Cambridge Forum hosts free, public discussions that inform and engage, so that people can better explore the varied issues and ideas that shape our changing world. CF broadcasts its live events via podcasts, weekly NPR shows and online presentations via GBH Forum Network on YouTube.
Why have so many Americans turned against democracy? How did we get to the point where an organized political movement within the U.S. is working to bring down its own democratic system? These are the questions that journalist Katherine Stewart grapples with, in her new NYT bestselling book, 'Money, Lies and God'.
Stewart’s latest investigation exposes the inner workings of the “engine of unreason” roiling American culture and politics, dissembling the roots of the problem. Along with her in-depth research into this “new style of religion”, she demonstrates that the movement relies on several distinct constituencies, with very different and often conflicting agendas. Stewart provides a compelling analysis of the authoritarian reaction in the U.S. Her reporting and political expertise helps reframe the conversation about the moral collapse of conservatism in America and points a practical way forward toward a democratic future.
This is Stewart’s third book about the rise of the religious right in America; Rob Reiner’s 2024 documentary, 'God and Country' is based on Stewart’s previous award-winning book, 'The Power Worshippers'.
Hear author Peter B. Kaufman discuss why video has become the dominant medium of human communication in his new book, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual. Kaufman explains how the moving image—not social media, not A.I., but TV networks and online video—has played such an outsized role in bringing personalities like Trump, Putin, Modi, and Netanyahu to the front of the world stage. These observations should raise public concerns about power across all communication industries. “If freedom involves participation in power, we are losing our grip on both. And that grip will disappear entirely if we let go of our control over the moving image,” says Kaufman.
Are we on the brink of a new and irreversible epoch; one that signals the end of democratic civilization as we have known it? Hard right political groups like Germany’s AfD party, which has roots in Nazi ideology, have celebrated Trump’s second term along with other extreme European politicians like Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban who announced that he had “downed vodka” in celebration of Trump’s win.
Cambridge Forum has invited three experts to consider the current political situation, from a US and global perspective. Richard Seymour, a writer and broadcaster from Northern Ireland, has been watching the disturbing political developments in Europe and elsewhere; his latest book, Disaster Nationalism, analyzes the roots, influencers and threats that this global shift poses. Sasha Abramsky, political journalist and writing lecturer at UC Davis, is a correspondent for The Nation magazine. Last week, he summarized the chaotic situation in Washington for The Nation “Trump’s win is a boon to the far right in Europe and beyond. There are certain basic things that an administration is supposed to do in a constitutional democracy, first and foremost is abiding by the law, not physically endangering political opponents and funding government services.” Michelle Lynn Kahn is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Richmond where she examines post-1945 Germany and Europe in a global and transnational frame focusing on racism, far-right extremism, gender and migration.
Recently, Elon Musk and his “unelected, unvetted and without federal government clearance” team wreaked havoc in government offices in the Capitol, to obtain access to sensitive personal data of all U.S. citizens. Is this assault on our democratic system the beginning of the end?
Cambridge Forum is pleased to feature Omo Moses, son of legendary civil rights organizer, Robert P. Moses, talking about his new book, The White Peril.
The book is a coming-of-age story, a multigenerational diary, a father-son road trip, a searing account of the Black male experience, and a work that powerfully revives Reverend Moses’s demand for liberation. Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather’s sermons and the writings of his father, Bob Moses. The result is a compelling memoir that spans three generations of an African-American family, shining a light on the Black experience, and demanding racial justice. Omo will be joined in conversation by Jack Tchen, the Clement A. Price Professor of Public History & Humanities, and Director of the Price Institute on Ethnicity, Cultures, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University. Tchen, author '"Yellow Peril! An archive of anti-Asian fear" (2016) will be in dialogue with Omo Moses' about Western colonial fears of the non-white Protestant/Christian world. Reverend Moses' remarkable 1919 "White Peril" and Tchen's "Yellow Peril!" get to the roots of liberation struggles, peace-making, and global wellbeing today, especially in the era of climate chaos.
Paris Alston, host of GBH News moderates the discussion.
Listen to Cambridge Forum archived interview with Bob Moses
here
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Cambridge Forum takes an incisive look at America’s public health system in the light of another potential pandemic, and the prospect of an incoming president who is set to dismantle our current public health care science which is regarded by many, as the best in the world. Alarm bells were sounded early last December when The Lancet, the world’s top medical journal, published an issue dedicated to U.S. public health lauding its remarkable global record and worrying for its future, under a second Trump administration.
Cambridge Forum continues its investigation into the impact of AI: Servant or Master? with FEEDING THE MACHINE on Thursday, December 19. The proliferation of A.I. offers seemingly limitless implications for the future, however what is less known about, is the hidden human cost of the labor that feeds this machine - and it is horrific.
Silicon Valley has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions, laboring under often appalling conditions to make A.I. possible.
Social media content and AI training data are processed in outsource centers in Kenya and Uganda and the global south, where long hours, low pay and exposure to very disturbing material is the norm. The daily demands of the job are inhuman, content moderators for companies like Meta are expected to watch hours of suicides, rapes and torture -“almost every day… you normalize things that are just not normal.”
The authors of Feeding the Machine, James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cantare based at Oxford University at the Oxford Internet Institute. They describe A.I. as “an extraction machine that feeds off humanity’s collective effort and intelligence, churning through ever-larger datasets to power its algorithms.” The purpose of their investigation was, “to give voice to the people whom A.I. exploits, revealing how their dangerous, low-paid labor is connected to longer histories of gendered, racialized & colonial exploitation.”
Muldoon, our guest speaker, is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Essex. Muldoon, Graham and Cant conducted hundreds of interviews during countless hours of fieldwork collected over more than a decade. The book describes the lives of the workers who are deliberately concealed from view, and the power structures that determine their future. The examples move from California, to Iceland, to Kenya, to Mexico and beyond, featuring stories from different composite characters. The data annotator in northern Uganda clicking through endless footage for $1.16 an hour; to the artist whose voice has been sold online; to the engineer pressured to deliver an imperfect final product, without ethical guidelines.
The book provides an important and overlooked examination of the network that maintains an exploitative system, revealing the untold truth about the excessively high human cost of creating A.I.
Muldoon is joined in the conversation by Josh Miller-Lewis, co-founder and senior editorial director of More Perfect Union.
What is graffiti – is it vandalism, ornament or art? Anthropologist, Rafael Schacter proposes that we think of it as a monument – and it is indeed an ancient phenomenon. Originally thought to have come from the Italian archaeological term Graffito, meaning a deliberate mark made by scratching or engraving on a large surface such as a wall - nobody really knows. While the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians may have first coined the term, the definition and origins of modern-day graffiti continue to be debated, and Cambridge Forum is delighted to continue the discussion.
Schacter’s newest tome, Monumental Graffiti is a hefty and heavily researched read. In it, he shows why graffiti demands our urgent attention as a form of expression that challenges power structures by questioning whose voices are included in, or excluded from, the public space.
Schacter is joined by Cambridge graffiti artist, Caleb Neelon, co-author of The History of American Graffiti.
“We are over-protecting children in the real world while under-protecting them online” says Jonathan Haidt, author of THE ANXIOUS GENERATION who maintains that the environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development. Haidt traces the current mental health crisis to the mid-2010s when smartphones and social media began to reshape the social landscape for adolescents. Cambridge Forum explores these troubling developments in The Anxious i-Generation.
Furthermore, Haidt argues that smartphone technologies have led to over-parenting e.g. constant notifications and GPS tracking of children’s whereabouts. This in turn, has robbed an entire generation of the resilience, coping skills and independence needed to navigate everyday situations and in turn, created unprecedented levels of societal anxiety. The dramatic decline in mental health in teens has been accompanied by decreases in academic scores for math, reading and science. CF asks what happens when we take phones out of schools and replace screen time with normal extracurricular activities that encourage independence and healthy risk-taking? Well, some forward-thinking teachers and psychologists have been doing exactly that with very promising results.
Our panel consists of Catherine Price, science journalist, founder of Screen/Life Balance and author of How to break up with your phone; Camilo Otiz, Associate Professor of Psychology at Long Island University and licensed psychologist in private practice; Lenore Skenazy, president of the nonprofit, Let Grow and author of Free Range Kids plus Shane Voss, Head of Mountain Middle School in Durango, CO. where he has created a phone-free school environment since 2013.
Scientist, engineer and artist Dr. Joy Buolamwini discusses her book UNMASKING AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines. In it, she uncovers what she calls “the coded gaze”, evidence of encoded racial and gender bias, discrimination and exclusion in tech products. On the basis of her research, Buolamwini founded the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL) to show how racism, sexism, colorism, and ableism can overlap and render broad swaths of humanity “excoded” and vulnerable in a world rapidly adopting AI tools. Encouraging everyone to join this fight, Buolamwini writes, “The rising frontier for civil rights will require algorithmic justice. AI should be for the people and by the people, not just the privileged few.”
Cambridge Forum is delighted to partner with Harvard Book Store to bring you a conversation with Nancy Pelosi about The Art of Power, which chronicles her life as America’s first female Speaker of the House and one of the most powerful women in American political history.
When Nancy Pelosi, aged 46 years and a mother of five, asked her youngest daughter if she should run for Congress, Alexandra Pelosi answered: “Mother, get a life!” And so Nancy did, and what a life it has been. In her book The Art of Power, Pelosi describes what it takes to make history—not only as the first woman to ascend to the most powerful legislative role in our nation, but to pass laws that would save lives and livelihoods, from the emergency rescue of the economy in 2008 to the transformation of health care. She describes the perseverance, persuasion, and respect required to succeed, but also the joy of seeing America change for the better. Renowned for her hard work and diligent preparation, Pelosi worked to find common ground, but also learned how to stand her ground with presidents from Bush to Biden.
In her memoir, she reveals how she went toe-to-toe with Trump, leading up to January 6, 2021, when he unleashed his post-election fury on the Congress. Pelosi provides a personal account of that day: the assault not only on democracy but on those who had come to serve the nation, never expecting to hide under desks or flee for their lives—and her determined efforts to get the National Guard to the Capitol.
Nearly two years later, violence and fury erupted inside Pelosi’s own home when an intruder, demanding to see the Speaker, viciously attacked her husband, Paul. Pelosi shares details of that fateful day and the traumatic aftermath. However, Pelosi does not fear a good fight and “The Art of Power” is about the fighting spirit that has always animated her, and helped her create an historic legacy.
She is joined in conversation by Governor Maura Healey—the 73rd Governor of Massachusetts.
