Author Archives: Harry Katz
A Burning
A Burning By Megha Majumdar Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2020 Faced with a difficult moral choice, would you do the right thing? What if doing the right thing might cost you your job or the chance of a promotion? … Continue reading
Homeland Security Was Destined To Become A Secret Police Force
Masha Gessen, author of Surviving Autocracy (my review), writing about the Portland protests in The Nee Yorker on July 25, says, “… we are watching the perfect and perhaps inevitable combination of a domestic-security superagency and a President who rejects … Continue reading
Surviving Autocracy: Can American democracy survive Trump’s autocratic transformation?
Surviving Autocracy By Masha Gessen Riverhead Books, New York, 2020 Most people in the US today have never lived under a dictatorship. Maybe we’ve heard stories from our parents or grandparents who immigrated from such places, but we don’t have … Continue reading
White Fragility
White Fragility By Robin DiAngelo Beacon Press, Boston, 2018 “White Fragility” sounds like a paradox. How can whites be fragile when we’re supposed to be the largest and smost dominant segment of US society? As author Robin DiAngelo explains it, … Continue reading
So you want to talk about race
So you want to talk about race By Ijoma Oluo Seal Press, New York, 2018 In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, and the nation-wide protests that followed, many white people, … Continue reading
Gorsuch Surprises, Alito Spews, Scalia Haunts in Bostock v. Clayton County
On Monday, June 15, 2020, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects homosexual and transgender individuals from job discrimination. This decision has been hailed as a major victory for … Continue reading
Good Economics for Hard Times
Good Economics for Hard Times By Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo Hachette Book Group, New York, 2019 Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics for their research into alleviating global poverty. In Good Economics … Continue reading
Supreme Court Upholds Limits on Attendance at Church Services
At about midnight last night the United States Supreme Court, in a 5.4 decision, upheld California’s restrictions on the number of people who can attend church services during the coronavirus emergency. Scotusblog has posted the written decision. The South Bay … Continue reading
Together
Together By Vivek H. Murthy, MD HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, 2020 You can die of loneliness. It’s not just poetic sentiment, it’s a medical fact. Research shows that lack of social connection is just as hazardous to life expectancy as smoking … Continue reading
Solar power is becoming insanely cheap
The cost of solar power has fallen by a factor of 5 since 2010, and it will keep falling for decades to come. That’s the gist of a May 14, 2020 blog post titled Solar’s Future Is Insanely Cheap (2020) … Continue reading
