Acclaimed Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat joins today’s Democracy Now! to speak out against the Dominican Republic’s decision to denationalize hundreds of thousands of people in what some are calling “ethnic purging.” Half a million legally stateless people could be sent to Haiti this week, including those who have never stepped foot in Haiti and don’t speak the language.
Watch the interview on Democracy Now! today.
Tom Hayden, author of the new book, “Listen, Yankee!: Why Cuba Matters,” argues the United States and Cuba have much more in common than a 55-year disagreement. His book is based in part on conversations with Ricardo Alarcón, the former foreign minister of Cuba and past president of the Cuban National Assembly. A longtime activist, Hayden was one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society and later a California state senator. Watch his interview on Democracy Now! today.
In this short video clip, Michael Pollan, one of the country’s leading writers and thinkers on food and food policy, tells Democracy Now! that processed food has undermined what he calls “the nursery of democracy”: the family meal. “There is a deliberate effort to undermine food culture, to sell us processed food,” Pollan says. “The family meal is a challenge if you’re one of these companies because the family meal is usually one thing shared … It’s where we learn and where teach our children how to share, how to take turns, how to argue without offending, how to learn about the events of the day. If kids are spending all of their time in their rooms, passing through the kitchen, nuking a frozen pizza, they’re missing something very important.” Click to watch the full 50-minute interview about his new book called, “Cooked: The Natural History of Transformation.” Do you agree with this analysis?
