New Issue of The Commonwealth Magazine

The February/March 2011 issue of The Commonwealth magazine has been published and is appearing in members' mailboxes this week. Commonwealth Club members receive the magazine as a benefit of membership; they also get access to the digital edition of the magazine (via the weekly Club e-mail newsletter).

Here's a preview of this issue:

Cover story: U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner: "The Recovery, Part II"
Author James Ellroy: "L.A. Story"
Arianna Huffington: "Middle-Class Dilemma"
AEI President Arthur Brooks: "Earned Success and Happiness"
Reza Aslan and a panel of Muslim artists: "Cultural Exchange"
CDC Director Thomas Frieden: "The Economic Imperative of Preventive Measures"
Historian Simon Winchester: "Tales of the Sea"
U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra: "High-Tech Health Care"
Plus: Dr. Gloria C. Duffy on why "Wikileaker Is No Hero," an interview with Kiva.org President Premal Shah, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter on national mental health care policy, the Club's annual report, complete Club event listings, and more.

New Issue of The Commonwealth Magazine Now Out

Members of The Commonwealth Club should keep an eye on their mailboxes over the next week as the December/January issue of The Commonwealth makes its way through the mails.

The issue features U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on the cover; inside, she speaks about expanding participation in – and the resources for – American diplomacy, and she answers questions about energy, Mexico, China, Afghanistan, and much more.

Also this issue: Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice discusses growing up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama; a bipartisan panel takes on the heated topic of solving America's burgeoning national debt and deficit; Swiss Federal Chancellor Corina Casanova compares and contrasts California's and Switzerland's experiences with referenda.

Plus, an expert panel looks at the challenges of funding current and future transportation needs; commentator (and aide to four U.S. presidents) David Gergen gives a sobering view of national decline; attorney David Boies discusses his work on the legal challenge to California's Proposition 8; The Commonwealth has a chat with conservative political satirist P.J. O'Rourke; chef Rick Bayless discusses food and cooking with fellow chef Joey Altman; and Commonwealth Club President and CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy looks at solving seemingly intractable urban problems.

It's all in the new issue of The Commonwealth. Members will receive the print edition in the mail, but they will also have access to the digital version of the magazine. They will receive a link to the digital edition in the weekly e-mail newsletter for members. If you are a member but have not yet subscribed to that e-newsletter, go to our web site and sign up on the e-newsletter box on the left side of that page.

The New Issue of The Commonwealth Magazine: Foreign Policy, Culture Wars, Aghan War, & More

The newest edition of The Commonwealth, the members' magazine of The Commonwealth Club of California, is in the mail at this moment. If you're a member, watch your mailbox for the October/November 2010 issue, which is filled with interesting people and thought-provoking and even controversial ideas.

The cover story features a bipartisan duo of former U.S. secretaries of state: Madeleine Albright and George Shultz, who discuss with veteran journalist Marvin Kalb the most important issues facing our country today and tomorrow. Other articles include author and Iran expert Stephen Kinzer discussing the relationship between Iran and the United States; Anglican priest Kapya Kaoma on America's export of its culture wars to Africa; author Anna Quindlen discussing family with writer Ellen Sussman; an all-star panel (Laura Tyson, Paul Saffo, Nancy Pfund, Robert Klein, Robert Hertzberg, and Sydnie Kohara) discussing California's economic future; journalist Sebastian Junger on the ground with our troops in Afghanistan; author Nicholas Carr (in conversation with Google's director of research, Peter Norvig) talking about whether the internet is making us stupider; Commonwealth Club President & CEO Dr. Gloria Duffy on financial abuse of the elderly; and we say good-bye to a longtime friend of The Club and a giant of California's modern history, Bill Lane.

If that doesn't keep you occupied for the next month, check out the magazine's calendar of upcoming Club events and start marking your schedule for our great lineup of speakers, travel, and other opportunities in the Bay Area and beyond.

Newest Issue of The Commonwealth Is Here! Science, Presidential Controversy, & More

The Commonwealth, the members' magazine of The Commonwealth Club of California, has just released its June/July 2010 issue, and you can see the cool cover image below. Below that is the complete contents listing, so you know what to expect when the magazine arrives in your mailbox in a day or two.

The cover image is a rather dystopic vision of radical climate change, and it illustrates an article from a panel discussion about some controversial alternative approaches for dealing with the global issue. Geoengineering has drawn vociferous opposition from many environmentalists and climate-change activists. What exactly is it? Is it a solution or a diversion? Read the cover story and find out.

From Commonwealth Club of California

The contents:

More and More Languages on Verge of Extinction

Earlier this week, people gathered in droves all over the world to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. But most of these people didn’t realize that while they were all jubilantly enjoying green beer and rejoicing in the name of the Irish, the native tongue of Ireland became one day closer to extinction. All over the world, many of the earliest spoken languages, surviving only in small indigenous communities, are fighting a losing battle against more dominant languages. A recent Washington Post article states that by the year 2100, half of the world’s remaining 7,000 languages will vanish.

When Ireland was founded in 1922, about 250,000 people spoke Gaelic, the traditional Irish language, but these days that number has plummeted to around 30,000, writes Kari Lydersen of The Post. Languages die off mostly due to small native groups coming into contact with larger more dominant groups. Elders stop speaking and passing their language down to younger generations due to both voluntary and forced assimilation. Sometimes the languages of indigenous people are forced out by intentional national policies. Other times, indigenous people, wanting to avoid standing out as separate from the majority culture, abandon their own dialects.

The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has estimated that more than half of the world’s present-day population only communicates in eight different languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali and Portuguese. And more than 3,000 languages today are now spoken by fewer than 10,000 people.

On April 13, The Commonwealth Club will host an event on The Rosetta Project, a global endeavor that aims to amass a free and publicly accessible online archive of all documented human languages. Language is inextricably linked to culture, and as languages die off, many fear that we will also wave good-bye to the customs and fables that give many cultures their unique identities. Though it may seem that The United States is not involved with such loss of identity -- since English is the most dominate language of all -- this country was founded by immigrants, has a majority language fashioned from numerous foreign tongues, and an identity based on the customs and stories of many different cultures. The loss of languages around the world may hit closer to home than we realize.

Illinois Senate Says Pluto Is Still A Planet

Having apparently nothing more urgent to tend to, such as addressing their state government’s corruption, lawmakers in the great state of Illinois have now turned to more important matters: the fight for Pluto’s honor. The planet Pluto – or rather the Dwarf Planet Pluto, or is it the Plutoid Pluto? – is back in the news. The Illinois Senate has announced that it does not accept the decision made by the International Astronomical Union in 2006 to demote Pluto, and the senators have voted unanimously to reinstate Pluto’s “full planetary status.”

On February 5, 2009, Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and author of The Pluto Files, spoke at The Commonwealth Club about the plight of Pluto. During a revamping of the Hayden Planetarium in the late 1990s, Tyson and his co-workers decided to re-organize the objects in the solar system by like properties. This resulted in Pluto being grouped with icy bodies in the outer solar system, rather than with the gaseous and rocky objects that we call planets. A year later, this information made the front page of The New York Times: “Pluto’s Not A Planet? Only in New York.”

Soon after, the young citizens of this great nation raised their arms in outrage. As Tyson put it, “This created a disturbance in the space-time continuum of the elementary school curriculum.” He received dozens of letters from young soldiers in the fight to preserve Pluto’s honor. Some even drew him pictures of the planet in case he did not know what it looked like.

Finally, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union made the decision that Pluto did indeed belong in a separate category. That category was called Dwarf Planets. Later, Pluto was again re-categorized as a Plutoid. The loss of planetary status, however, does not mean that Pluto is no longer important, Tyson said during his Commonwealth Club appearance. While Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto in 1930, may not have found another planet, Tyson explained, “He found one of the largest objects of an entire new understanding of the outer solar system. That’s not just a spin on that discovery; that is a much more fundamental contribution to the frontier of science.”

Tombaugh, as it turns out, is an Illinois native, and the Illinois Senate plans on naming March 13th Pluto Day, in honor of Tombaugh and his great discovery. Maybe Illinois’ fight for Pluto does not show a disregard for the more important political issues currently hanging over the state’s head after all; maybe this is in fact their solution. Pluto might not be a bad place to build a medium-security prison to hold crooked politicians.

– Excerpts from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s February 5, 2009 Commonwealth Club appearance, “The Demotion of a Planet, and Hate Mail from Third Graders,” will appear in the April edition of The Commonwealth, the Club's award-winning monthly magazine. You can listen to or purchase the talk in its entirety at The Commonwealth Club web site. –