Innehållsförteckning för October 19, 2015 från The Nation

@thenation.com Coming Out for Choice After reading Katha Pollitt’s column “Come Out, Pro-Choicers!” [September 14/21], I’ve decided to tell my story to The Nation. I had an abortion at age 18. I was date-raped and prayed that I would not become pregnant. When I missed my period, I knew my prayers had not been answered. I was beside myself with worry when I went home for the summer after the end of my first college year. My mother recognized my condition and arranged for an abortion. The doctor who was to do the procedure first asked if there was any possibility of marriage. None, I replied. On the way home, my mother cautioned me not to mention this to anyone. I kept the secret for many years. I was able…

There was nothing radical about Pope Francis’s reminder to Americans that a nation of immigrants should “care for the immigrant.” Or about his statement that members of Congress have a responsibility “to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good.” And there certainly wasn’t anything radical about his declaration that “climate change is a problem which can no longer be left to a future generation.” But the pope’s September 24 speech to Congress took a radical turn when he declared: “In these times when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement.” During her decades of advocacy in the 20th century, when she made common…

Carly Fiorina has claimed that her election would represent a big step forward for American women. And yet… “Over the years, feminism has devolved into a left-leaning political ideology where women are pitted against men and used as a political weapon to win elections.” —Fiorina, in a speech at the Competitive Enterprise Institute “If Hillary Clinton were to face a female nominee, there are a whole set of things that she won’t be able to talk about…. She won’t be able to talk about a war on women without being challenged. She won’t be able to play the gender card.” —Fiorina, speaking to reporters in April “Being empowered means having a voice. But ideological feminism shuts down the conversation—on college campuses and in the media.” —Fiorina, at the CEI “It…

On july 29, 2013, a latina mother in illinois named Natasha Felix sent her three sons, ages 11, 9, and 5, out to play with a visiting cousin, a young girl, in a fenced park right next to her apartment building. The oldest boy was charged with keeping an eye on his siblings, while Felix watched them all from the window. While they were outside, a local preschool teacher showed up at the park with her class. She saw the 9-year-old climb a tree. Felix’s youngest son fought with his cousin over a scooter and, at one point, ran with it into the street. Based on this, the teacher called the child-abuse hotline, and Felix received a visit from the Department of Children and Family Services. According to legal filings…

In 1995, a young writer named John Keene published a marvelous, odd, and slender book called Annotations. The title was very much of the era—think Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and Raymond Williams’s Keywords, then still in heavy circulation in your hipper university lit departments. It was a slim, slippery thing, not quite a memoir and not exactly a novel, as heady and at times abstruse as its title suggested. Its methods were equally poetic and novelistic, but something was lacking, like a house glimpsed in a dream, all windows and doors but no walls. In the book’s final sentence, the author advised that it should be understood as “a series of mere life-notes, aspiring to the condition of annotations” (italics mine). It was, or aspired to be, a collection of marginalia…

1 To set all four paws on an upturned tub and not topple over was as much as I could manage even when I still strode into battle with my lord Ramses. Mite-ridden then, raw with mange, I became a mascot for Amenhotep, no less integral to his menage than any of the menagerie lounging on the ramps. The sawdust-stuffed baboons were known to munch on peaches by the bushel, so their urine was notably high in cyanide. After a last ration of beer flavored with aniseed I was set down between a giraffe and a rhino. My face was recasting itself from the one I’d been assigned to the face of a Pharaoh from the Fourth Dynasty. 2 My face was the face on the royal sarcophagus I’d guarded…

ACROSS 1 Torn-up shoestring subjected to review (9) 6 God’s way to tell a mug from a demitasse? (5) 9 Helps Japanese prime minister with empty threats (5) 10 Run my bath? That’s crazy—say there are alligators in the sewers (5,4) 11 DIY garden tool is getting me angry (8) 12 Middle Eastern queen: an electronics pioneer (6) 14 That woman would lose small storage structure (4) 15 Indigenous Canadians accepting trees’ eerie quality (10) 18 Loopy, confused, uncouth lot (3,2,5) 19 What Fitzgerald did well: go away (4) 22 Rat can help cop become this! (6) 24 Community of learners directed a taxi most of the way west (8) 26 For example, de Klerk stuffing 33 percent of kangaroos into a chicken (9) 27 Raised objection about the Italian…

The refugee crisis now confronting Europe, with hundreds of thousands of desperate migrants pouring across multiple borders, has opened up deep fissures in the European Union. The crisis threatens to tear the EU apart, but it’s truly global in nature, with roots in decades of conflict, from Afghanistan to Somalia to Eritrea; in the multiple upheavals stemming from the Arab revolutions, from Libya to Yemen; and in the regional instability and extremism brought about by the US invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq. But the greatest source of refugees flooding into Europe now is Syria, and that demands a rethinking not only of EU and US refugee policy, but also their approach to Syria’s civil war. About half of Syria’s population—nearly 12 million people—has been displaced after four years of…

As the scale of Volkswagen’s emissions-control deception set in, Adweek observed that the company had “just squandered 55 years of great advertising,” starting with its famous “Lemon” ad. The ad (below) boasted: “This Volkswagen missed the boat. The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished and must be replaced. Chances are you wouldn’t have noticed it; inspector Kurt Kroner did.“ The ad describes a level of meticulousness that consumers couldn’t help but trust—certainly not the sort of company that would develop an emissions-rigging device to hide in your car. Volkswagen continued to build goodwill throughout the 1960s by fostering, in the words of writer Thomas Frank, “a hip consumerism driven by disgust with mass society itself.” The clever ads and anti-consumerist vibe earned the company an enduring place in…

You may have heard that Carly Fiorina won the September 16 CNN debate and has since entered the “top tier” of Republican presidential candidates. Well, for now that’s true, but in the long run, the true winner will be the same guy who won the August 6 Fox News debate and is winning pretty much every political debate we have in this country these days: Roger Ailes. Allow me to explain. Ever since Ailes founded Fox News in 1996 (with Rupert Murdoch’s money), the station has served as a propaganda arm and ideological enforcer for the Republican Party, even as it pretends to be a news network. Its broadcasts ignore reality whenever convenient, preferring to purvey whatever misinformation and/or ideological obfuscation serve Ailes’s strategic and financial purposes. Because the network’s…

IN 1961, TWO AND A HALF YEARS AFTER TAKing power, Fidel Castro gave a celebrated speech to the Cuban artistic and cultural elite that came to be known as “Words to the Intellectuals.” “What are the rights of revolutionary or nonrevolutionary writers and artists?” he demanded. Then, answering his own question with a particular focus on nonrevolutionary writers, he declared: “Intellectuals who are not genuinely revolutionary [must be allowed to] find a place to work and to create within the Revolution.” But even this freedom had its limits. “Within the Revolution,” Castro thundered, “everything goes; against the Revolution, nothing…no rights at all.” Bill Gates couldn’t be more different, temperamentally or politically, from Fidel Castro. He once characterized anyone who challenged the current intellectual-property laws—specifically those guaranteeing software patents—as a “new…

In the opening of Alessandro Spina’s novel The Nocturnal Visitor (1979), night is falling on Sheikh Hassan’s home in a valley in eastern Libya so small that it fits “in the hollow of a hand.” The sheikh is ready to embark upon his reading, a nightly voyage he takes with his books as “enigmatic traveling companions.” But his reveries are troubled: A crime has been committed in his home. What follows is a series of doubles and double-crosses, in which guilt shifts with each new revelation—a plot that could have sprung from one of Sheikh Hassan’s treasured books. A boy in his household, accused of trying to sleep with his sister, is exiled from the valley. In town, he finds another boy who bears a striking resemblance to him and…

5.7% Annual rate of increase in price for 227 brand-name drugs in 2006 12.9% Annual rate of increase for 227 brand-name drugs in 2013 $13.50 Cost per pill of Daraprim, a drug used to treat a life-threatening parasitic infections, when Martin Shkreli’s company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, purchased it $750 Cost per pill of Daraprim after Shkreli’s company raised the price $16B Annual projected savings if Medicare were allowed to negotiate Part D prescription-drug prices with pharmaceutical companies “No doubt I am a capitalist who plays to win.” Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, on Twitter…

When Volkswagen, maker of the humble Beetle, first found a home deep within the American psyche in the decades after World War II, it presented itself as an automotive brand apart. In a sea of chromium excess and Detroit tail-fin profligacy, the German carmaker stood for values like conservation, thrift, and modesty. Born of the austerity of pre- and postwar Europe, the company’s name meant simply “People’s Car.” But in that peculiarly American place where progressivism and puritanism meet out back in the parking lot at the mall, the Beetle’s perceived honesty and friendly minimalism placed it at the center of a powerful and enduring consumer movement, one that has bordered on religiosity. For a sense emerged of Volkswagen the company as fun, fair, and caring. Another century’s Apple, it…

Douglas Foster writes in this issue about the rise of drug-resistant tuberculosis and the “global class divide in medicine.” That divide was also evident during the initial explosion of the disease following the Industrial Revolution. In a 1906 article in these pages, Nation editor Hammond Lamont wrote that one problem preventing the eradication of tuberculosis was “securing a sufficient number of tenements…constructed as mere business ventures.” This was unfortunate, because “when the landlord has his eye first of all on gain, he will, in spite of inspectors, ‘scamp’ his plumbing. This is the strongest argument offered by advocates of municipal housing for the poor—that the only safeguard against tuberculosis and other maladies is a landlord who can and will set sanitation above everything else.” The way to slow the spread…