Innehållsförteckning för September 16, 2013 från The Nation

Women’s Work…
 Seattle
 “On Leaning Out,” Ashley Nelson’s article [July 22/29] about the challenges and trade-offs working women face when they give birth, was a sad commentary on workers’ rights in this country. I was happy that she described the European approach to supporting women, which is light-years ahead of the United States.
 It is also important to point out why it is so critical for women to be home with their young children for their first few years. Research is increasingly clear that a constant maternal presence during early childhood—particularly up to age 2—is critical for a child’s growth into a mentally and physically healthy adult. This is not a happy message for feminists who value women’s economic independence over their roles as mothers. But the evidence grows that…

On Monday, August 12, the day Attorney
 General Eric Holder announced “a fundamentally new approach” to the criminal justice system in his speech before the American Bar Association in San Francisco, US District Court Judge Mark W. Bennett was in his office in Sioux City, Iowa, drafting a sentencing opinion in a drug case. An out­spoken critic of mandatory minimums [see “Imposing Injustice,” November 12, 2012], Bennett is known for writing unusual opinions that criticize the sentences he must often hand down. “It’s about trying to make the system fairer,” he says, “not just for the defendant in front of you, but for others.”
 The defendant in this case, a 37-year-old black man named Douglas Young, had caught a rare break. He’d pleaded guilty to two charges involving twenty-eight grams…

As the nation takes stock of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, I’m listening to a news program playing a recording of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking of peace and reconciliation and mountaintops to be crested. I’m also online, watching my screen blink with discussions about current events like the dismissal of a racial harassment suit against Paula Deen and the debate over New York’s stop-and-frisk policies. The decades-long span of unsolved issues and endless crises fills me with sadness and unease.
 According to a recent Pew poll, “Blacks were nearly three times as likely as whites to be living in poverty. And the median net worth of white households was 14 times the median net worth of black households.” But this disparate reality is felt very…

The tapir, dark brown and the size of a small cow, had been shot in the head and floated away dead before the hunters could retrieve it. Now the man at the helm of our outboard skiff, traveling up a muddy Ecuadorean river in the Yasuni National Park with some scientists from the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, has spotted the freshly killed animal. 
 A couple kilometers further upriver, we pass a hunting party of Indians. They have new clothes; one of the men wears a big watch; a woman in their party has a bright yellow dress; on their canoe sits a big new outboard engine. These are all signs that they are not local subsistence hunters, but outsiders in search of illegal bush meat to sell in the towns.…

David Lowery sets his much-praised drama of crime and romantic love, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, in a small-town Southern past that’s been run, for softening purposes, through the mythography machine. “This was in Texas,” reads the opening title; but when it was exactly, I’d be hard-pressed to say.
 Neither the vehicles nor the firearms do much to specify the period, the former being chrome-detailed six-seaters when new (and rattling, rusted-out trucks when not), the latter conforming to a traditionalist’s preference for revolvers and shotguns, with not an automatic in sight. At the local roadhouse, a crowd that’s modern enough to be interracial drinks to old-fashioned music of indeterminate vintage. Most touching of all these details of bygone folkways is the method that the story’s beautiful, tragic lovers use to correspond.…

The images filtering out of the eastern suburbs of Damascus on August 21 were horrifying. Uploaded by residents using cellphones and video cameras to YouTube and other social media, they depict hundreds of Syrian civilians victimized by a chemical weapons rocket barrage, writhing in pain, foaming at the mouth and dying, with no visible wounds of the sort that would arise from conventional weapons. Doctors Without Borders has confirmed over 300 killed and said the symptoms “strongly indicate” that neurotoxic agents were used. 
 As we go to press, a swelling chorus of condemnation, led by the Western powers and including the Obama administration, has laid blame for the attack squarely on the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The administration’s desire to uphold the inter­national convention banning the use of chemical…

In the run-up to Sochi, Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympics, the Kremlin is getting torched. An international chorus of critics has assailed the Russian government for enacting a law that bans any promotion of LGBT relationships, rights and issues wherever children might be present. Many protesters are calling for a global response. Opponents like actors Harvey Fierstein and Stephen Fry, among many others, have urged countries to boycott the Olympics. American author Dan Savage launched a popular #dumpRussianvodka campaign.
 There is a reason that everyone from Lady Gaga to President Obama has spoken out against Russia’s new anti-gay law: it is discriminatory and inhumane, and many people are desperate to do something—anything—to show solidarity with Russia’s LGBT community and help get the law repealed. Yet it’s not all that clear whether…

On the morning of February 1, anthony Marx, president and CEO of the New York Public Library, met with a group of business and political leaders who had assembled in a majestic room inside the 42nd Street library. Marx was introduced by a prominent Manhattan real estate developer, William Rudin. Near the end of his spirited presentation, Marx digressed from library policy and asked his audience to buy commercial real estate in the vicinity of Fifth Avenue and 40th Street—the location of the Mid-Manhattan Library, which the NYPL is determined to sell under its Central Library Plan (CLP), the core of which envisions a colossal, $300 million–plus transformation of the 42nd Street library by the architect Norman Foster. 
 The CLP has been the subject of mounting controversy for almost…

Avec Camus Comment résister à l’air du temps. By Jean Daniel. Gallimard. 153 pp. Paper €11.70. The Burden of Responsibility Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century. By Tony Judt. Chicago. 196 pp. Paper $17.50. Algerian Chronicles By Albert Camus. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Edited by Alice Kaplan. Harvard. 224 pp. $21.95. The Invention of Decolonization The Algerian War and the Remaking of France. By Todd Shepard. Cornell. 288 pp. Paper $24.95. Toward the end of his recent memoir, Jean Daniel, the last surviving friend of Albert Camus and the most distinguished journalist in France, permits himself an anecdote. It’s the summer of 1951, and Camus’s book-length essay The Rebel will soon be published. The writer has taken his mother to a party with friends in Paris. After dancing…

Back in 2000, while serving as US customs commissioner under President Bill Clinton, current New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly delivered a speech to the New York City Bar Association. Kelly had been the city’s police commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins from 1992 to 1994, and in his speech he criticized the NYPD for abandoning community policing and expanding the use of stop-and-frisk. “A large reservoir of good will was under construction when I left the Police Department in 1994. It was called community policing,” Kelly said, according to The New York Times. “But it was quickly abandoned for tough-sounding rhetoric and dubious stop-and-frisk tactics that sowed new seeds of community mistrust.” He attributed the decrease in crime not to these police tactics but to “social trends,” including a…

We talk a lot about restrictions on abortion that affect patients directly—twenty-week time limits, transvaginal ultrasounds, forced hearing of fetal heartbeats and many other cruelties. We talk some—not enough, but some—about unnecessary regulations intended to force clinics out of business. But except when there’s an actual murder, like that of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas in 2009, we pay little attention to the way anti-choicers wreak havoc on individual providers. This oversight makes it easier for the anti-choice movement to position itself as respectable and mainstream, interested only in methodically pursuing its legislative agenda. But the reality is that the country’s leading abortion opponents are the same unreconstructed fanatics they have always been.
 You would not think, for example, that a convicted clinic bomber would have a lot of traction…

On May 1, a familiar anti-abortion story line played out on Azteca 13, a popular television channel in Mexico. In the opening scenes of an episode of Lo Que Callamos Las Mujeres (What We Women Keep Silent), a Lifetime-like telenovela series about “real-life” stories, a pretty brunette with a heart-shaped face, Alondra, discovers she is pregnant when overtaken by a sudden bout of morning sickness. Her sister Sofía is concerned, but later that night, when Alondra’s boorish boyfriend comes home and she breaks the news, he asks if it’s his, then tells her to abort.
 Alondra complies and, in a series of hazy scenes, visits a clandestine abortion provider. But she’s haunted by what she has done, and is awoken at night by phantom baby cries that send her searching…

Architects have been tested immemorially by the question of where to draw the line, and the choices are not exclusively aesthetic. Because buildings have uses and frame and enable particular activities, their ethical aspect is inevitable by simple association. The connection can be fuzzy or clear. Bauhaus grads worked on the plans for Auschwitz, and someone thought hard about the ornamentation on the facade of the Lubyanka. This was unambiguously wrong. So too was the target of the first explicitly architectural demonstration I ever attended, which was organized by a group called the Architects’ Resistance. We marched in front of the headquarters of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, then at work designing a skyscraper in apartheid Johannesburg. The leaflet handed out suggested that somewhere upstairs was a draftsman designing two men’s…