Innehållsförteckning för January 6-13, 2014 från The Nation

Keep Talkin’ Happy Talk
 Thank you for giving Jackson Lears enough space to write, so eloquently, about the pursuit of happiness [“Get Happy!!” Nov. 25]. His comparative, historical approach made my mind very happy. Truly. ELLEN STRENSKI Los Angeles _________________________ Thank you for Jackson Lears’s wonderful multi-book review, parsing the slippery concept of “happiness” and exposing the core of our contemporary malaise. Nathaniel Hawthorne opined, “Happiness is a butterfly which when pursued is always just beyond your grasp; but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” About the excesses of imperial Rome, the Stoic Seneca observed, “And now it has come to this, that to want only what is enough is to be considered both boorish and utterly deprived.” Bookends for the stack of books reviewed.…

Early in 2013, before Edward Snowden’s revelations, the Supreme Court turned aside a challenge by this magazine and other organizations to a 2008 law that permitted the National Security Agency to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications. The plaintiffs claimed that the law was unconstitutional, but the government argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing to pursue their challenge because they had failed to show that the law would be used to intercept their communications. In a 5-4 vote, the Court agreed with the government. 
 Over the past six months, we’ve learned a great deal about the way the NSA has been using and abusing its surveillance powers, including the powers that were at issue in the Supreme Court case, Clapper v. Amnesty. And we’ve learned something else as…

Tensions are flaring in San Francisco over tech-driven gentrification. On December 9, protesters blocked a Google bus from shuttling workers to the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
The privately owned Google buses (and similar shuttle lines run by companies like Facebook and Apple) have long been symbols of the city’s increasing inequality. As well-paid tech workers have moved into San Francisco, many working-class residents have been forced out of their neighborhoods as both rents and evictions have skyrocketed. 
 —Jamilah King Colorlines.com…

For a nation in mourning, South Africa was in festive spirits in the week following Nelson Mandela’s death. From the moment that first train left at 5 am for the official memorial service, which was addressed by Barack Obama among others, until the first speech, the chanting never stopped. Thousands sang as one in praise of the African National Congress’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, and Mandela, who founded it, as well as other staples from the liberation struggle. Pretty much everybody had something—a hat, coat, umbrella, shawl or flag—that bore the colors of the ANC or the likeness of Nelson Mandela, or both. So as they danced, shuffled and swayed to the sound of their own voices, the stadium was carried away on waves of black, green and yellow.…

Lorrie Reed lives alone in a trailer on a rural road outside Frankfort, Kentucky, on two acres of land that her late husband bought more than twenty years ago. He left the property to her and their daughters when he died in a motorcycle accident. “He told me before he passed that the place was going to be mine, and the only way I’d lose it was if I let somebody mess me out of it,” Reed says.
 Ever since this past summer, when land agents approached her—twice—to ask permission to survey a proposed pipeline route across her property, Reed repeats these words to herself. She walks with a limp, an injury from a collision with a dump truck during the years that she worked on road maintenance crews. She…

Spam gets no respect. It’s a trivial, time-wasting annoyance. Who but a masochist would even want to think about it? For this reason, Finn Brunton’s Spam (MIT; $27.95) seems willfully perverse in its choice of subject. Brunton, however, insists that spam is good to think about, its diverse forms and dark purposes mirroring the more promising developments of information technology. By exploring the evolving definitions of spam, the constituencies that have promoted and fought it, and the ingenious varieties it has taken, Brunton seeks to provide, as his book’s subtitle promises, nothing less than “a shadow history of the Internet.”
 Spam plays a surprising Virgil for Brunton’s descent into the seamy underworld of online life, disclosing the haphazard odyssey of the Internet from the 1970s to the present. The author…

@mychalsmith: Plotting a socialist takeover and the destruction of Christmas at The Nation holiday party #FestiveNation.
 @janetmock: “When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.” Rest in Power Mr. #NelsonMandela.
 @RichardKimNYC: Mandela on George W Bush: “…a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly....” 
 @EdgeofSports: Unless we want to be The United States of Amnesia, we also must remember that Reagan believed this great man Mandela to be a terrorist.
 @chrislhayes: BREAKING: “whiteness” is not some actual thing out there in the world, but a category constructed by human societies.
 @JessicaValenti: Never forget the Montreal Massacre: 24 years ago today a man screaming “I hate feminists” targeted & killed 14 women at…

When Joe Aidlin, an old pal of former Nation editor Carey McWilliams, came to me many years ago with the idea that since the so-called experts were wrong so much of the time, someone ought to do a book called The Experts Speak, I called André Schiffrin, then the director of Pantheon Books. André immediately suggested that I enlist the witty writer and editor Christopher Cerf. 
 Thus we joined a distinguished club—Authors Published By André—that included Studs Terkel, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Roy Medvedev, Gunnar Myrdal, Günter Grass, Ivan Illich, George Kennan and Sissela Bok. 
 Satire and humor are probably the last things most people in publishing think of when they think of André Schiffrin, who died…

New York has a marijuana arrest problem. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, the NYPD arrested 440,000 people for low-level possession offenses between 2002 and 2012, while an American Civil Liberties Union study found that the Bronx has the third-highest number of pot arrests in the country.
 State Senator Liz Krueger wants to change all that. The Manhattan Democrat introduced a bill on Decem-ber 11 that would regulate and tax marijuana the same way as alcohol and tobacco. Similar legislation has already been enacted in Colorado and Washington State.
 The Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act would legalize the possession of up to two ounces of marijuana, place a tax of $50 on each ounce, and allow New Yorkers to cultivate up to six plants at home. Responsibility for taxation and…

The confirmation of Janet Yellen as Federal Reserve chair is 
an excellent opportunity to reform an institution that has done too little for too long to combat the vast economic inequalities in the United States. As William Greider wrote in our October 7 issue, Yellen “well understands that much deeper change must be considered to get the economy back 
in balance.” 
 If the new chair is in search of specific suggestions for how to revive this 100-year-old institution, Greider’s articles in The Nation over the past decade would be a helpful place to start. 
 In 2009, as the country was reeling from the crash, Greider wrote “Dismantling the Temple: How to Fix the Federal Reserve,” which outlined a plan for greater democracy, transparency and effectiveness.
 “A reconstituted central…

When Bishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio, SJ, of Buenos Aires was inaugurated as the 266th pope this past March, one of his first acts was to call 85-year-old Father Gustavo Gutiérrez of Lima, Peru, to invite him to Rome for a conversation. The two concelebrated Mass, then ate breakfast and talked. It was a short meeting, but with enormous significance. In 1968, Gutiérrez wrote a paper, “Toward a Theology of Liberation,” whose ideas were embraced by the Latin American bishops at their historic meeting that year in Medellín, Colombia, where they issued a series of documents that became the Magna Carta of one of the most influential theological movements of the twentieth century: liberation theology. At the 1979 conference in Puebla, Mexico, the bishops affirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s “preferential option…

The price of things is crowding out their value. When it comes to art, the belief that the price of a work is its sole worth constitutes the peculiar accord between the hedge-fund millionaires driving prices into the stratosphere and the would-be revolutionaries who fantasize about the collapse of the art-market bubble and the whole hideous economic system of which it is a prominent sideshow. Is it even remotely possible to see the exhibition hanging in the Guggenheim Museum right now—paintings, drawings and photographs by the American artist Christopher Wool—as art instead of dollar signs, now that one of Wool’s paintings (not included in the exhibition, which is on view through January 22) has sold at auction for $26.5 million, just a year after another sold for what then seemed…

To fully grasp the meaning of Nelson Mandela’s death at the age of 95, imagine for a moment that his life turned out differently. What if he’d perished as a child, like so many youngsters of his generation, in the rural backwaters of the Transkei? Think of what might have happened—or not
 happened—if he’d died in the mines of the City of Gold, where he arrived as a young man after running away from his village. He was not shot in the back, like demonstrators at Sharpeville in 1960, or gunned down like young protesters in Soweto during the June 1976 uprising. Though he believed in armed struggle, Mandela escaped the fate of so many of his comrades who were killed in the bush, blown to pieces by letter bombs…

Beginning in January of 2012, The New York Times once again proved its worth as the world’s greatest newspaper with a comprehensive, multipart investigation of Apple that shed light on the working conditions on the company’s Chinese manufacturing lines. It found near-slave-labor conditions, including apparently forced labor by student “interns” at Foxconn, Apple’s largest supplier (and the supplier for a host of other tech companies as well). Exposure to poisonous chemicals and the occasional fatal factory explosion were hardly unknown to workers and their families.
 Before the Times investigation, Apple successfully stonewalled reports about these unconscionable conditions. Sounding like a Stalin-era Soviet commissar, Steve Jobs claimed that Apple did “one of the best jobs of any companies in our industry, and maybe in any industry, of understanding the working conditions…

Based on two years of undercover research on the anti-choice movement, the new play Mom Baby God by activist Madeline Burrows explores the resurgent attacks on reproductive rights, with a focus on the student arm of the anti-choice movement.
 The play follows 15-year-old Jessica Beth Giffords, played by Burrows, as she attends the Students for Life of America conference. Throughout the hour-long solo performance, Giffords absorbs misinformation in an abstinence-only “sexual purity” workshop and struggles to contain her crush on 
a Christian boy who sports a purity ring.
 “It holds a mirror up to the anti-choice movement,” says Burrows. “Even more threatening, Mom Baby God inspires audiences to fight back.”
 For more information, see mombabygod.com.…

This past year was about a lot more than Ted Cruz and the surreal shutdown politics of the Republican right. Across America, grassroots groups, bold unions, inspired activists, crusading editors and courageous elected officials did great things. They are the real heroes of 2013, and The Nation’s Progressive Honor Roll celebrates them for their accomplishments this year and their determination to do even more in 2014.
 * * * MOST VALUABLE SENATOR: Elizabeth Warren
 When speculation about her prospects as a presidential contender spiked, the new senator from Massachusetts turned attention away from herself and toward the need to crack down on “too big to fail” banks. “Since when does Congress set deadlines, watch regulators miss most of them, and then take that failure as a reason not to act?”…

Killing Kennedy The End of Camelot. By Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. Holt. 325 pp. $28. The Man Who Killed Kennedy The Case Against LBJ. By Roger Stone and Mike Colapietro. Skyhorse. 352 pp. $24.95. They Killed Our President 63 Reasons to Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK. By Jesse Ventura, Dick Russell and David Wayne. Skyhorse. 256 pp. $24.95. The Poison Patriarch How the Betrayals of Joseph P. Kennedy Caused the Assassination of JFK. By Mark Shaw. Skyhorse. 288 pp. $24.95. A Cruel and Shocking Act The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination. By Philip Shenon. Holt. 625 pp. $32. The Interloper Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union. By Peter Savodnik. Basic. 288 pp. $27.99. If Kennedy Lived The First and Second Terms of President John…

Space is the essential raw material for building, and virtually every square foot of ground in New York City has been exhausted. With the last of the city’s green fields long since occupied, “growth” has become synonymous with density, and to gain more ground, real estate has become an extractive industry, mining the air.
 Property, however, has historically been measured only in two dimensions, as a piece of the earth’s surface, typically calculated in square feet or meters, acres or hectares, miles or kilometers. This seems straightforward, but the vertical dimensions of ownership confuse things. Consider the issue of access to what lies beneath, such as petroleum (where the possibility of horizontal drilling remains contentious) and minerals (likewise). Matters are made more difficult by the presence of a variety of…