Kris Brown and Louisa Lim Episode 584

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As President of Brady, Kris Brown combines a lifelong background in policy, law, and grassroots activism with considerable strategic management expertise to help forge the direction of the organization’s programs and ensure the successful impact of its national and field assets. A veteran of gun violence prevention work, Ms. Brown started her career on Capitol Hill working for Rep. Jim Moran, advocating for the bill that would eventually become the groundbreaking Brady Bill requiring background checks on federally licensed gun sales. Ms. Brown has also served as the Chief Legal Officer to a publicly traded company based in Switzerland and as a lawyer practicing at the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. She lives in Arlington, VA, with her two teenage daughters. 

At Brady, she has helped shape the conversation on gun violence as a national health care crisis, launched the organization’s groundbreaking safe storage campaign to End Family Fire, and formed Brady’s Team Enough youth initiative after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Parkland, FL.

 

A noted speaker and media commentator, Ms. Brown was featured in the November 2018 TIME magazine cover article, “Guns in America,” in which she noted that Brady is working to move the discussion of gun violence beyond the polarizing politics in American life. “There’s a huge amount of common ground on this issue in this country and I hope we’re finally at a tipping point where we can move forward with legislation and [programs] that actually protect people, and are entirely consistent with the Second Amendment.”

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

Journalist Louisa Lim (The People’s Republic of Amnesia) mixes memoir and reportage in this riveting portrait of Hong Kong. Interweaving an up-close view of recent protests against Chinese rule with evocative details about Hong Kong’s colonial past, Lim contends that the 50-year term for “One Country, Two Systems”—the policy that was supposed to govern its 1997 transition from a British possession to a sovereign territory of China—has ended well ahead of schedule. She explains that Hong Kong officials were excluded in all but “an advisory capacity” from negotiations between Britain and China setting the rules for the handover, and documents how the steady erosion of freedoms led to the “Umbrella Movement” of 2014 (“an explosion of discontent, desire, and, above all, hope”) and widespread anti-government protests in 2019. Lim also explores Hong Kong’s multifaceted identity through profiles of residents including Tsang Tsou-choi, the “King of Kowloon,” a “toothless, often shirtless, disabled trash collector” who in the 1950s began covering government property with “misshapen, childlike calligraphy” claiming the British stole his family’s land: the entire Kowloon Peninsula. Conversations with protestors, many of whom were not yet born in 1997, convey their burning idealism as well as their growing sense of futility. The result is a vivid and vital contribution to postcolonial history. 

 

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