Savor moments of Zen like never before, with our Senior Philosophical Correspondents The Ultimate Daily Show and Philosophy is revised, expanded, and updated to probe deeper than ever before the philosophical significance of the quintessential “fake” news show of the 21st century. Features significant revisions and updates from the first 2007 edition Includes discussion of both The Daily Show and its spin-off, The Colbert Report Reveals why and how The Daily Show is philosophically engaging and significant Showcases philosophers at their best, discussing truth, knowledge, reality, and the American Way Faces head on tough and surprisingly funny questions about politics, religion, and power
Culture trumps everything. That's the central theme of Civil Disservice, an impassioned call for genuine reform and renewal of the U.S. federal civil service. In this acerbic, fast-paced, and irreverent polemic, long-time government consultant Fred Mills offers a unique perspective on federal employment culture, gleaned from years of ground-level experience working with dozens of federal agencies and organizations. Mills argues that much of the dysfunction of our national government today has its roots in this culture in the norms, behaviors, incentives, and expectations that have come to define federal civil service. Mills goes on to deliver a pointed critique of civil service reform efforts to date, arguing that virtually none of these initiatives has recognized or addressed the underlying sources of the government's human resources management challenges. Instead, most attempts at reform over the past several decades have been little more than cosmetic exercises, focused overwhelmingly on tweaking the mechanics of federal HR. Predictably, these efforts have foundered, falling far short of expectations and in the end contributing nothing of lasting value to the quest for improved government performance. Civil Disservice challenges the next generation of federal sector reformers to dig deeper, to think harder, and to acknowledge and confront outdated assumptions about what it means to be a civil servant. Mills offers a vision of a future federal workforce designed to deliver results to the American people: a more responsive, flexible, and capable workforce, with an employment culture strikingly different from today's. Given the prospect of massive generational turnover during the coming decade, now is the ideal time for fresh thinking and unconventional ideas about reforming and renewing the federal civil service. Provocative, insightful, and refreshingly direct, Civil Disservice makes a powerful case for a new way forward.
Winters Rain tells the story of a time when life remained an unfair spiritual war game. It was a time when there were uncertainties and untold mysteriesand for some, fame. It was a cold day in hell, where no one could tell what it was like living in a jail cell. It was a time when challenges spread their way across the sky and when great torrential downpours and blocks of ice astounded more than the pounded dough of the American pie. It was when heavy winds ruled over rough terrains pooled in the distillation of predatory fears. It was a time when the merchant of death ruled like a plague with no breath, but not without the pain of knowing persistent suffering once again. Winters Rain uniquely portrays hidden sadness and loneliness. Of the many that embarked upon this sad and lonely journey, far too many lay in waste due to unattended gurneys. All have been consumed by the bombardment of fear. All have fallen prey to its savage rival steer, for not even hell can resist the stall of innocent pain when nighttime falls upon the dream of life during a writer's Winter's Rain.
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The book is a welcome contribution to the literature on ethics as it provides a broader horizon of investigation than most familiar works in recent years. Jamil E. Jreisat, International Journal of Public Administration This book provides critical, up-to-date reviews on the field of ethics and integrity of governance, along with fresh future perspectives. Focusing on Europe and the US, it addresses the key dimensions of public service values, the integrity and rationality of governance, ethics management, and the ethics of governance politics. In each of these four areas, leading international scholars tackle the main issues and controversies facing the world today. The final chapter synthesizes these views and provides an ambitious and critical outline for future work in the field of ethics and integrity of governance. Emanating from the much heralded transatlantic dialogue , this study integrates both the European and American perspectives into a common voice for action. Ethics and Integrity of Governance will appeal to academics, researchers and practitioners in the areas of leadership and organisation, public policy and public administration, and public values and ethics.
It is difficult to ignore the fact that, even as the United States becomes much more racially and ethnically diverse, our neighborhoods remain largely segregated. The 1968 Fair Housing Act and 1977 Community Reinvestment Act promised to end discrimination, yet for millions of Americans housing options remain far removed from the American Dream. Why do most neighborhoods in American cities continue to be racially divided? The problem, suggests Mara Sidney, lies with the policies themselves. She contends that to understand why discrimination persists, we need to understand the political challenges faced by advocacy groups who implement them. In Unfair Housing she offers a new explanation for the persistent color lines in our cities by showing how weak national policy has silenced and splintered grassroots activists. Sidney explains how political compromise among national lawmakers with divergent interests resulted in housing legislation that influenced how community activists defined discrimination, what actions they took, and which political relationships they cultivated. As a result, local governments became less likely to include housing discrimination on their agendas, existing laws went unenforced, and racial segregation continued. A former undercover investigator for a fair housing advocacy group, Sidney takes readers into the neighborhoods of Minneapolis and Denver to show how federal housing policy actually works. She examines how these laws played out in these cities and reveals how they eroded activists' capability to force more sweeping reform in housing policy. Sidney also shows how activist groups can cultivate community resources to overcome these difficulties, looking across levels of government to analyze how national policies interact with local politics. In the first book to apply policy design theories of Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram to an empirical case, Sidney illuminates overlooked impacts of fair housing and community reinvestment policies and extends their theories to the study of local politics and nonprofit organizations. Sidney argues forcefully that understanding the link between national policy and local groups sheds light on our failure to reduce discrimination and segregation. As battles over fair housing continue, her book helps us understand the shape of the battlefield and the prospects for victory.
Explores how journalists think and talk about changes in the news environment, with a focus on the increase in opinion and commentary. From News to Talk examines what journalists think about the movement toward often opinionated, sometimes uncivil, talk in news. It provides an important intervention in debates about the future of news by investigating what journalists themselves perceive as the forces affecting this movement, the effects of this shift on audiences and political culture, and how the movement from news to talk affects their roles and authority in society. Drawing on more than thirty interviews with journalists and other industry professionals and a decade of published journalistic materials, Kimberly Meltzer uncovers the technological, economic, cultural, and political forces affecting the movement toward opinion and commentary—or talk—in television, online, print, and radio news. From CNN’s Brian Stelter, to Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi, and many other journalists from CBS, USA Today, POLITICO, and HuffPost, the interviewees are key figures in journalism. Her analysis centers around several key case studies, including the increase in opinionated talking heads on television and the ushering in of a new era of talk and entertainment programs, the strategy by CNN to broaden its definition of news by adding non-news programs, and the bevy of star journalists starting their own self-branded sites. “This is an important work of journalistic scholarship that will influence future generations of journalists and teachers of journalism. It is grounded in historical and theoretical contexts while providing a novel approach to understanding an important issue through a practical lens—through the eyes of journalists.” — Lea Hellmueller, author of The Washington, DC Media Corps in the 21st Century: The Source-Correspondent Relationship
