by Stephen M. Kohn ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2023
Definitive and compulsively readable.
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Resources and advice for people considering becoming whistleblowers within their organizations.
Kohn, a lawyer and longtime champion of workers’ rights, cites a suite of new U.S. laws designed to help protect whistleblowers, including the Dodd-Frank Act, resulting in “stunning and almost unbelievable” success. Since 1986, corporations running afoul of the law have paid more than $100 billion in fines, which has had an enormous deterrent effect, saving an estimated $1 trillion, according to the 2022 Whistleblower’s Annual Report issued by the Security and Exchange Commission. Kohn notes that thanks to qui tam legislation, which entitles whistleblowers to a portion of the fines their employers incur (legislation that goes all the way back to 1779; a grateful Samuel Adams was compensated by Congress for his role in outing lawbreakers), the government has paid over $10 billion to employees. Qui tam, he writes, “puts teeth into the right of the people to expose fraud and misconduct,” and in these pages, he clarifies an array of detailed advice, “rules” for modern-day whistleblowers to follow in order to protect themselves. Kohn keeps these guidelines appealingly simple—“Be Confidential,” “Document, Document, Document,” “Don’t Tip Off the Crooks,” and so on. While the rules are unfailingly interesting, Kohn is even more fascinating when he addresses the doubts or insecurities potential whistleblowers might experience. He advises such candidates to consider whether they should risk covertly taping misconduct at work or if they might feel like they’ve betrayed their colleagues; he also recommends carefully drawing the distinction between whistleblowing and an employment dispute. Kohn is a vivid, authoritative guide, and it’s a testament to his narrative skill that he can make this niche subject so consistently gripping.
Definitive and compulsively readable.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781493072804
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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