The Mesa Verde Mystery

Seven centuries ago, an entire society performed one of the greatest vanishing acts in human history when they fled their homes in the American Southwest. Archaeologists are trying to work out why they left.

The Indonesian Massacre: What Did the U.S. Know?

Margaret Scott The New York Review of Books
President Obama welcomed Indonesian President Joko Widodo to the White House last week, 50 years after the U.S. backed military coup that resulted in the killings of hundreds of thousands of suspected Indonesian Communists and just weeks after the CIA’s declassification of intelligence documents offers an opportunity to revisit the U.S role in those murderous events. But neither president appears ready to probe further one of the worst massacres since World War II.

Friday Nite Videos -- November 6, 2015

Portside
The Ferguson Effect: It's Hard Out There for a Cop. How the Keystone Fight Was Won. Movie: This Changes Everything. The Mesa Verde Mystery. Sanders’ Strength? Millennials Back Socialism.

How the Keystone Fight Was Won

President Obama's rejection of the Keystone pipeline is the culmination of years of organizing and mobilization. Time to take a moment to celebrate a victory and draw lessons about how victories are won. 

Movie: This Changes Everything

Directed by journalist and filmmaker Avi Lewis (The Take) and produced in conjunction with Naomi Klein's bestselling book of the same name, this urgent dispatch on climate change contends that the greatest crisis we have ever faced also offers us the opportunity to address and correct the inhumane systems that have created it.

Sanders’ Strength? Millennials Back Socialism

Socialist? Populist? Progressive? Joseph Schwartz and Gar Alperovitz discuss Senator Bernie Sanders’ plans for extending democracy to the economic sphere and attacking inequalities in wealth and income.

Matt Taibbi: The Case for Bernie Sanders

Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone
His critics say he’s not realistic – but they have it backwards. The only reason this attention-averse, sometimes socially uncomfortable person is subjecting himself to this asinine process is because he genuinely believes the system is not beyond repair.

Male/Female Brain Differences? Big Data Says Not So Much

Science Daily
A research study has debunked the widely-held belief that the hippocampus, a crucial part of the brain that consolidates new memories and helps connect emotions to the senses, is larger in females than in males.

Cities and States Leading Fight Against Big Money

Benjamin T. Brickner Brennan Center for Justice
Maine's Clean Elections program and Seattle's Honest Elections Seattle swept to notable victories on Tuesday, providing ways that candidates can run for office without relying on big money from special interests. These efforts are a reminder that many of the most important initiatives to fix our broken campaign finance system are happening on the state and local level.

Why Asian Americans Don’t Vote Republican

Cecilia Hyunjung Mo The Conversation
Three quarters of the Asian-American vote went to the Republican presidential candidate just two decades ago. In 2012, three quarters of Asian Americans voted for Barack Obama. This dramatic change in party preference is stunning. No other group has shifted so dramatically in their party identification within such a short time period. Some are calling it the “GOP’s Asian erosion.”