Indholdsfortegnelse for April 25-May 2, 2016 i The Nation

@thenation.com Monday Elation I am thrilled to my very coreTo see The Nation at the door.No better way to start the weekThan to read the news that I seekFrom such an informed, friendly source. What a wonderful new resource! DON WIGAL NEW YORK CITY Newsroom Blues A soon-to-be-former colleague passed me Dale Maharidge’s piece on the state of journalism [“Written Off,” March 21]. It’s extremely timely, especially for me today. Comforting in that I know I’m hardly alone, but scary because I’m not sure the journalism we knew coming up in the business is ever coming back. As one of your subjects suggested: There’s just no profit margin anymore in sending reporters to the City Council meeting, or letting one reporter spend two weeks (or longer) on a single story.…

Can Ryan Hughes get lightning to strike a second time? A month before the Michigan primary, polls showed Hillary Clinton ahead of Bernie Sanders by around 30 points. Yet when the votes were counted, Sanders scored a stunning upset that kept his campaign’s hopes alive and sent Hughes, his Michigan state director, to Pennsylvania, where the most recent poll before the April 26 primary gives Clinton a 25-point lead. “We’re going to be competitive here,” Hughes promises when we meet for a drink in Philadelphia’s Center City. It’s only his third day in the state, and he’s been constantly on the move, from Scranton—where the campaign opened its first office on March 22—to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and points in between. “Why Scranton?” I ask, since the town is associated more with…

Last month, the International Energy Agency released data on global energyrelated carbondioxide emissions in 2015, finding that they remained essentially the same—at 32.1 billion tonnes—as 2013 and 2014 emission levels. “The new figures confirm last year’s surprising but welcome news: we now have seen two straight years of greenhouse gas emissions decoupling from economic growth,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol said of the data. Here are some more numbers from the IEA’s 2015 findings: 90% New electricity generated worldwide from renewables 1.5% Decline in CO2 emissions from China 70% Chinese electricity generated from coal, down 10% since 2011 2% Decline in CO2 emissions from the United States 28% US electricity generated from low-carbon sources, up from 19% in 2011…

The members of the elite mainstream media came in for some harsh, extremely public criticism recently, and all indications are that they did not appreciate it. The speaker complained that most political reporters do not “dig deeper” or “demand more” of our politicians. He insisted that the electorate would be better served “if billions of dollars in free media came with serious accountability.” This is particularly true, he noted, when reporters know the politicians can’t keep the promises they make. And yet because the press fails to ask “tough questions,” voters take these leaders at their word. “When people put their faith in someone who can’t possibly deliver on his or her promises, that only breeds more cynicism,” the speaker said. He also wondered why reporters appeared to care so…

“The hot sun of Havana casts black shadows,” the journalist Lewis Gannett wrote in these pages when Calvin Coolidge made a presidential visit to Cuba in January 1928. “The narrow old streets are jammed with big American automobiles…. The sea is incredibly blue.” Gerardo Machado, a general in Cuba’s War of Independence, had established an iron grip on power and “shown what fate opposition will meet. President Coolidge’s phrase that Cuba’s ‘people are…free, prosperous…and enjoying the advantages of self-government’ was almost 100 per cent false.” A year earlier, Machado had visited New York, where J.P. Morgan & Co. honored him with a lunch. “The wealth of foreigners in Cuba must and will be protected,” Machado told the assembled bankers. No wonder, as Gannett wrote, that Cubans believed the US government…

In the spring of 2008, a graduate student named matthewDesmond began renting a trailer in a mobile-home park on the south side of Milwaukee. Like much of the south side, the park’s population was predominantly poor and white, with an outsize number of its residents addicted to drugs or working as prostitutes. After four months, Desmond moved to an equally impoverished, predominantly black neighborhood on the north side of Milwaukee, into a duplex bordering an alley covered in gang graffiti. Unlike most of his neighbors, Desmond didn’t live in these places because he had no better options. He was an ethnographer interested in studying the dynamics of eviction, a familiar ritual at his fieldwork sites, where movers arrived seemingly every day to dump the possessions of another evicted tenant on…

ACROSS 1 Lip-read to provide all the parts of a solid (14) 10 Howard going after laughable, unopened letter (7) 11 A vote in favor of packing a knife in school (7) 12 Bigot with a pronounced aversion to Buddhists or warrior princesses, depending on whom you talk to? (9) 13 Don is still in bed, after coming back (3,2) 14 Bag of wine (4) 16 Hearts, perhaps, can be seen in officer’s uniform? (5,4) 18 Feverish Republican, having gone crazy, is a militarist (9) 19 A bro’s counterpart, flaws and all (2,2) 22 Clergy’s fate is in church (5) 23 Conga-line dancing is nice (9) 26 Engineer a tinier sloth (7) 27 Rest uncomfortably after turning over throw pillow (7) 28 Par for the course, like The Man Who…

Anyone looking for a political revolution knows that it’s going to take more than a presidential nominee—and more than a president—to remake the Democratic Party as a force capable not just of overcoming right-wing opposition, but also of securing economic and social justice. The results of Wisconsin’s April 5 primary, which gave Bernie Sanders the latest in a string of critical wins, will keep attention focused on the presidential primary, which now takes Sanders and Hillary Clinton to New York and, ultimately, to California. But progressives cannot focus on this race alone. They must use their votes—and their organizing skills—to elect a new generation of inside/outside activists who understand that their politics will be shaped in committee rooms and in the streets. One of the first tests comes on April…

Dear Liza, Should I quit my job as a prosecutor for the Department of Homeland Security (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and work for a nonprofit at half the salary? I hate myself for the work I do, but I’m a single mom with three kids. Right now I’m paying one son’s college tuition and am $40K in debt for my other son’s tuition. And I have a 13-year-old coming up. —Down (or Out) at DHS Dear Down (or Out), Don’t hate yourself! Instead, hate the system that forces many of us to do horrible things to support ourselves and our kids. I do, however, think you can make choices that would be better for you, your children, and the world. For readers unfamiliar with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it’s an…

At right, Laila Lalami dissects the conservative obsession with “political correctness,” particularly how the term is used to delegitimize critics of the right’s hateful nonsense. In an October poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University, researchers found that Americans seemingly agree that political correctness has run amok. Q: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: A big problem this country has is being politically correct. 68% People who agree 27% People who disagree 81% Republicans who agree 62% Democrats who agree However, when researchers tweaked the question, they got a markedly different response. Q:Donald Trump said recently: A big problem this country has is being politically correct. Do you agree or disagree with him? 53% People who agree (–15%) 41% People who disagree (+14%) 80% Republicans who agree (–1%) 36%…

Observations By Marianne Moore. Edited by Linda Leavell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 119 pp. Paper $16. On February 29, 1988, John Ashbery gave a poetry reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, dc: The room was packed. Coincidentally, the Folger had mounted “Marianne Moore: Vision Into Verse,” an exhibition including an array of clippings and photographs that Moore includes in her poems—most prominently in “An Octopus,” the longest poem in her 1924 volume Observations. Speaking from the podium, Ashbery called “An Octopus” the most important poem of the 20th century; and while the remark provoked a few titters, he was reiterating a conviction that was neither novel nor idiosyncratic. “Despite the obvious grandeur of her chief competitors,” he’d written two decades earlier, in a 1967 review of Moore’s Complete…

20,000 Peak population of Pennsylvania’s steel-producing MonongahelaRiver Valley (circa 1930) 2,150 Population in 2013 15104 The zip code for Braddock, Penn., tattooed on the arm of Mayor John Fetterman, now a candidate for the US Senate 9 The number of gun deaths during his time in office, also tattooed on Fetterman’s arm “When Sanders ran, that opened up a level of awareness in this state that the issues I care about can make a viable campaign.” John Fetterman, the mayor of Braddock, Penn., on why he’s running for the US Senate…

T he publishers of the print weekly The Indy-pendentare now raising funds for a onetime paper dubbed The Battle of New York. As a Nation reader, you may be feeling the Bern. New York’s April 19 primary will be hotly contested, especially after a TV debate in Brooklyn between the two candidates. Can Bernie Sanders pull off a win in the state that Hillary Clinton represented in the Senate? According to the aspiring publishers of The Battle of New York, “It can happen.” The paper will feature “information and analysis from prominent voices,” along with “original art and photography” delivered by “a proven design team. It will provide a practical, compelling and interactive means of demonstrating the surge of support” for Sanders “among those under 40. It will include a…

Eric Alterman, at right, discusses President Obama’s recent comments about the mainstream media. Obama thinks that journalists should dig deeper, while the journalists take umbrage at advice from a president whose administration has resisted transparency and prosecuted whistleblowers. But journalists have suffered a worse blow than secretive public officials: the decline of the newspaper industry. The replacement of newspapers with online content mills has resulted in the layoffs of serious investigative reporters for young, social-media-savvy “content producers.” As Dale Maharidge reported in our March 21 issue, “The term ‘seismic shift’ is overused, but it applies to what’s happened to American newspapers. In 2007, there were 55,000 full-time journalists at nearly 1,400 daily papers; in 2015, there were 32,900, according to a census by the American Society of News Editors and…

To hear some people tell it, there is no greater threat to the Republic at the moment than political correctness. It forces dissenters to cower before views they would ordinarily reject, out of fear that they will be labeled as bigots. It thwarts attempts at finding common-sense solutions to the country’s problems. It stifles open debate and free inquiry. So negative has the term become that no one is ever heard saying, “I’m proud to be politically correct.” Admitting to political correctness is tantamount to admitting that there are limits on one’s speech and, by implication, on one’s thoughts. Conversely, refusing to bow to standards of respect demanded by various groups is supposed to convey a deep commitment to unadorned truths. What truths are so sorely missing from our national…

Baltimore It’s a saturday morning in early March, and a multiracial group of Unite Here Local 7 members are playing an organizing game. Split into three teams, they’re trying to figure out why sky-high hotel prices in some cities don’t translate into higher wages for hotel workers. (Hint: Low-wage cities like Baltimore don’t have strong unions.) The crowd is laughing and arguing as Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards slips into the room. “Shhh… No!” she says, when a union staffer offers to bring her to the front to speak. Instead, Edwards joins a raucous team—cooks at Camden Yards, croupiers at the Horseshoe Casino, and housekeepers at the pricey Harbor hotels—as they try to figure out which US city has the highest-paid hotel workers. (It turns out to be New York.) Only…

IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 2011, Samar Yazbek, an outspoken Syrian writer and journalist in Damascus from a prominent Alawite family, kept a diary of the first hundred days of what soon became her country’s civil war. The diary became a book, A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, which describes in grave, essential detail what it was like to be forced into exile as protesters were being rounded up, tortured, or shot in the streets. Condemned by security officials as a traitor for backing the protests and, in their eyes, abandoning her sect—the Alawites are an offshoot of Shia Islam to which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and many others in his regime belong—Yazbek fled with her daughter to France. Her new book, The Crossing: My…