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David Shipler    

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author, Former Foreign Correspondent of The New York Times, Online Writer for The Shipler Report

David K. Shipler, an American author and journalist, has a long and distinguished career that has been marked by significant milestones. His book "Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land" won him the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1987. He has served as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for The New York Times, one of the most respected newspapers in the world. In addition, he has been a professor at the esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Shipler's expertise doesn't stop at journalism and academia. He has also ventured into the digital realm with "The Shipler Report," an electronic journal he has published since 2010. His work also extends to television, with appearances on C-SPAN and a documentary film titled Arab and Jew: Return to the Promised Land aired on PBS.

Shipler's work has often centered around civil liberties and social issues. This is evident in his book "The Working Poor: Invisible in America," as well as his writings on the Middle East and Biden's housing plan. His dedication to these topics has earned him several honorary degrees and awards, including a Martin Luther King Jr. Social Justice Award. As a trustee emeritus of Dartmouth College, Shipler continues to contribute to the academic community, further enhancing his credentials.

Speech Topics


Russia and the New Cold War

Even before its invasion of Ukraine, Russia under Putin was hurtling backwards into an authoritarian system without the relatively free press that emerged under Gorbachev in the late 1980s, and without the space to debate government policy and address social ills. It is return to historical Russian habits of resentments toward plurality, diversity of thought, and Western-style permissiveness. But Russia is not going away. So how should the U.S. and Europe respond going forward? What kind of relationship can we have?

The Working Poor

Millions of Americans who work earn too low a wage to keep them very far above poverty. Their problems come in chain reactions of ills that cannot be effectively addressed one at a time but require holistic solutions. This we saw during the pandemic, when frontline "essential" workers had to expose themselves to Covid to keep making their hourly wages, and suffered disproportional health problems as a result. Child malnutrition--with accompanying damage to brain development--was exacerbated, and family stress has increased. There are solutions if American society is willing. We have the skills, not yet the will.

The Dying Constitution

Conservatives deride liberals for seeing the Constitution as a living document whose basic civil liberties provisions can be adapted to modern society. But those conservatives--most notably on the Supreme Court--are pulling constitutional interpretation backwards into the 1700s, which risks stifling those rights and suffocating the Constitution's soaring principles. The Framers were not so short-sighted; they wrote the text to enshrine rights as transcendent, recognizing that they could not imagine a world centuries hence. In many areas codified by the Bill of Rights, the country is losing the vibrant nature of what is, in fact, a living document--which is the reason that it has lived so long.

Israel and its Dangerous Middle East Neighborhood

Israel has gone through a transformation of its place in the Middle East. The Abraham Accords, negotiated under President Trump, established relations with more Arab countries and downgraded the Palestinian question. Iran's rising threat has propelled some Arab nations to see Israel as more of an ally than an adversary, on the understanding that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But where does that leave the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Is a two-state solution still possible? Is it fair to accuse Israel of apartheid in its treatment of Palestinians. A look at the clash of two nationalisms and the friction between two historical narratives, worsened buy a relatively recent religious component: extreme Islam vs. extreme Judaism.

The Decline of American Journalism

Gone are the days--almost gone--when you could turn on a broadcast, pick up a newspaper, or go to a website and get all sides of a controversy. The rise of opinionated "reporting" and the dwindling of balanced, fair-minded coverage is destined to damage the democracy, whose citizens rely on information untainted by bias and political distortion. Simultaneously, local news coverage has disappeared in many parts of the country as newspapers have closed, leaving a vacuum into which the most polarizing screeds have flowed. Why has this happened, and what can be done about it?

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