Innehållsförteckning för November 9, 2015 från The Nation

@thenation.com Inside Out and Outside In Someone asked me how I felt about Michael Sorkin’s criticism of me in his survey of responses to Renzo Piano’s new building for the Whitney Museum of American Art [“Lost at Sea,” Oct. 19]. I was surprised to be asked, because I didn’t feel very criticized—at least not in comparison with many of the other writers Sorkin mentions. Besides, it seems to me his issue is that people don’t know how to evaluate a building. He’s probably right, in general and about me, but I claim a pass on that one because I am not an architecture critic and would never pretend to be. If I need to criticize a building, I’ll have to wait for Sorkin to teach me how. However, since he…

The latest chatter among Washington insiders isn’t about whether the Republican Party will win in 2016, but whether it will survive. The fear that Donald Trump might actually become the party’s nominee is the ultimate GOP nightmare. Some gleeful Democrats are rooting (sotto voce) for the Donald, though many expect that he will self-destruct. Nevertheless, Republicans face a larger problem. The GOP finds itself trapped in a marriage that has not only gone bad but is coming apart in full public view. After five decades of shrewd strategy, the Republican coalition that Richard Nixon put together in 1968—welcoming the segregationist white South into the Party of Lincoln—is now devouring itself amid ugly, spiteful recriminations. The abrupt resignation of House Speaker John Boehner was his capitulation to this new reality. His…

The GOP has a tradition of racism disguised in the mantle of “states’ rights,” and they just can’t give it up. “Republicans have rejected the old concept of states’ rights as instruments of reaction and accepted a new concept: states’ rights as instruments of progress.” —Richard Nixon, Arkansas, 1968 “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” —Richard Nixon, private tapes, 1969 “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff.” —Lee Atwater, Reagan campaign adviser, later campaign manager for George H.W. Bush. “I believe in states’ rights.” —Ronald Reagan, 1980, speaking in the Mississippi town where…

As John Nichols has written at TheNation.com, one historical analogue for today’s Republican insurrectionists is the John Birch Society, those paranoiac vigilantes whom even William F. Buckley Jr., “patron saint of the conservatives,” eventually denounced as apostates from the true faith. The Nation helped expose their pernicious influence on American political life when, in March 1961, just weeks after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, a California reporter named Hans Engh wrote in these pages: “In certain communities the Birchians have been able to whip up a good deal of unrest and suspicion. Persons are labeled Communist at the drop of a hat, and semi-secret meetings create an aura of fear and hate. Fortunately, even in these communities there are still enough reasonable people around who bring a measure of…

Humanism was the particular glory of the Renaissance. The recovery, translation, and dissemination of the literatures of antiquity created a new excitement, displaying so vividly the accomplishments and therefore the capacities of humankind, with consequences for civilization that are great beyond reckoning. The disciplines that came with this awakening, the mastery of classical languages, the reverent attention to pagan poets and philosophers, the study of ancient history, and the adaptation of ancient forms to modern purposes, all bore the mark of their origins yet served as the robust foundation of education and culture for centuries, until the fairly recent past. In muted, expanded, and adapted forms, these Renaissance passions live on among us still in the study of the humanities, which, we are told, are now diminished and threatened. Their…

THE PUZZLE OF HOW TO DEFINE THE relationship of the mind to the body is familiar to philosophers, psychologists, yoga teachers, and neuroscientists. Many modern thinkers in these fields believe that the dualistic notion of the mind and body as separate spheres is misguided, although it may be hard to eliminate from the lumber of everyday thought. Still, is it possible to imagine alternatives to the dualistic model? And if it is not self-evidently true that we “have” bodies (rather than being physical creatures), then where did the notion of the mind or self as a separate entity come from? A.A. Long’s splendid book, Greek Models of Mind and Self (Harvard; $25.95), suggests that to answer such questions one could return not to Descartes or the Christian tradition, long regarded…

Barbara Lee has always had the clearest vision when it comes to the US role in Afghanistan. In 2001, the California representative cast the only vote in Congress against the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Lee did not oppose responding in appropriate and necessary ways to genuine threats to the United States, but she feared that the open-ended AUMF would become a blank check for endless war. President Obama proved her right when, in mid- October, he suspended the planned withdrawal of the remaining US forces in Afghanistan. Instead, current troop levels of roughly 10,000—along with the full capacity for air strikes, like the one on October 3 that devastated the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz—will remain through 2016. Obama’s…

John Cameron Mitchell’s Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch closed in September, after winning a Tony Award as well as renewed fervor for the show’s queer antihero. Hedwig will soon be going on tour, while Mitchell’s hard at work on a film that he describes as “Romeo and Juliet between a punk and an alien.” Nation editors Lizzy Ratner and Kai Wright spoke with him about the show’s origins—and the striking bust of Hedwig that he keeps in his apartment. LR: Who created that? JCM: Miguel Villalobos, who I met on the street. He had come from Venezuela with nothing. He was washing dishes and photographing rock stars and doing his art, and we just met on the street. He was shooting Lady Bunny, who I knew, and…

Palestinians have taken to the streets to demonstrate against nearly 50 years of military rule and the denial of their freedom at the hands of Israel. These protests come after the death of the peace process, the election of a right-wing Israeli government that has stated it has no intention of granting Palestinians their rights, and growing discontent with the unelected Palestinian Authority (PA). The protests have also been fueled by repeated Israeli announcements of settlement expansion; settler attacks on Palestinian lives, property, and holy places; and the Israeli government’s decision to allow right-wing extremists who seek the destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque to enter the Haram al-Sharif compound while simultaneously denying Palestinians access to their holy sites. Seeking to quell the unrest, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that…

Picasso is a truly Protean figure. He manifests no “essence” that you can grasp in your search for understanding, and there’s no better example of this than the great exhibition of his sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through February 7. That the artist who for so many decades made himself synonymous in the public mind with the word “painter” should have also turned his hand, and brilliantly, to the sister art of sculpture is not in itself surprising. His rival Matisse now and then created, as if to demonstrate the essential unity of plastic arts, a fairly restricted number of extraordinary sculptures whose resonances can still be detected today. But that Picasso had, so to speak, what amounts to a second career as a sculptor—producing…

ACROSS 1 Seven stars, and one who eats a lot of chips? (3,6) 6 Following a revolution, Chinese factory contains places to get a drink (5) 9 Exhausted couple enters our cabin at the rear (7) 10 Elevated roadway cut catastrophically after 6 CE (7) 11 Weep about stack of paper at the back of the dairy (8) 12 Mailer’s Terminator (6) 14 Paradise is an Internet lair? (4) 15 British poet rebuilt home sauna (1,1,7) 17 Femme fatale’s wig? (9) 19 NRA obsession is comfortable, if you think backwards (4) 21 Melting ice cap? It makes you want to throw up (6) 22 Element of Asian Tet offensive (8) 24 Pig’s belly holding second serving of slop (a large amount) (7) 25 Arnold going nuts around the first, second,…

$278M Amount raised by super-PACs during the current presidential cycle $15.4M Amount raised by super-PACs at the same point in the 2012 presidential campaign 88% Donations to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign from donors giving less than $200 20% Donations to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign from donors giving less than $200 “I don’t think the revolution’s coming.” Former senator Jim Webb, during the first Democratic debate; he dropped out of the race a week later…

In this issue, DW Gibson writes about Brooklyn’s corrupt building boom (page 22). Here, he recommends five books about how gentrification works. “When I moved to NYC in 1995, Times Square was under scaffolding and the city was undergoing major changes,” he says. “I’ve always felt like I arrived at a crucial moment, by chance.” His recommendations break down the forces behind our cities’ relentless churn. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City by Neil Smith Routledge, 1996 Smith is a revered guru when it comes to understanding the dynamics of gentrification. He breaks the phenomenon into stages, explaining it as a logical process rather than a mystical transformation. The book features well-selected case studies, and while his tales are steeped in data, Smith manages to keep Urban…

In a July report, Human Rights Watch described the treatment of Palestinian children by the Israeli Defense Forces. 11: Age of the youngest Palestinian child interviewed for the report who was arrested or detained by Israeli security forces using unnecessary force. Treatment of children included choking and beating them while they were in custody, throwing stun grenades at them, and threatening and interrogating them without disclosing their whereabouts to parents. 163: Palestinian children classified by the Israeli military as “security detainees” in detention at the end of January 2015, including children convicted for offenses like throwing stones (but not including children convicted as “criminal detainees”). 128: Cases in which the Israeli military failed to record its interrogation of a child, out of a total of 440 cases in 2014, according…

IT’S JUNE IN NEW YORK CITY—A HUMID LATE AFTERNOON—AND A dozen neighbors are gathered just outside the community garden they care for at 237 Maple Street, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. They sit in folding chairs in the street, wedged between the bike lane and the sidewalk, because they are not allowed to enter the garden. Just the day before, the Supreme Court of New York issued a restraining order to keep them out. Everyone looks damp and, deflated by the news, they sink into their seats. The Maple Street Community Garden sits on a patch of earth where the home of Oscar and Germaine Kirton once stood. The Kirtons were both deceased by 1990; with no known will or immediate heirs, their house fell into disrepair; it…