Social Issues & Demographics

This is the premier episode of The Sidebar, the weekly podcast from the New America Foundation that looks at what's in and what's underlying the news. This week, host Pamela Chan talks with Tamar Jacoby, Katherine Zoepf and Dan Meredith about Syria, privacy and immigration.

For all the grim news about the economy and jobs over the last few years, one indicator of the quality of life in the United States has stubbornly continued to improve. The latest Federal Bureau of Investigation data suggests crime rates went on falling through the first half of 2011, recession be damned. In 1991, the overall national violent crime rate reported by the FBI was 758 cases per 100,000 inhabitants; by 2010, that had dropped to 404 per 100,000. The murder and "nonnegligent homicide" rate dropped by more than half over the same period.

Very few of the heroes and villains made famous in the wars of the past decade are women. Of the scant exceptions, two of the most fascinating are the subjects of Deborah Scroggins’s thoughtful double biography, “Wanted Women.”

One is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born thinker and neoconservative darling; the other is Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who, in 2010, was sentenced to 86 years in prison for her assault on American personnel in Afghanistan. She is known as Al Qaeda’s highest-ranking female associate.

Bestselling journalist Liza Mundy’s smart, deeply reported analysis of the most important cultural shift since the rise of feminism: the coming era in which women will earn more than men, and how this will change work, love, and sex.

A revolution is under way. Within a generation, more households will be supported by women than by men. In The Richer Sex, Liza Mundy shows how this reality will transform the sexual, dating, marriage, and work habits of men and women worldwide.

“If it could rid itself of gender discrimination, the average developing country would grow at least two percentage points faster each year.”  At least so argues Marcelo Giugale, the World Bank’s Director for Poverty Reduction and Economic Management in Africa, in a recent op-ed that likens the current state of many global economies to one in which “half of all machines [are] misplaced: tractors [are] sent to hospitals, brain scanners to barber shops, hair driers to construction sites, cranes to car factories and crash-test dummies to farms.”

Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas," one of the biggest-selling songs of all time, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Although the wistful tune soothed homesick soldiers in such God-awful places as Guadalcanal more than half a century ago, and no doubt it still plays in Kandahar today, Berlin most likely wrote what he called "the best song that anybody's ever written" somewhere in the sunny Southwest, probably while sitting by a swanky hotel swimming pool.

Among Republican presidential candidates, it's been demagoguery as usual. Why have a substantive debate when you can exchange inflammatory sound bites instead, especially on immigration?

But something surprising happened last week far from the campaign trail — on Capitol Hill, of all places. Just when we thought Congress would never act to address the nation's broken immigration system, members of the House made a critical breakthrough, voting overwhelmingly to approve a fix that will make American companies more competitive and the immigration system fairer and more welcoming.

Last week, the Global Fund, the world's largest multilateral source of financing for the fight against AIDS, made a grim announcement: its donors had cut their funding by $1.6 billion, a big enough bite out of the organization's budget that the fund would be bankrolling no new AIDS treatment projects until 2014.

It's not a good sign when even the most obvious truths cannot be spoken on the campaign trail.

Deport 11 million illegal immigrants? Can Newt Gingrich really be the only Republican presidential candidate who understands that this would be impossible?

Not only would it cost tens of billions of dollars and divert resources from many far more pressing law enforcement priorities, but even the toughest of presidents would soon back off as the media images of mass round-ups beamed around the world—that really is not the kind of country most Americans want to be or live in.

The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming!

Remember what your elementary school teacher taught you about the War of Independence? The British wore scarlet coats, which made them easy marks and symbolized institutional pomposity, adherence to status over efficiency and an out-of-touch empire bent on doing things the old way. The rebellious American colonists, on the other hand, wore whatever; they were nimble, unencumbered by institutional baggage and not too proud to employ guerrilla tactics.