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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.

http://www.cambridgeforum.org

In Person

Joan C. Williams with Outclassed

7:00pm Thu, May 22, 2025

Join Joan C. Williams—award-winning scholar of social inequality and Distinguished Professor of Law (Emerita) at UC San Francisco—for a discussion about her new book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Get Them Back. Her latest book is an urgent wake-up call to mend the broken relationship between college and non-college grads of all races that is driving politics to the far right in the US. Williams says that the single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic - lies in changing the class dynamics driving American politics.

The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals, and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams explains how to reverse that process by bridging the “diploma divide”, while maintaining core progressive values. She offers college-educated Americans insights into how their values reflect their lives and their lives reflect their privilege. With illuminating stories —from the Portuguese admiral who led that country’s COVID response, to the lawyer who led the ACLU’s gay marriage response — Williams demonstrates how working-class values reflect working-class lives. Then she explains how the far right connects culturally with the working-class, deftly manipulating racism and masculine anxieties to deflect attention from the ways far-right policies produce the economic conditions that disadvantage the working-class! Whether you are a concerned citizen committed to saving democracy, a politician or a social justice activist in need of messaging advice, Outclassed offers concrete guidance on how liberals can forge a multi-racial cross-class coalition capable of delivering on progressive goaL.

CAMBRIDGE FORUM is partnering with Harvard Book Store and GBH Forum Network to record this event for free public enjoyment and distribution.

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Virtual

CARBON: The Book of Life

5:00pm Tue, May 6, 2025

Carbon gets a bad rap these days, according to author and environmentalist Paul Hawken, who urges us to widen our perception and response to the climate crisis. Too often carbon is maligned as the “driver” of climate change and blamed for the possible demise of civilization. However, this narrative is erroneous and misleading.

Carbon is an intriguing element; the only one that animates the entire living world. Manifesting in coal and diamonds, it displays a host of different properties because of its ability to bond easily. One vital example is carbon-dioxide, which allows plants to photosynthesize. Though carbon comprises a tiny fraction of Earth’s composition, our planet is lifeless without it.

Paul Hawken, veteran environmentalist and author, looks at the flow of life through the lens of carbon. Embracing a panoramic view of carbon’s omnipresence, he explores how this ubiquitous and essential element extends into every aperture of existence and shapes the entire fabric of life. Hawken charts a course across our planetary history, guiding us into the realms of plants, animals, insects, fungi, food, and farms to offer a new narrative for embracing carbon’s life-giving power and its possibilities for the future of human endeavor.

Hawken’s latest book, Carbon: The Book of Life illuminates the subtle connections between carbon and our collective human experience and suggests we see nature, carbon, and ourselves as exquisitely intertwined -inseparably connected.

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Demonizing the Truth

Tue, Apr 15, 2025

President Trump has spent years demonizing the press, popularizing the concept of “fake news” and branding journalists the “enemy of the people”. But targeting the free press is only one of the democratic institutions that Trump has gone after since taking office for his second term.

The Trump administration’s flagrant disregard for civil rights has manifest itself in the deportation, arrest and imprisonment of immigrants, foreign students and random tourists in detainment facilities “illegally”, according to Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch. Those who oppose Trump are liable to become the next subject of attack, and this includes the lawyers who have challenged his actions in court. Trump also views academic centers of learning as a threat because they encourage independent and critical thinking; he has already punished Ivy league universities like Columbia and Harvard under the guise of anti-semitism, and now has turned his sights on institutions like the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum network, with plans to reshape it, and eliminate “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology”.

Cambridge Forum considers how far ordinary Americans are willing to go, to acquiesce or protest these developments in Demonizing the Truth. The guest speakers are David Enrich, business investigations editor for NYT and author of a new book 'MURDERING THE TRUTH: Fear, the First Amendment, & A Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful.'

Berna Leon, a Spanish teaching assistant at Harvard's School of Government wrote an op-ed for The Guardian entitled “This Op-Ed could lead me to being deported from the U.S.”

Jesse Hagopian is a Seattle educator, the director of the Zinn Education Project’s Teaching for Black Lives Campaign, and the author of the book TEACH TRUTH: THE ATTACK ON CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ANTIRACIST EDUCATION.

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Human Rights Watch's Kenneth Roth on his memoir "Righting Wrongs"

Thu, Apr 3, 2025

Under the leadership of Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch grew its staff to over 500 and conducted investigations in 100 countries, uncovering abuses and pressuring offending governments to desist. Roth has grappled with the worst of humanity, and persuaded leaders from around the globe to stand up to their repressive counterparts.

Roth was the son of a Jewish butcher who escaped Nazi Germany just before the war began. He grew up knowing how inhumane governments could be. His work took him all over the world to confront cruelty and injustice. Roth arrived in Rwanda shortly after their genocide; he scrutinized the impact of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and he investigated and condemned Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. He directed efforts to curtail the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims, to bring Myanmar’s officials to justice after the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, to halt Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

Roth’s strategies included the deployment of the ancient but powerful tool of shaming, and the anecdotes he shares illustrate its surprising effectiveness.

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Money, Lies and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy

Tue, Mar 18, 2025

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'.

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THE MOVING IMAGE: A force to be reckoned with

Tue, Mar 4, 2025

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.

He will be joined in conversation by Robert S. Boynton, Director of the Literary Reportage program at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

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DISASTER NATIONALISM: Is it the downfall of liberal civilization?

Tue, Feb 18, 2025

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?

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LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF OUR FATHERS

Tue, Feb 4, 2025

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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Are We Ready for the Next Pandemic? The Price of Neglecting Public Health

Tue, Jan 21, 2025

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.

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FEEDING THE MACHINE - The Hidden Human Labor Powering AI

Thu, Dec 19, 2024

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 Cant are 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.

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