Innehållsförteckning för February 22, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Primary Lesson In its February 8 issue, The Nation endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, trading the cool impartiality of the sidelines for the chance to engage, directly and with vigor, in one of the most consequential Democratic nominating contests in recent memory. Hailing the senator’s “audacious agenda,” we embraced his “clarion call for fundamental reform” and the transformative integrity of his people-powered campaign. The Vermont senator, we wrote, “has summoned the people to a ‘political revolution’”—and transformed the 2016 election in the process. “Bernie Sanders and his supporters are bending the arc of history toward justice,” we concluded. “Theirs is an insurgency, a possibility, and a dream that we proudly endorse.” (The endorsement first appeared on The Nation’s website on January 14.) The Nation’s decision followed months of debate…

Mass movements start in the streets, marching to the steps of city halls and statehouses to speak truth to power. They open up debates, forcing elected officials to think anew and respond to demands for racial and economic justice, immigrant rights, fair elections, real democracy, and peace. Eventually, however, those who are making the demands realize that they can and should be setting the policies. That sentiment is expressed in presidential politics by Bernie Sanders’s talk of a transformative political revolution. And in congressional districts across the country, some of America’s most ardent activists and deepest thinkers are entering the fray. A chorus of new women’s voices could change the House. The next Elizabeth Warrens are running for Congress. Some are actually stepping out of academia, as Warren did in…

Is it wrong for women Democrats to want to vote for a woman Democrat? In primaries, I’ve always voted for the candidate I thought was more progressive, regardless of sex. In New York’s 1992 Senate primary, I voted for Bob Abrams over Liz Holtzman or Geraldine Ferraro. In 2008, I supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. In 2013, I voted for Bill de Blasio over Christine Quinn for New York City mayor. Way back in the distant past, there were times that I didn’t support a woman Democrat in the general election energetically, even though I voted for her, because she wasn’t left enough for me. At the time, those votes looked highminded and principled and based on a careful examination of the issues and the candidates’ records, but I…

“Prior restraint” used to be a fairly well-defined concept, particularly in the area of First Amendment jurisprudence. It was generally accepted that we don’t punish ideas—what someone reads or says or thinks-unless they threaten to depart the realm of mere ideas, becoming a “clear and present danger.” There are two significant forces converging to compromise that settled law, both in the United States and abroad. The first is the rise of fear about terrorism across the globe. The second is the enormously complex communicative power of the Internet. Many of us in the legal academy have spent the last few decades of the so-called culture wars debating the definition of “dangerous speech” in the traditional media and the new forms of social media. Those debates have largely been focused on…

THE DAWN OF 2016 IS NOT A HAPPY TIME TO BE an executive in the fossil-fuel industry. Like Gulliver, who awakens to find his limbs and trunk tied down by the tiny but industrious Lilliputians, the industry is under assault on many fronts at once, and it’s not clear whether it can free itself. Economically, the prices for oil, coal, and natural gas have been falling, even as production costs remain high. Industry stocks are tumbling, and small and large companies alike are going out of business. Arch Coal, one of the largest coal companies in the United States, declared bankruptcy on January 11. Outside investors are wary or fleeing. Many are embracing solar and wind energy, drawn by plummeting costs that have driven stratospheric growth and market penetration worldwide.…

I’ve been waiting for years for Vladimir Sorokin’s second novel, Norma (The Norm), to appear in English translation. It wasn’t published in the author’s native Russia until 1994, a decade after Sorokin finished it, so perhaps there’s hope yet. The book, by all accounts, is a series of vignettes linked by a moment in each when a character unwraps his or her ration of a substance called “the norm.” It stinks and tastes awful. Children especially hate it, but they, like everyone else, swallow their daily dose. It’s shit, of course, actual human excrement—a pungent symbol of the requisite humiliations of the Soviet system and, perhaps, of life in any oppressive collectivity. Ours included. A small chunk (of the novel, that is) appeared in the first issue of n+1, in…

It is little less than astonishing that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders—a politician who, not long ago, was widely branded as almost irrelevant, a marginal gadfly from the left—secured a virtual tie with establishment favorite Hillary Clinton in the Iowa Democratic primary. There is no longer any question that Populist Fire in Iowa the Sanders movement—led not so much by the candidate but by the thousands of young people who first turned out for his rallies and are now turning out to vote—is transforming the Democratic race. Indeed, Clinton eked out a razor-thin victory in Iowa because she veered left and finished her campaign with calls for wage hikes to address income inequality and new taxes on the rich—what The Des Moines Register referred to as “populist fire.” But the result…

JOB CREATOR Washington State Senator Pramila Jayapal was able to earmark $5.3 million in funding to ensure that women and people of color get support for apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs as part of the state’s transportation package. EDUCATION EQUALITY Jayapal also drafted a successful budget proviso that requires all of the state’s public schools to provide adequate interpretation and translation to parents who speak only limited English. WARRIOR FOR WOMEN Former Nevada State Assembly member Lucy Flores introduced a bill, since passed into law, that allows domesticviolence victims to break their lease in order to escape an abuser. Flores spoke in favor of the bill from experience, after having to move repeatedly in her 20s when an abusive ex-boyfriend stalked her. IMMIGRANT-FRIENDLY Flores also co-sponsored a bill, since passed into…

Dear Liza, I’m actually asking this for a (former) friend with benefits. This is the question I imagine he would ask you: “I’m getting the message from a friend (with benefits) that I’m kind of sexist as a lover. Could this be true? Or is it because she’s been dating women for the past two decades and just doesn’t understand things between men and women? She said I implied that going down on a woman was asking more than going down on a man. She also felt that our conversations focused much more on my problems and interests than hers. Eventually I stopped sleeping with her, because I could tell she thought I was deficient in so many areas! Could you make a quiz that I could use to objectively judge whether I am or am not sexist in my…

In this issue, Barry Schwabsky, The Nation’s art critic since 2009, reviews a new book of essays about Lawrence Alloway, The Nation’s art critic from 1963 to 1971. In our August 2, 1971, issue, Alloway wrote about the Guggenheim Museum’s last-minute decision not to exhibit a controversial piece by Hans Haacke titled Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System. (It’s now at the Whitney; Schwabsky and Nation architecture critic Michael Sorkin both discussed the piece in their reviews of the museum’s new building, and in a subsequent exchange of letters, last year). Alloway, a former Guggenheim curator, wrote of the museum’s director, Thomas M. Messer: “[He] has decided that the Guggenheim is a citadel to be defended. He has forgotten or discounted the existence of a…

Des Moines, Iowa I had a premonition that Donald Trump would lose Iowa while listening to him talk in a halfempty Waterloo auditorium the morning of the caucus. He was low-energy, his crowd was low-energy, and I didn’t understand the choice of Adele’s plaintive “Rolling in the Deep”—“We could have had it a-a-allllllll“—as his walk-up music. But the truth is I should have suspected it on Saturday morning, when Senator Ted Cruz packed an Ames Hotel ballroom with parents and kids and showed off his high-profile evangelical support. In Iowa, endorsements matter; organization matters. In the end, it seems Trump had little of either, and Cruz had it all. COMMENT Cruz was endorsed by four conservative heavyweights: Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell; Family Leader CEO Bob Vander Plaats; anti-immigrant…

Linda McMahon, a Republican, was on the Connecticut State Board of Education, but she was far more popular as the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. Alas, that popularity didn’t translate into votes, as McMahon lost the 2010 Connecticut Senate election with only 39 percent of the women’s vote, as opposed to Richard Blumenthal’s 60 percent. Despite pouring $140 million of her own fortune into her campaign for governor, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, also a Republican, lost the women’s vote—and thus the gubernatorial race—by 16 percent. In 1998, Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln became the youngest woman ever elected to the US Senate. In 2010, she lost the women’s vote by 16 percent, denying her a third term. Christine Quinn garnered just 16 percent of the women’s vote, compared to Bill…

June 13, 2015 Texas Governor Greg Abbott signs Senate Bill 11, the socalled “campus-carry” law. October 7, 2015 The Daily Texan reports that economics professor emeritus Daniel Hamermesh will withdraw from his teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin when the bill goes into effect, citing classroom-safety concerns. December 10, 2015 A 19-member working group established by UT-Austin president Greg Fenves recommends that guns be banned in various locations, including residence halls, some campus laboratories, and counseling and medical facilities. January 25, 2016 Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize­ winning physicist and UT-Austin professor, announces at a faculty council meeting that he will ban guns from his classroom. August 1, 2016 SB 11 will go into effect at all four-year state colleges and universities in Texas. August 24, 2016…

No literary genre is more ephemeral than art criticism. Mostly that’s a blessing, but sometimes writing of genuine value disappears from view. The 1960s and ’70s were years of tremendous vitality for American art criticism, as they were for American art. Yet today, when writers mention the debates of those days, they often focus on a handful of voices: Donald Judd, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, maybe some late grousings from Clement Greenberg as his pen was running dry. The criticism of many others seems to have been unjustly forgotten. Among them I would have counted, until recently, Lawrence Alloway, who wrote regularly for this magazine between 1968 and 1981. To me, he remains the great intellectual resource among the art writers of that period, so I am happy to point…