Hunger and Hope in Haiti

Hunger and Hope in Haiti

Amy Wilentz on Haiti, Mia Birdsong on poverty, and Kate Aronoff and Michael Kazin on socialism.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener
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It’s been 10 years since Haiti was devastated by the earthquake that killed more than a hundred thousand people. Amy Wilentz, who has been reporting on Haiti for three decades, returned to the island and found the country oddly calm, despite deepening poverty, violence, and corruption. She also found “little sprouts of possibility everywhere.”

Also: We have a lot of experts on what to do about poverty—academics and policy-makers. Mia Birdsong has been working with a different sent of experts: poor people themselves. She’s a senior fellow of the Economic Security Project, and her TED talk “The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn’t True” has been viewed almost 2 million times. Now she has a new four-part podcast at The Nation—it’s called More Than Enough.

Plus: Democratic socialism, American style: Kate Aronoff and Michael Kazin talk about socialism in America today—they are co-editors with Peter Dreier of We Own the Future, which includes chapters on sports, banks, work, health care, campaign finance, immigration, and families.

We cannot back down

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Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

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Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

Start Making Sense Start Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon Wiener Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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