For most of us, the TSA is our only contact with the “war on terror.”

It is an honor and a pleasure to have Paul Krugman at the Lake this afternoon for a conversation on End This Depression Now! Dedicated “To the unemployed, who deserve better,” the book is a condemnation of the policies and mind-set that have produced the worst economic depression since the 1930s. And unlike the Great Depression, which contemporaries did not understand, we know what to do; the current depression is entirely self-inflicted. The broken homes and ruined lives are not attributable to acts of God or the inscrutable logic of the market, but are the direct consequence of public decisions that have amplified the inherent risk of private credit by deregulating financial operations and the attempt to balance the budget when aggregate private demand is collapsing. The central message is that none of this suffering is necessary, and none of it is justified.

Madeleine Kunin certainly knows from women and work. She’s been the governor of Vermont and the Ambassador to Switzerland. Before all that, she did her time as a journalist, a college professor, and an activist. She’s seen the feminist movement go through many permutations, and in her new book The New Feminist Agenda: Defining the Next Revolution for Women, Work and Family, she details out her vision for where feminism should go next. Kunin argues that the movement hasn’t paid quite enough attention to the family, and specifically advocating for policies that allow women (and men) the ability to balance their work lives and their family lives in our hectic, work-focused world.

Social Security is one of those topics that most people think they know about. Everyone“knows” Social Security is “going bankrupt,” that the government “raided the trust fund,” and that “it won’t be there when we retire.” These folks include both the ideologues determined to dismember the program and the casual consumers of mainstream media, which has been largely content to write he-said, she-said stories giving equal weight to the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration and“experts” wearing tin-foil hats.

But there’s a potentially more dangerous cohort than the Fox-educated crowd out there, says Eric Laursen.

In her landmark book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America published in 2001, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover working in a series of minimum wage jobs (waitress, nursing-home aide, maid, etc.) to learn what life is like for the “working poor” in America. For most of those thrown off the welfare rolls, women in particular, these were the jobs that were available to teach the former welfare recipients the “dignity” of work. What Ehrenreich found was demanding and exhausting work paying sub-poverty wages so low that workers could scarcely afford to feed and shelter themselves, no job security, no benefits, and no future.

Eleven years later in The American Way Of Eating Tracie McMillan has traced a similar path, only this time exploring the economic and societal implications of how we grow our food, harvest it, ship it, and market it in America. Why do Americans make so many bad food choices? Why do we eat so poorly? What is a “food desert” and why do we have them? The answers reside in the ever more powerful supermarkets with their massive infrastructure and distribution systems which have displaced the local grocers, and with the cookie cutter restaurant chains where the food is not so much cooked as it is assembled from pre-packaged portions which are microwaved and served to a clientele who want a night away from their own kitchens where they, most likely, would have been emptying a salad bag into a bowl while a frozen packaged entree slowly spins in the microwave. Combine that with a populace who increasingly know less about the food they eat and seemingly spend more time watching cooking shows on TV and cooking less because they “don’t have enough time” and we have serious food issues in America.

Going away to college is one the defining moments in anyone’s life, and for Scags Morgenstern, the heroine of Deborah Emin’s Scags at 18, her first semester at an elite Vermont college, where she’s a scholarship student, shifts her world.

Told in the first person as diary entries, Scags’ first semester expresses the questioning and discovery that comes with growing into adulthood.

Kendra Pierre-Louis has crafted a powerful little manifesto for social change agents who seek to challenge and change the status quo. Her book, Green Washed, largely assumes that readers know the grim state of affairs – basically, Peak Everything and Ecosystem Collapse, and have chosen to “do something” about it by buying into the myth that we can comfortably shop our way to a greener, more sustainable planet.

Today we’ll be talking to Kevin Gosztola, an FDL blogger, journalist and co-author (with Greg Mitchell of The Nation), about the fascinating, clearly explained and up to the minute book, Truth and Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning. (I am a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights and a legal advisor to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.)

Little more than 13 months after the world’s third major civilian nuclear accident in three decades, it might be surprising to find that one of the words commonly used in context with nuclear power these days is “renaissance.” Though more the product of public relations than real observation, the concept of a “nuclear renaissance” took hold over the last decade purportedly as a response to the rising price of fossil fuels and a growing concern over climate change–and it became so much a part of the lingua franca that even after an earthquake and tsunami triggered the massive crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (a crisis that continues to this day), media reports still try to assess how much of a renaissance we will see post-Fukushima, rather than laugh at the idea that a renaissance ever existed.

On Tuesday, I will return to Fort Meade, Maryland, where court martial proceedings against Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, resume. The focus of those proceedings will involve an effort by David Coombs, Manning’s defense lawyer, to have an “aiding the enemy” charge dismissed. This is one of the more egregious charges Manning faces and is based on the contention by the government that Manning knowingly provided “intelligence” to al Qaeda and other related terrorist groups indirectly when he allegedly released information to WikiLeaks.