April 1, Thursday Luncheon Roundtable on Zoom – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Speaker is Jack Nagel, professor emeritus of political science at Penn. His topic—The Struggle for Voting Rights: Will National Reforms Prevail over State Rollbacks?
The pandemic spurred historic liberalization of voters’ access to the polls in 2020, and now state legislators across the nation have introduced nearly a thousand bills affecting voting rights. Most of these would expand access, but about 250 of them would make voting more difficult, especially in battleground states such as Pennsylvania. Two major pieces of federal legislation would block many of these restrictive measures. H.R.1, the For the People Act, has already passed the House on a near–party line vote. H.R.4, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, has yet to be introduced in the current session, but a previous version passed in 2019. Senate passage of H.R.1, and probably H.R.4 as well, depends on elimination or reform of the filibuster. Prof. Nagel will give an overview of major state and federal proposals, and then provide background on the filibuster and how it might be abolished or curtailed—along with predicting likely outcomes and consequences.
Jack Nagel has studied electoral systems in depth, including alternatives to single-winner plurality elections, which predominate in the U.S.; the effects of plurality elections on three-party competition in Britain; electoral reform attempts in Britain and Canada; and the mixed-member proportional electoral system adopted in 1996 by New Zealand. His articles on electoral subjects have appeared in political science journals and edited volumes in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, Britain, and Europe. He has given testimony on electoral reforms to legislatures and courts in Pennsylvania, Quebec, and Minnesota. And he has written op-eds on electoral matters for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Harrisburg Patriot-News, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He advises FairVote, a nonpartisan national reform group, and assisted them in defending ranked-choice voting against legal challenges in Minnesota and Maine. At Penn, he chaired the Political Science department and was associate dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. He holds a B.A. with highest honors from Swarthmore and a Ph.D. from Yale.
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April 5, Zoom Quarterback Roundtable – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Matthew McGovern is our Quarterback.
April 8, Thursday Luncheon Roundtable on Zoom – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Speaker is Paula Marantz Cohen, dean of the Pennoni Honors College and a distinguished professor of English at Drexel. Her topic—King Lear and the Marginality That Comes With Age.
Prof. Cohen will read and discuss a chapter from her new book, Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy (Yale University Press, 2020).
Paula Marantz Cohen is the author of six nonfiction books on literature, film, and culture; and her six novels include the best-selling Jane Austen in Boca and a thriller based on the James family, What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper. Her essays have appeared in The Yale Review, The American Scholar, The Times Literary Supplement, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She is the host of the TV interview show, “The Civil Discourse,” broadcast on PBS stations across the country, and a co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. She is also the proud spouse of Innmate Alan Penziner.
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April 12, Zoom Quarterback Roundtable – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Dick Goldberg is our Quarterback.
April 15, Thursday Luncheon Roundtable on Zoom – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Speaker is Thom Nickels, well-known Philadelphia author and journalist. His topic—Religious Cults in Philadelphia, is based on his book, From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.
Religious cults have marked every society since the beginning of time. Some have an audacious presence, while others seem to be the very soul of respectability. From Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement with its connections to Jim Jones of Jonestown infamy, to Krishna Consciousness, Scientology, and Anton Szandor LaVey’s Church of the Process and its missionaries in Suburban Station, to Philadelphia’s assorted New Age marketers and pop-up gurus, Thom followed a long-standing curiosity about religious practice beyond the mainstream to write his newest book on religious, and some secular, cults in Philadelphia (Arcadia Publishing, 2020).
Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including Philadelphia Architecture (2005); SPORE (2005); Literary Philadelphia: A History of Prose & Poetry in the City of Brotherly Love (2015); and Philadelphia Mansions: Stories and Characters Behind the Walls (2018). Nickels’ essays on his years as a Vietnam War-era conscientious objector were published by The New Oxford Review and Oklahoma Humanities Magazine. He was the recipient of the 2005 Philadelphia AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism, the theater critic for ICON Magazine and a columnist for Philadelphia Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He currently writes for the Philadelphia Free Press, Delaware Valley Journal, Philadelphia Irish Edition, and City Journal (New York).
April 19, Zoom Quarterback Roundtable – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Roberta Kangilaski is our Quarterback.
April 22, Thursday Luncheon Roundtable on Zoom – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Speaker is Christopher Ketcham. His topic—What Are the Questions We Should Be Asking on Earth Day 2021?
Innmate Chris Ketcham is retired from the University of Houston Downtown where he taught risk management and ethics. He is the author of Flowers and Honeybees: a Study of Morality in Nature, discussed at a Thursday Roundtable last May. He has published in the Journal of Animal Ethics, Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy, Space Policy, Marcel Studies, and Philosophical Inquiries.
On this 51st Earth Day, Chris will focus on the fundamental question of just what we want Earth to be like for us and future generations. He will offer a brief look back in environmental time and then pose three questions: What kind of world do we have? What kind of world do we want? What must we do to get there? There’s a lively dialog to be had in trying to answer these important general questions, and others associated with intergenerational justice, economic, political, and social issues. Here are links to two essays to ponder beforehand. The first, from NASA, extols our planetary advantages in the solar system. The second calls for rebalancing our expectations about ecosystems and our built environment.
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April 26, Zoom Quarterback Roundtable – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Gresham Riley is our Quarterback.
April 29, Thursday Luncheon Roundtable on Zoom – 12:30 to 1:45 p.m.
Speaker is Anna Coxe Toogood, retired historian of Independence National Historical Park. Her topic—Philo Taylor Farnsworth: The Almost-Forgotten Inventor of Television.
Philo Farnsworth filed a patent application for his electronic television transmission system in 1927, received the patent for this first functional system in 1930, and won his battle for patent rights in 1935 against RCA mogul David Sarnoff. Now Sarnoff is remembered as the father of television, and Farnsworth’s name has faded from history. Anna Coxe Toogood will share the story of this brilliant inventor, who spent several years in Philadelphia, and held hundreds of patents for his contributions to further developments in television technology, and to other areas such as radar and infrared technology, electron microscopy, gastroscopy, and nuclear fusion.
Coxey Toogood was just two weeks away from retirement in March of 2020, when the staff at INHP was sent home because of the Covid pandemic. She describes it as an anticlimax in a fascinating career of 50-plus years as a National Park Service historian, documenting the buildings and landscapes, and telling the stories of these national resources. Coxey was born in New York City but spent her youth in Philadelphia. After graduation from Penn, she quickly found her way to the NPS central offices in Washington, DC, where she began her career as a research historian.