Innehållsförteckning för December 2, 2013 från The Nation

Immodest Proposals
 Bryce Covert, in “‘Modest’ Demands” [Nov. 4], outlines five measures congressional Democrats should demand in order to play Republican-style hardball and boost the economy. They could also demand that all gun purchasers go through the federal background check system. After all, 90 percent of Americans are in favor of this. Michael Miller Jr. Philadelphia
 _________________________ As a retired physician, I agree with Bryce Covert that single-payer is what we all need and deserve (but I don’t think we will see it in this lifetime). And we need to realize that global warming is the great equalizer. The climate and 7 billion-plus humans (rapidly multiplying) may well take us in unexpected directions very soon. I think of The Hunger Games or The Road. BruceZ 
 _________________________ Of Skinheads and…

Ever since Edward Snowden disclosed that the National Security Agency was sweeping up massive amounts of personal data about all of us, without regard to whether we are suspected of terrorist acts or any other wrongdoing, Americans have justifiably expressed concern. Why exactly does the NSA need to know every time I have texted my teenage kids, my wife or my friends? It’s a reasonable question, and the NSA has yet to offer a satisfactory response. 
 But the questions all too often stop at the border. We demand to know why the agency is collecting “our” data. But what about its collection of “their” data? With respect to foreigners abroad, the law allows the NSA to collect not just metadata—the information about whom they’ve called and when—but much of…

Nineteen-year-old Renisha McBride was shot to death on November 2 while seeking help after a car accident in the mostly white city of Dearborn Heights, Michigan.
 The shooter has not yet been arrested or charged with any crime, despite McBride’s autopsy revealing that she was shot in the face. McBride’s family has met with officials from the area prosecutor’s office because they believe the shooting was racially motivated. “He killed my niece and he needs to pay for it,” Bernita Spinks, McBride’s aunt, said. “She went looking for help and now she’s dead.” 
 —Jamilah King Colorlines.com
…

“There is more to Senator Jack Kennedy,” the journalist Frederic W. Collins wrote in the April 4, 1959, issue of The Nation, “than a coiffure arranged, during his plastic years, by facing South in a strong East wind.” That early judgment—bemusement offset by a cautiously positive appraisal—marked our coverage for most of Kennedy’s abbreviated career. 
 But his assassination fifty years ago led the magazine to consider the deeper meanings of the JFK legacy: 
 “We had begun, under his maturing leadership, to cut back arms spending, to reduce some military commitments, to explore the possibilities for a gradual reduction of tensions—in a word, to make the great turn toward peace. John F. Kennedy will be remembered with affection and admiration for many fine qualities and achievements but above all…

Fractured Times Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century. By Eric Hobsbawm. Little, Brown. 336 pp. £25. I first read Eric Hobsbawm as a doctoral student in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) in the 1980s. I started with his books on popular protest, Primitive Rebels (1959) and Bandits (1969), before moving on to his trilogy on the ages, respectively, of revolution, capital and empire. In October 2012, when Hobsbawm died at 95, I happened to be in London. Curious to see how a historian of such enormous influence was remembered, I picked up every paper at the newsstand next to my hotel. The Guardian had a large photograph of Hobsbawm on the front page, a fulsome full-page obituary (by two writers associated with the Communist Party), and an editorial saying that his…

@KatrinaNation: So many women elected mayors tonight….sweet.
 @brentinmock: The economic orientation of de Blasio when compared to Bloomberg is as different as chalk from cheese.
 @JamilSmith: Disheartening to see the de Blasio family’s blackness and hair continuously written about like a novelty act, here to educate the masses.
 @JessicaValenti: Since the GOP is so concerned about later abortions, I’m looking forward to their plan to increase access to BC and early abortion.
 @aurabogado: Wow. Melissa Harris-Perry fought to not have the @MHPshow named after her. That was influenced by @bellhooks’s little b, little h.
 @LilianaSegura: On a personal note: co-editing our special pot issue was fun, rewarding & a wonderful way to depart this job I love. #FF 
@TheNation #PotWars
 letters@thenation.com…

It is not allowed to happen in Russia, or in Kazakhstan—but in the United States, children as young as 12 are allowed to toil on tobacco farms, whether it’s driving Dad’s tractor or picking leaves for R.J. Reynolds. Tobacco farming poses threats to their health thanks to heavy pesticide use and the possibility of acute nicotine poisoning, as Gabriel Thompson vividly describes in his special investigative report in this issue.
 The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 banned child labor in factories and mines, but racist Southern politicians ensured the existence of enough loopholes to keep black children working on the farm. Now it’s young migrants who often do those jobs. And as Mariya Strauss demonstrates in the second feature of our investigative report, it’s not just nicotine poisoning and…

At a September PTA meeting, Castle Bridge elementary school parents were told that the New York City Department of Education was imposing new standardized tests on their children in kindergarten through the second grade.
 The district purchased the tests to meet the state’s new teacher evaluation laws. The parents, appalled, opted for collective action. 
 A core group organized meetings, disseminated fact sheets and galvanized a spirited conversation at the next PTA meeting.
 By October 28, 
families of ninety-three of the ninety-seven students subject to the tests had opted out. Principal Julie Zuckerman then put her weight behind the families.
 The near-unanimous boycott, unprecedented in the city, is part of a growing test-resistance movement poised to reach new heights nationwide this academic year.
…

The air was heavy and humid on the
morning the three Cuello sisters joined their mother in the tobacco fields. The girls were dressed in jeans and long-sleeve shirts, carried burritos wrapped in aluminum foil, and had no idea what they were getting themselves into. “It was our first real job,” says Neftali, the youngest. She was 12 at the time. The middle sister, Kimberly, was 13. Yesenia was 14.
 Their mother wasn’t happy for the company. After growing up in Mexico, she hadn’t crossed the border so that her kids could become farmworkers. But the girls knew their mom was struggling. She had left her husband and was supporting the family on the minimum wage. If her girls worked in the tobacco fields, it would quadruple the family’s summer earnings.…

The War That Ended Peace The Road to 1914. By Margaret MacMillan. Random House. 739 pp. $35. The Sleepwalkers How Europe Went to War in 1914. By Christopher Clark. Harper. 697 pp. $29.99. Dance of the Furies Europe and the Outbreak of World War I. By Michael S. Neiberg. Harvard. 292 pp. Paper $18.95. As Europe’s great powers mobilized their armies in August 1914, many of their citizens and subjects were in denial. They were convinced that war had died out—at least among the “civilized” nations of Europe. “War is declared! Up to the last minute I would not believe it…. I thought that in our day and generation disputes were settled…without bloodshed,” wrote one observer. During World War II, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled that at the onset…

T he political and media elites obsessed only with Washington intrigue and the next presidential race thought New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s predictable re-election was the big story of the 2013 season. It wasn’t. The big story was a cross-country rejection of austerity 
 and an endorsement of the progressive populism that Democrats must embrace if they hope to prevail in 2014. Bill de Blasio’s 73 percent landslide in the New York mayoral race, in which he ran on a platform of building a more inclusive city by addressing income inequality and taxing the wealthy, was just the topline measure of a national trend. The new public advocate of New York is Letitia James, a progressive populist first elected to the City Council on the labor-backed Working Families Party line.…

Double Down, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s sequel to their 2010 bestseller Game Change, provides a near-perfect distillation of the mindset of what bloggers call “the Village.” Like Bob Woodward—their role model and only real competition when it comes to metaphorical shoe size—the double H’s make their own rules. They pay next to no attention to actual issues and none whatsoever to traditional methods of sourcing and evidence. They write sui generis sentences filled with made-up, often mixed-up words. And they burn their interviewees when it suits their needs and then threaten them with more of the same should anyone have a problem with that.* But because they have managed to create a franchise that sells gazillions of books and spawns HBO movies and makes many millions of dollars, they…

On October 21 in Dublin, an anonymous Facebook poster tipped off a news channel about a blond-haired, blue-eyed child living with a dark-skinned Roma family. The journalists alerted the police, who raided the home and took the 7-year-old girl away on a hunch—that hunch being the blood libel that Roma steal kids. The next day, seventy-five miles away in Athlone, a 2-year-old boy was removed from his Roma parents in similar circumstances. DNA tests proved both hunches wrong. Rumor and racism had taken the place of policing and journalism, resulting in immense trauma for both families.
 This panic was sparked by an incident in Greece a few days earlier, when a blond-haired 4-year-old girl, Maria, was found in the care of a dark-skinned Roma couple who turned out not to…

Michael Steele, a gregarious kid whose
friends sometimes called him Bubba, had recently shot up from chubby middle-schooler to a teen with a six-foot-three, 185-pound frame. For the last couple of summers, beginning when he was just 13, he had worked chopping wood, selling his garden vegetables and hauling hay for local farmers. Michael, who shared a home in the tiny town of Frankford, Missouri, with his mother and sister, had his eyes on a single goal. “He saved up all his money for a truck,” his mother, Dena Steele, told me. “He went from playing video games 24/7 to working all the time. Even when one of his friends or his girlfriend wanted to hang out, he told them, ‘No, I have to work.’”
 The truck Michael wanted was a…

Paolo Sorrentino starts off with a boom in the first scene of The Great Beauty, making you look down a cannon bore just before the charge explodes, and then begins the second by having you peer into the O of a woman’s mouth in mid-shout. Matched glimpses into two very loud, dark voids: one belonging to the daylight world of public gestures (a military ceremony at Rome’s Fontana dell’Acqua Paola) and the other to the nocturnal realm of semi-private revels (a feverishly crowded birthday party, held on an apartment terrace overlooking the Colosseum). Much music, ethereal or carnal, accompanies the elaborate scenes to which these two images belong. Many flights, lunges, glides and pokes of the camera in these sequences—an almost dialogue-free, thematic preamble to the narrative of The Great…