-told stories from around the world, Kevin Walker reveals the unintended consequences of our myopic focus on quantity over quality. A trip to a Costa Rica plantation shows how the Cavendish banana became the most common fruit in the world and also one of the most vulnerable to disease. Walker’s early career in agribusiness taught him how pressure to sell more and more fertilizer obscured what that growth did to waterways. His family farm illustrates how an unquestioning belief in “free markets” undercut opportunity in his hometown. By the end of the journey, we not only understand how the drive to produce ever more food became hardwired into the American psyche, but why shifting our mindset is essential. It starts, Walker argues, with remembering that what we eat affects the wider world. If each of us decides that bigger isn’t always better, we can renegotiate the grand food bargain, one individual decision at a time. Link to Kevin D. Walker's online webinar "Is there more to food than calories, taste, and nutrition?" https://hero-health.org/webinar/is-there-more-to-food-than-calories-taste-and-nutrition/

Welcome to Reader Beware. Where we read a book that approaches a topic from an academic or critical perspective and then discuss it. We don't know everything but sometimes we act like it. Episode One: Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O'Neil Panel: Name - Area of Focus Thomas - Health Policy Alixis - Law and Social Justice Zach - International Business and Consumer Behavior About the book: A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life — and threaten to rip apart our social fabric We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. But as Cathy O’Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can’t get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he’s then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a “toxic cocktail for democracy.” Welcome to the dark side of Big Data. Tracing the arc of a person’s life, O’Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These “weapons of math destruction” score teachers and students, sort résumés, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health. O’Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it’s up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change. Notable Achievements: A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2016 A Boston Globe Best Book of 2016 One of Wired‘s Required Reading Picks of 2016 One of Fortune‘s Favorite Books of 2016 A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2016 A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2016 A Nature.com Best Book of 2016 An On Point Best Book of 2016 New York Times Editor’s Choice A Maclean‘s Bestseller Winner of the 2016 SLA-NY PrivCo Spotlight Award https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241363/weapons-of-math-destruction-by-cathy-oneil/