Closing the Achievement Gap, Taking Down Gangs, and Ending World War II

Multiplication Is For White People: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children
by Lisa Delpit

The nutshell: After spending decades interviewing and observing African-American students and their teachers, Southern University education scholar Delpit believes that the single best way to close the achievement gap in education is to raise our expectations for black students.

Literary lovechild of: Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Short Memories, Long Runs, and Endless Wars

New Books on the Cold War, Long-Distance Running, and Immigration

How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America
by Jon Wiener
UC Irvine historian Wiener traveled to Cold War monuments and exhibits around the country—from a “hippie …

Bipartisanship Shouldn’t Just Be Nuclear

Five Cold Warriors Have Shown Us That a Healthier Political Culture Is Possible

In this era of rancor in Washington, it’s hard to imagine a time when two of the most partisan men in the nation–Republican President Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, the …

Bye Bye, Lenin

The Cold War Passed Away 20 Years Ago. I Still Miss It.

It’s hard to describe, let alone explain, my melancholic reaction to the movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy after watching it in a sold-out theater on Saturday. Sure, the film, adapted …

Our Man in Minsk

Lee Harvey Oswald's Soviet World

I went to Minsk to find Lee Harvey Oswald. Not the man, of course. His world – his apartment, on 4 Communist Street; the television and radio factory where he …