The Nation December 23-30, 2013

Cannabis: Hemper Fidelis
 Our special issue on pot, “Dope and Change” [Nov. 18], despite occasioning some canceled subscriptions, epithets (“childish,” “deplorable,” “dishonest,” “irresponsible”) and a cry of outrage (“a whole issue on marijuana? This is not news”), was highly popular: “makes good sense,” “long overdue,” “appreciated,” “thank you for your excellent issue on the marijuana law insanity.” Said “Don Quixokie” of Tulsa, “I am pleased with the way society is moving on the marijuana issue, but I fear the government won’t be joining us for another generation. Don’t hold your breath—
unless you’ve taken a big drag.” Your letters and comments follow. —The editors
 _________________________ What were your editorial writers smoking when they wrote that pot-smoker George W. Bush was “elected” president? 
 RICK BAUM Oakland, Calif. _________________________ Thank you for…

@chrislhayes The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon tradition must look deeply bizarre and perverse to people in other countries, future observers.
 @RichardKimNYC Low wages>low prices >low wages>low prices. The #BlackFriday vicious circle.
 @WorkingAmerica There is no economic excuse for Walmart’s low wages. They can pay a living wage and meet obligations to shareholders. #WalmartStrikers 
 @fightfor15 A very special happy holiday to @WholeFoods workers who won today off by going on strike. Collective action gets the goods.
 @JessicaValenti Sex is a vital piece of people’s lives, health and happiness—wanting to have it without fear of pregnancy is moral & just #HandsOffMyBC
 @JillFilipovic A Thing Everyone Should Know: Hobby Lobby insurance used to cover birth control. Then Obamacare became an issue & they pulled coverage.
 letters@thenation.com…

One of the greatest challenges facing American education today is a fantasy, spun by billionaire-funded “think tanks” and often repeated uncritically by
politicians and pundits, that our schools are failing, that teachers are shirking their responsibilities and that unions are
 the root of the problem. Unfortunately, the peddlers of these distortions have held the microphone for so long that the word “reform” is now associated with the crudest assaults on the very infrastructure of public education.
 It’s not that reform isn’t called for. Schools are beset with difficulties, mostly born of the inequalities rampant in the larger society. But, as ought to be obvious, education reform must be in the public interest—on behalf of public schools and the children who attend them—rather than private interests, furthering “the corporate agenda for public…

Before coming here this evening, I thought to say something about what is lately on my mind—what is on all our minds, whether we know it or not—something that has swept through our lives and taken us up in ways that are useful and even spectacular, but also
worrisome—and so ubiquitous and loomingly present in everything we do: the way we communicate and take care of ourselves and find things out and look to be entertained. Well, that would have to be the Internet. So to begin, I want to congratulate those short-listed content providers here this evening. 
 The World Wide Web was conceived as a somewhat academic resource some years ago, but its years of development since the 1980s have seemed to me the work of a moment, coming…

On the campaign trail this year, Bill de
Blasio repeatedly channeled New Yorkers’ anger over gentrification, the widespread sense that the city is turning into a playground for the rich that locks out everyone else. “I see people suffering and feeling like they’re losing their grip on the place, and my job is to help New Yorkers live in New York. It’s not to clear the place out and see it fully gentrified,” the mayor-elect was quoted in New York magazine in June. 
 That means when de Blasio takes office, he’ll be attempting to solve a problem that is plaguing major urban centers all over the world. Housing prices are soaring in San Francisco as technology workers stream into once-affordable neighborhoods like the Mission District. In June, London housing prices…

The forces of science and sanity scored a partial victory on November 22, when the Texas State Board of Education gave preliminary approval to fourteen new science textbooks that provide unqualified, unadulterated descriptions of both evolution and climate change. Texas’s SBOE has long been a warren of creationists and climate-change deniers eager to use their position to muddy the teaching of basic science in public schools—a serious problem, since the choices that get made in Texas, the second-largest textbook market in the country, end up influencing the larger textbook landscape.
 Four years ago, the board passed new curriculum “standards” meant to force textbook companies to present weaker treatments of evolution and global warming. It followed up by trying to pack the textbook review teams with junk-science zealots. But thanks to…