Innehållsförteckning för September 30, 2013 från The Nation

Pot Calls Kettle Pervert
 New York City
 JoAnn Wypijewski accurately portrays Christine Quinn as a tool for the real estate lobby and a shameless opportunist [“Carnal Knowledge,” Aug. 19/26], but to suggest that Anthony Weiner’s pathological behavior is akin to a sexual preference that will one day be tolerated is ludicrous. It is OK for a woman to prefer to have sex with another woman, so long as she does not post her genitalia on Twitter for women half her age while in a committed relationship, then lie about it for a week, do it again right before deciding to run for mayor and finally compare herself to Nelson Mandela, as Weiner did. A candidate being criticized for untrustworthy behavior by a rival who happens to be a lesbian is…

By claiming for weeks that “doing nothing” is the only alternative to a “limited” military response to the Assad regime’s reported use of chemical weapons in Syria—plainly stated, an illegal American war against a nation that has not threatened the United States—the Obama administration has continued Washington’s post–Cold War disdain for diplomatic solutions to international crises. It has done so in the same triumphalist, America-as-indispensable-nation spirit that inspired the Clinton administration’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the Bush White House’s disastrous war in Iraq, both carried out without a UN mandate and over Russia’s protests.
 But the Russian foreign minister’s September 9 proposal to put Assad’s chemical weapons under international control makes clear that a diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis is eminently possible. President Obama called the initiative…

Here’s a little window into poverty, American-style. According to a Yale University study published in August in Pediatrics magazine, almost 30 percent of low-income women with children in diapers can’t afford an adequate supply of them, with Hispanic women and grandmothers raising grandchildren the most likely to be in need. Some women are forced to make one or two nappies last the whole day, emptying them out and putting them back on the baby. Based on a survey of almost 900 low-income women in and around New Haven, Connecticut, investigators found the lack of diapers—such a simple thing—had profound and complex effects. The risks to children’s health are obvious: rashes, urinary tract infections, painful chafing. (If a mom is too poor to afford diapers, she probably can’t afford diaper cream…

“We’ve found through our experience
that timid supplications for justice will not solve the problem,” declared the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 as he announced the civil rights movement’s pivot toward the economic justice message of the Poor People’s Campaign. “We’ve got to massively confront the power structure.” 
 With those words, King spoke a language every bit as American as his “I Have a Dream” message of four years earlier. There are times for optimism and hope, and there are times for acknowledgment of an overwhelming challenge and the radical demand that it be addressed. Often they merge, and in these moments, great movements fundamentally redirect the nation. Tom Paine knew that. So did Frederick Douglass, and Jane Addams, and A. Philip Randolph. There is a rich American…

Blood of the Liberals By George Packer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 405 pp. $26. The Unwinding An Inner History of the New America. By George Packer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 434 pp. $27. Cotton Tenants Three Families. By James Agee, with photographs by Walker Evans. The Baffler/Melville House. 224 pp. $24.95. In his 2000 memoir, Blood of the Liberals, George Packer mentions a post-collegiate encounter with one of his Yale classmates, a young right-wing pundit who had hired Packer—then dividing his time in Boston between carpentry jobs at construction sites and volunteer stints at a downtown homeless shelter—to build him a bookshelf. This was the mid-1980s, and the conservative was a young man in a hurry, tacking confidently into the post-liberal zeitgeist. He was “an apologist for radical laissez-faire economics…

Barack Obama was absolutely right to announce, in his September 10 address to the nation, that he had asked
Congress to postpone a vote to authorize the use of force against Syria. In seizing the diplomatic path out of the crisis offered by Russia, Obama was accepting the fact that Moscow had achieved an important breakthrough. Russia’s proposal, and Syria’s positive response, have already accomplished more than even the most optimistic predictions regarding the outcome of a US military strike: not only has Syria acknowledged, for the first time, that it possesses chemical weapons; it has offered to give them up entirely and to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention as well. 
 Of course the Assad regime could renege or stall on this offer, and the difficulties of impounding such weapons…

Abu Shihab recalls when armed police officers in full riot gear barged into his cramped apartment and led him away in handcuffs, along with a dozen other Syrian refugees. “They were dressed like they were ready for a war,” he says.He stands in the sun-washed courtyard of Masaken Othman, a cluster of cracked reddish-brown residential buildings rising from the dust in Cairo’s desert outskirts. Trash and car tires float in fetid green water seeping from a drainpipe onto the sand.
 Abu Shihab arrived with his wife and children in May, fleeing his hometown of Hama after his 12-year-old son was killed in an airstrike by the Assad regime. They now live in this isolated apartment complex alongside some 240 other families, among an unprecedented wave of Syrians who have fled…

Sandy Nurse seemed to have lost what tolerance she once had for long meetings. Even though the basement of the DeKalb Library in Brooklyn was air-conditioned on an especially sticky July day, and even though the meeting’s agenda was only partly finished, she told the handful of other eco-activists there that she was sorry, but she had to go build some compost bins, and she left.
 Nurse never really looked all that happy in meetings. As one of the earliest members of Occupy Wall Street’s Direct Action Working Group—as well as one of the last—she attended a lot of them, including a lot of quite horrible ones. She could often be seen sitting at the far end of the oblong circle, away from the fray but guiding it nonetheless with…

Remember Schizopolis? Probably not, and why would you? It had a quietly disastrous premiere in 1996 at the Cannes Film Festival, where seven years earlier its mastermind, a self-taught, 26-year-old filmmaker, had won the Palme d’Or for his first feature-length work, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Accepting his prize, the newly anointed godfather of American independent cinema looked out across the crowd, paused and said, “Well, I guess it’s all downhill from here.” In a way, he was proven right by Schizopolis, a masochistic, quasi-autobiographical sketch-comedy psychodrama about a married couple’s communication breakdown. 
 At the beginning, the writer/director, Steven Soderbergh, who is also the film’s star, steps onto a stage to deliver a warning of sorts:
 A riff on Cecil B. DeMille, the grandstanding speech is intended as a deadpan…

“Unapologetically progressive”—two words spoken all too rarely by triumphant candidates in major electoral contests these days—were among the first pronounced by Bill de Blasio as he celebrated his inspiring win in the first round of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on September 10. At this writing, a runoff with rival Democrat Bill Thompson is still possible, though the moderate, affable African-American former comptroller trailed the liberal public advocate from Park Slope—whom this magazine endorsed—by 14 points (losing by an even larger margin in black-majority districts). Running a distant third was City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a practiced political player who tied her fortunes to that of the city’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg.
 And indeed, while Bloomberg’s name was not on the ballot, his shadow loomed over the race. De…

Ever since the release of A Nation at Risk, in 1983, the government report issued by Ronald Reagan’s
National Commission on Excellence in Education, which warned of the threat posed by the declining academic performance of American students, the United States has been in a period of perpetual education “reform.” Education policy has been characterized by a series of sweeping initiatives that politicians claim will transform our schools and propel our children from mediocrity to the top of the heap in academic performance. 
 The new Common Core academic standards adopted by forty-five states and Washington, DC, are just the latest version of “silver bullet” reforms promoted as cure-alls for what ails American education. According to its advocates, the Common Core will dramatically lift standards and boost the academic performance of…

 In late August, while many models were hustling from casting to casting in hopes of landing gigs at New York Fashion Week, a handful were gathered in an auditorium elsewhere in Manhattan, listening to supermodel Anne Vyalitsyna recount her dicey, unsupervised years as a teen model. After being plucked from Russia at the age of 15, Vyalitsyna says, she was tempted with “partying, alcohol and men” and was asked to pose nude. She feels it is easy for young models to go the “wrong way,” but she is one of the lucky ones: “My story is an exception, I feel like; it’s not the rule,” she insists, having landed covers of Vogue, Elle and Glamour and been featured in nine issues of Sports Illustrated. Perhaps most impressive, she is still…

Modern warfare changed on a Harvard soccer field in the summer of 1942. On July 4 of that year, Louis Fieser, head of the National Defense Research Committee’s “Anonymous Research Project No. 4,” flipped a switch, triggering a white phosphorous explosion inside a bomb filled mostly with jellied gasoline. The use of flame in war had been on the decline since the spread of gunpowder in the thirteenth century, but Fieser showed that with napalm, planes could drop sticky fire from the sky. 
 As described by Robert Neer in Napalm: An American Biography (Belknap/Harvard; $29.95), the innovation depended on taxpayer money and academic know-how, and required the fervent corporate desire for more products to sell. To ensure that napalm would have the desired effect, its architects emptied entire villages…