Currently, I am a lecturer at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, teaching speech and writing at a perennial top ten business school in America. I also teach speech to business students as an adjunct professor at Butler University in Indianapolis. Before teaching became my calling and my fulltime vocation, I spent thirteen years working for the State of Indiana, and twenty years as a contract lobbyist in the Indiana Statehouse.
I had already been a lobbyist for a few years before I became aware of the satirical story about lobbying. And while the satire is entertainingly ridiculous, the individual components are not all that different from real life. Lobbyists are faced with moral dilemmas so often that the consequences often become unnoticeable.
The story is less about what is technically known as “lobbying” but, more broadly, a better term that has since become popular in the age of social media known as “influencing.” It raises the moral dilemma issues so well that I have taught the story in my advocacy classes at Indiana University.
Nobody blows smoke like Nick Naylor. He’s a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies–in other words, a flack for cigarette companies, paid to promote their product on talk and news shows. The problem? He’s so good at his job, so effortlessly unethical, that he’s become a target for both anti-tobacco terrorists and for the FBI. In a country where half the people want to outlaw pleasure and the other want to sell you a disease, what will become of the original Puff Daddy?
I love this book because it is a classic example of how movements based on hate and evil can quickly take hold and spread. The parallels from 1920s Indiana to modern-day America jump out of this story about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
Egan’s meticulous research and storytelling paints a vivid picture of the moment and the surroundings of one of our nation’s darkest periods. It explains so many shortcomings about modern-day middle America that the eerily true account almost seems made up.
"With narrative elan, Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country—and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time." —Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile
“Riveting…Egan is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
There is an abundance of writing and rhetoric that points out instances of political success that lead to governmental catastrophe. None capture the current breakdown between politics and governing better than Michael Lewis did here.
As a former lobbyist and current political columnist, I try to connect how politics should be all about governing, but the electorate is drifting away from this hard truth.
The transition of the first Trump administration following eight years of Obama reveals the lack of preparedness or even care about the job of governing the new administration had. It foretells what America should have expected the second time around.
Michael Lewis's brilliant narrative of the Trump administration's botched presidential transition takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its leaders through willful ignorance and greed. The government manages a vast array of critical services that keep us safe and underpin our lives from ensuring the safety of our food and drugs and predicting extreme weather events to tracking and locating black market uranium before the terrorists do. The Fifth Risk masterfully and vividly unspools the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works.
I knew Lobianco (we call him T-Lo) when he was a reporter at the Indiana Statehouse for the Associated Press and the Indianapolis Star. His chronicle of Pence’s story from his youth in Columbus, Indiana, through his rise in Republican politics to his surprising pick to join the Trump ticket is fascinating.
The connection between the strategies and choices Pence made along the way shows a collection of moral bargaining that explains what we see in the former VP today. Hoosiers knew much of these stories in isolation, but the collection of them and the contextualizing of them in hindsight makes sense of the seemingly senseless things he did in his political life.
Social Security for Future Generations
by
John A. Turner,
This book provides new options for reform of the Social Security (OASI) program. Some options are inspired by the U.S. pension system, while others are inspired by the literature on financial literacy or the social security systems in other countries.
An example of our proposals inspired by the U.S. pension…
This is the story that made me want to be either a reporter or a whistleblower. The trail of this episode from the moments the break-in occurred at Watergate to the resignation of President Nixon show how complex corruption often is. “Getting to the bottom of it” is often never fully achieved in conspiracies, not only as large and sweeping as this one, but of countless others that are much smaller in scale.
Additionally, this is a great example of how the original decision to commit the first corrupt act leads to more and more of it until corruption defines the existence of men and women who started out with good intentions.
50th Anniversary Edition—With a new foreword on what Watergate means today.
“The work that brought down a presidency...perhaps the most influential piece of journalism in history” (Time)—from the #1 New York Times bestselling authors of The Final Days.
The most devastating political detective story of the century: two Washington Post reporters, whose brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation smashed the Watergate scandal wide open, tell the behind-the-scenes drama the way it really happened.
One of Time magazine’s All-Time 100 Best Nonfiction Books, this is the book that changed America. Published just months before President Nixon’s resignation, All the President’s Men revealed the…
There are small groups of people who decide how the American government works. OK, the group in Washington, D.C., is not small. But the one in your state usually is. Wherever your American town or state might be, there is a small group of people who run it. No one really chose them to run it; they just do.
In a story based on actual events, the lifestyle and evolution of Will O’Courtney, a typical lobbyist in the Indiana Statehouse, traces a path from a life of comfortable influence-peddling to mob-like intrigue. Indianapolis serves as any-town U.S.A. in this coming-of-age story of a middle-aged man looking to start over. And the love of a beautiful young woman gives him the reason he needs for his awakening.
