What We Are Reading Today: The Secrets of Silence by Shannon Malone Gonzalez

What We Are Reading Today: The Secrets of Silence by Shannon Malone Gonzalez
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Updated 04 October 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Secrets of Silence by Shannon Malone Gonzalez

What We Are Reading Today: The Secrets of Silence by Shannon Malone Gonzalez

In “The Secrets of Silence,” Shannon Malone Gonzalez investigates how the policing of black women is tied to the policing of their stories.

Over a period of four years, Malone Gonzalez conducted intimate life-history interviews with black women about their encounters, listening to those who had never shared their stories before, had never even been asked to, or had tried repeatedly to speak to those around them to no avail.

They all described the unspoken or whispered connections in the ways officers and communities socially control black women to put them “in their place.”


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life’ by Alexandre Lefebvre

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life’ by Alexandre Lefebvre
Updated 03 November 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life’ by Alexandre Lefebvre

What We Are Reading Today: ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life’ by Alexandre Lefebvre

Where do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism. Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was.

Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in “Liberalism as a Way of Life,” many of us are liberal without fully realizing it—or grasping what it means.

Misled into thinking that liberalism is confined to politics, we fail to recognize that it’s the water we swim in, saturating every area of public and private life, shaping our psychological and spiritual outlooks, and influencing our moral and aesthetic values—our sense of what is right, wrong, good, bad, funny, worthwhile, and more. 

This eye-opening book shows how so many of us are liberal to the core, why liberalism provides the basis for a good life, and how we can make our lives better and happier by becoming more aware of, and more committed to, the beliefs we already hold.