Innehållsförteckning för December 9, 2013 från The Nation

Trials and Designs On May 13, The Nation published Michael Sorkin’s appallingly inaccurate “The Trials of Rafi Segal,” which presented a dramatic tale of betrayal. However, the article has the facts backwards and the truth upside down and violated fundamental standards of journalism.
 Sorkin’s journalistic travesty recounted the tale of Rafi Segal, an Israeli architect, who was selected to be the “preferred architect” to design the Israel National Library, only to have the winning title and potential contract snatched away. According to Sorkin, Segal was betrayed by the competition sponsor, an Israeli foundation funded by the Rothschilds. Sorkin also blamed me personally for raising questions about the ownership of rights to the winning design. Sorkin called Segal’s disqualification the “narrowest (and phoniest) legalism” and claimed that Segal was “forced to…

It seems these days that whenever Mother Nature wants to send an urgent message to humankind, she sends it via the Philippines. This year the messenger was Haiyan (known in the Philippines as Yolanda).For the second year in a row, the world’s strongest typhoon barreled through the Philippines, Haiyan following on the footsteps of Pablo, aka Bopha, in 2012. And for the third year in a row, a destructive storm deviated from the usual path taken by typhoons, striking communities that had not learned to live with these fearsome weather events. 
 That it was climate change creating these super-typhoons was a message not just to Filipinos but to the whole world, whose attention was transfixed by the images of destruction and misery the storm left in its wake. The…

Despite near-apocalyptic objections from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, strong opposition from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf kingdoms, and criticism within the United States from neoconservatives, hawks and many members of Congress—and despite last-minute sabotage from France during the negotiating round that concluded on November 9 in Geneva—the United States, Iran and the rest of the P5+1 group of world powers are likely to strike an interim agreement over Iran’s nuclear program. That’s because President Obama and President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, who took office in August with a mandate to end Tehran’s isolation and strike a deal on the program, see an accord as in both countries’ interests. 
 The interim accord will give Iran modest but significant relief from economic sanctions in exchange for its agreement to…

On November 4, teachers across North Carolina led “walk-ins” rather than walking out to protest the General Assembly’s savage cuts to education this past legislative session.
 Teachers showed up early at school, wearing red for public education, greeting students and parents as they entered school buildings, and holding rallies and speak-outs against the cuts. 
 The youth leadership organization NC HEAT, or Heroes Emerging Among Teens, encouraged students to support their teachers by attending walk-in rallies and giving their teachers apples as statements of solidarity. 
 Students also arrived early to distribute literature about the plight of three North Carolina public high schools where teacher actions had been shut down by their administrations. 
 —Q. Wideman…

Memoirs of a Revolutionary By Victor Serge. New York Review Books. 521 pp. Paper $17.95. Victor Serge A Political Biography. By Susan Weissman. Verso. 406 pp. Paper $29.95. Post-Post-Soviet? Art, Politics & Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade. Edited by Marta Dziewanska, Ekaterina Degot and Ilya Budraitskis. Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw/Chicago. 332 pp. Paper $29. New Left Review 82 “Mexican Notebooks: 1940–1947.” By Victor Serge. Translated by Ros Schwartz and Trista Selous. In his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Victor Serge describes a 1927 visit to Grigory Zinoviev, a high-ranking Soviet official who had just been expelled from the Communist Party’s Central Committee. With his novelist’s eye for detail, Serge writes: 
 Zinoviev, in his small apartment in the Kremlin, feigned a…

Harvard scholar Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact With Hitler (Harvard/Belknap; $26.95), the product of exhaustive research in US and German archives, clearly intends to disturb readers with the force of its promised revelations. For me, though, there’s nothing in the book more unsettling than the banal fact that Adolf Hitler loved to watch movies before going to bed. He had a special fondness for American productions like Mickey Mouse cartoons and Laurel & Hardy comedies, and his underlings kept careful tabs on his responses, which fell into three categories: good, bad and “switched off.” Art doesn’t choose its audience, but of what value are good intentions when they provide comfort and joy to those who should only sleep badly? The Collaboration sounds a righteous lament about Hollywood’s inability to…

Is there autumn there, is there leaf smoke, is the air blued and mapled, oaked and appled and wined, is that tang, that ache for who knows? gone from your sweaters and hair? Are there trees even, do they break out in uncontrollable cold fires, do they shatter in long, unreal downstreamings, is October the same without them, is our sadness so river-and-wind swift, and so free, is it still our sharpest seeing, if we have not learned from them how to be taken apart, how to be blown away? Are clouds the same, are they still our clouds if leaves have never seethed against them on a tempestuous night, are they wild, is the moon the same if it has never wildly sailed through wild clouds, is there a…

@stevenjhsieh:
In America, you can get life without parole for siphoning gas, owning a crack pipe or shoplifting.
 @lhfang:
Got one of those canceled plans? Some would leave u on the hook for $285,936 in debt if you get sick. Some value. 
 @KatrinaNation:
At @thenation this am at edit meeting, @bradlander inspiring about what a de Blasio NYC could look like--competent progressive governance.
 @prisonculture:
For me, true justice will be when black lives are no longer seen as disposable.
 @RaniaKhalek:
Google news search for “haiyan looting” elicits 3,056 articles. In stark contrast, “haiyan climate change” brings up less than 60.
 @gzornick:
When you strip away horse-race stuff, big issue is Dems writ large have no answer for exploding inequality. So Warren makes them nervous.
 letters@thenation.com…

Gayle McLaughlin is serving her second term as mayor of Richmond, California, the first Green Party official to represent a city of more than 100,000. Last year, after
 a fire at a local Chevron refinery sent 15,000 residents to the hospital, the city sued the company for damages. Now McLaughlin’s advancing a plan to use the city’s eminent domain power to acquire troubled loans so as to stop a new wave of foreclosures. This interview has been edited and condensed. —Laura Flanders
 LAURA FLANDERS: You’re just back from Ecuador, where you toured communities that, like Richmond, are in a struggle with Chevron. Isn’t it enough to take on your city’s biggest taxpayer? Why take on the big banks too?
 GAYLE McLAUGHLIN: Chevron does pay a lot of taxes. We don’t…

For twenty years, the voices of New York’s normally raucous public haven’t been heard much in the halls of power. Giuliani shouted people down; Bloomberg wasn’t interested. But in the weeks since the election that swept Bill de Blasio and a swarm of progressives into office, something unusual has happened. The rumble of civic chatter that built during the election has continued—most notably in a vast tent in lower Manhattan.
 This tent is the centerpiece of Talking Transition, a fifteen-day experiment in participatory policy-making organized by ten foundations. (Think Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, North Star Fund, etc.) The purpose, said OSF’s Andrea Batista Schlesinger, is to demonstrate the power of public engagement and influence the incoming administration. The foundations have no formal connection to Team de Blasio, but they…

Searching for information on a New York–based journalist named “Albert Canus”—who the State Department claimed was filing “inaccurate reports which are unfavorable to the public interest of this country”—J. Edgar Hoover closely studied Hannah Arendt’s essay “French Existentialism” in the February 23, 1946, issue of The Nation. In it, Arendt explained the existentialists’ objections to bourgeois notions of l’esprit sérieux, or “respectability.” 
 “The ‘serious’ man is one who thinks of himself as president of his business, as a member of the Legion of Honor, as a member of the faculty…. For by doing so he agrees to the identification of himself with an arbitrary function which society has bestowed. L’esprit sérieux is the very negation of freedom, because it leads man to agree to and accept the necessary deformation…

The Blood Telegram Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. By Gary Bass. Knopf. 499 pp. $30. 1971 A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh. By Srinath Raghavan. Harvard. 358 pp. $29.95. Never have humanitarian interventionists been more visible in public life. Never have they been more embattled. In September, the martial drum beat had hardly faded from the air when the president’s foreign policy triumvirate—John Kerry, Samantha Power and Susan Rice—learned that they would be denied their splendid little strike against Syria. The public was against it. Congress was poised to vote it down. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought it was dangerous. It took the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, to concoct a way out of the impasse. Suddenly, Obama, Putin and Assad were tiptoeing…

The Undeserving Poor America’s Enduring Confrontation With Poverty. Second Edition. By Michael B. Katz. Oxford. 353 pp. Paper $19.95. The Other America Poverty in the United States. By Michael Harrington. Scribner. 237 pp. Paper $16. The Great Escape Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. By Angus Deaton Princeton. 376 pp. $29.95. Toward the end of last summer, Fox News aired a nine-minute segment featuring a 29-year-old surfer in La Jolla, California, named Jason Greenslate. Not only did Greenslate possess certain qualities that seemed designed to enrage the cable channel’s over-65 demographic—long hair, mirrored sunglasses, a languid grin—but this particular surfer dude also happened to receive $200 a month in food assistance, some of which he spent on sushi and fresh lobster. Footage showed Greenslate driving a black…

The Affordable Care Act began life as a compromise—a complicated and frustrating political calculation—and it is never easy to defend a compromise. But failure to do so at this critical stage in the rollout of the ACA will create
 a crisis not just for healthcare in America but for the notion that government can and should repair the breaches that threaten civil and humane society. 
 When President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress decided to expend political capital to address the absolute failure of the free market to provide affordable, readily available healthcare to tens of millions of working Americans, they took off the table the right response to the crisis—a single-payer, “Medicare for All” system. They believed the best reform was politically unachievable, so they cobbled together a…

In yet another blow to marijuana prohibition, the country’s largest civil rights organization, the NAACP, has come out in support of HR 1523—the Respect State Marijuana Laws Act. The uncommonly bipartisan bill, currently being considered by Congress, would further expand protections for states hoping to legalize or decriminalize marijuana. According to the NAACP, these “state level law changes will impact communities of color the most.” 
 —Von Diaz
 Colorlines.com
…

Just a few weeks ago, on the heels of the Tea Party’s disastrous shutdown of the government, pundits were predicting a sea change in American politics. Republicans were on the run, while Democrats were looking to recapture the House and revive a can-do, muscular liberalism. Oh, how things have changed! Now the conventional wisdom is that the various snafus in the rollout of Healthcare.gov have reversed the political dynamic. On Fox News, Charles Krauthammer and Bill O’Reilly crow about the “end of modern liberalism,” the New York Post declares an “Obamacare Overreach,” and Congressman Paul Ryan (who, as my colleague Lee Fang points out, once quietly requested Obamacare cash for his own district) brays on about how Americans are witnessing—and rejecting—“big government in practice.” Even mainstreamers like The New York…

If films were horses, almost no one would have placed even a $2 bet on Hannah Arendt, the recent biopic by the independent German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta. How did a film that reprises the fifty-year-old controversy about what the German-Jewish refugee and political philosopher thought and wrote in 1963 about the kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann become the most talked-about art-house movie of this past summer, and one of the most improbable independent-film successes in recent memory? There have been any number of movies about writers and artists, from Michelangelo to Truman Capote, made by directors of varying intellectual abilities in both Hollywood and Europe, but very few biopics made about intellectuals or philosophers. And with good reason: however wrongly, the lives of writers are thought to be…

The sea urchins star the sea floor like sunken mines from a rust-smirched war filmed in black and white. Or if they are stars they are negatives of light, their blind beams brittle purple needles with no eyes: not even spittle and a squint will thread the sea’s indigo ribbons. We float overhead like angels, or whales, with our soft underbellies just beyond their pales, their dirks and rankles. Nothing is bare as bare feet, naked as ankles. They whisker their risks in the fine print of footnotes’ irksome asterisks. Their extraneous complaints are lodged with dark dots, subcutaneous ellipses… seizers seldom extract even with olive oil, tweezers. Sun-bleached, they unclench their sharps, doom scalps their hackles, unbuttons their stench. Their shells are embossed and beautiful calculus, studded turbans, tossed…

A few years ago, the literary world was beset by a bogeywoman who came bearing bad news and the numbers to prove it; her name was VIDA. Some assumed this moniker was an acronym or a misspelled allusion to Virginia Woolf’s famous literary paramour, Vita Sackville-West, but it wasn’t. VIDA was an all-caps neologism that would come to haunt the dreams of editors of magazines large and small, eminent and less so, with your author, dear reader, included among those unsound sleepers. 
 “Veedah. Veeedaahh….”
 If you are an accredited member of the magazine world or else a vigilant fellow traveler, chances are that you already know about VIDA. You have heard of the Count, which tallies bylines by gender at publications that “are widely recognized as prominent critical and/or…