Innehållsförteckning för November 16, 2015 från The Nation

@thenation.com For the Love of Bernie I will preface this by saying that I admire Bernie Sanders and his clearly progressive views, as well as his strongly articulated ideas. However, reading D.D. Guttenplan’s “The Secret to Sanders’s Success” [Oct. 26] reminds me why he’s not a viable choice for me. The article’s lead (uncaptioned) photo could have been taken in lily-white Vermont, so I’ll give it a pass for its resemblance to a diversity-free Republican rally. But consider Guttenplan’s choice of Bernie volunteers: 16-year-old Australian Torin Peel and 24-year-old digital whiz kid Aidan King. Do you really believe these representatives, so evocative of Sanders’s campaign, will appeal to the majority of lower-income, nonwhite, and immigrant Democrats whose votes would be essential for presidential victory? Unfortunately, Sanders’s policies, so much more…

DEAR SENATOR SANDERS, Congratulations on the tremendous success of your campaign. You have energized and inspired millions of Americans and forced the questions of economic inequality and excessive corporate power to the center of our political discourse. These are remarkable accomplishments. So take the following advice as coming from an admirer. I urge you to reconsider how you respond to the inevitable questions about what you mean by “democratic socialism” and a “peaceful revolution.” Next time, embrace our own American radical tradition. There’s nothing wrong with Denmark; we can learn a few things from them (and vice versa). But most Americans don’t know or care much about Scandinavia. More important, your response inadvertently reinforces the idea that socialism is a foreign import. Instead, talk about our radical forebears here in…

The beatification of right-wing Republican Paul Ryan has become an almost annual ritual among the punditocracy. This bizarre tradition began when Ryan released his first budget as chair of the House Budget Committee in 2011, and repeated itself a year later when he rereleased it. It occurred a third time when Mitt Romney—under powerful punditocracy pressure—picked Ryan as his running mate for the 2012 presidential campaign. Now we are in the midst of yet another episode in this sorry franchise, as Republicans and their apologists and propagandists beg Ryan to use his superhero powers to save them from the lunatics who have taken over their party. It’s a measure of how deeply the Republicans have dived into know-nothing, do-nothing nihilism—and, no less significantly, how deeply our most prestigious pundits remain…

Six weeks after Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in Britain’s Labour Party leadership elections, both the party and the nation’s political class have settled on a new abnormal. Labour’s abrupt lurch to the left after a generation of rightward drift (imagine if Bernie Sanders, only less strident and more radical, won the Democratic nomination) has forced a tectonic realignment. Former rebels are demanding party discipline, while the establishment of yore is in open insurrection. The media, which did not foresee Corbyn’s rise, is once again all-knowing and all-wise about his inevitable fall. All of the attributes that helped make Corbyn electable—including his reputation for being plainspoken, principled, and entirely without guile—are now considered liabilities. In presentational terms, Corbyn’s initial six weeks have been mostly unimpressive. His victory took even him by surprise,…

The history of congressional hearings is, to say the least, a checkered one. Members of Congress have abused the hearing process to foment witch hunts, as Senator Joseph McCarthy did with the Tydings Committee to investigate the loyalty of State Department employees. More recently, members of both parties have staged hearings to play the scold, inveighing against the allegedly violence-inciting lyrics of, among others, Twisted Sister, Tupac Shakur, and Marilyn Manson—all while doing precious little to curb the sale of actual guns. At their best, however, congressional hearings can play a salutary role, shining a light on neglected public interests and exposing corporate fraud and government malfeasance. The Pecora Committee used its subpoena power to haul banksters in front of Congress in the wake of the 1929 stock-market crash, leading…

In Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, the Facebook executive acknowledged the structural sexism that women face in the workplace but sought to address the “barriers that exist within ourselves.” She argued that women “hold ourselves back” by becoming less professionally aggressive when, for example, they anticipate a pregnancy. Thus the title’s exhortation to “lean in” to the workplace: “We lower our own expectations of what we can achieve…. Compared to our male colleagues, fewer of us aspire to senior positions,” she wrote. Now the Lean In organization, partnered with the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, has released a new study based on surveys of nearly 30,000 people and 118 businesses. And the findings cut against the idea that women simply don’t try as…

The Nation’s newest contributing writer is hitting the immigration beat during a rabidly xenophobic election cycle. Over e-mail, she chatted about why. When and why did you get into journalism? In college, I realized I much preferred explaining and analyzing a conflict to mucking about in it as an activist or organizer. That was the beginning of it all. How did you find your beat? I started out at Colorlines, where I was assigned to cover enormous issue areas—including immigration. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in journalism since starting? The pipeline that got me into the business has fallen away. Smaller papers and independent websites can’t always sustain internship programs, and they’re a crucial training ground for young reporters. Something that will never change? Readers’ hunger for news, new…

Last month, at events in Portland, Seattle, and New York City marking The Nation’s 150th anniversary, singers performed selections from Slave Songs of the United States (1867). The book was co-edited by Lucy McKim Garrison—the daughter of the abolitionist James Miller McKim, this magazine’s first financial backer, and also the wife of Nation literary editor Wendell Phillips Garrison, himself the son of famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison—and included more than 100 spirituals that Lucy had learned from newly emancipated slaves in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, where she’d traveled with her father during the Civil War. The story of Lucy McKim Garrison and Slave Songs is told in Songs of Sorrow, which was published by the University Press of Mississippi last April—just weeks after the death of its author, the musicologist…

LONG-ACTING REVERSIBLE CONTRACEPTIVES, KNOWN AS LARCs, are revolutionizing American birth control. Pilot programs in St. Louis, Missouri, and in Colorado, where healthcare providers and researchers have made the IUD and hormonal implants available at low or no cost and educated potential users about their nearly foolproof effectiveness, have shown astounding results. In Colorado, the teen birth rate and teen abortion rate both dropped 48 percent over five years. At the start of the study, half the women in the poorest parts of the state gave birth before the age of 21. Five years later, half the women in the same group were over the age of 24 when first giving birth. And in St. Louis, pregnancy and abortion rates among sexually active teens studied dropped to less than a quarter…

ACROSS 1 Penalty kick, outside, hems in shot (10) 6 Addict hosted by the administration (4) 10 Poem: “To Be the Boss Without Clothing” (5) 11 For example, kreplach with minor imperfections hiding distasteful lump (9) 12 Slough off evil creatures (6) 13 America exposed and disrupted—that’s against the law (5) 15 Cowardly yokel taken in by smallest denomination with time off (7) 17 Fat, cod, and a bit of oil mashed together?! (3,4) 19 Reverse code to read a link for six pairs of Across entries (3) 20 School’s principal cursed crawfishes—they’re dangerous when they bite (3,4) 22 Oscar winner holds on to suitable branch (7) 24 Money is power, assuming leadership in banking (5) 26 Montana city restricted dairy product (6) 29 Accepts the responsibility of, or has…

American Socialism? 47% Americans who are willing to vote for a socialist for president, according to a new Gallup poll 59% Democrats who are willing to vote for a socialist for president 52% Americans who support heavily taxing the rich to support a more equitable distribution of wealth 63% Americans who believe that wealth should be distributed more equitably “He would like to see Medicare for all in this country.” Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), explaining why she thinks Bernie Sanders is “too liberal” to win…

Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin representative and candidate for speaker of the House, flies back home to Janesville to visit his family every weekend. If that sounds extravagant, keep in mind that it costs about the same as a year of center-based childcare, at an average cost per family of $11,666 each year. Ryan’s House record, however, isn’t so family-friendly: NO to federal childcare subsidies, with a 2014 budget eliminating a $16 billion Social Services Block Grant, including all childcare funding for low-income families. NO to paid parental leave for federal employees—Ryan voted against just four weeks of such leave, which would still have the US lagging behind the rest of the developed world. NO to food stamps, Medicaid, and Pell Grants, all slated for deep cuts by Ryan during his…

Syriza Greece’s left party garnered 35.5 percent of the vote in the September general election, despite accepting a crushing EU-led austerity program, thus securing victory over the conservative New Democracy party. Left Bloc Despite the Left Bloc winning 10.2 percent of the vote in Portugal’s elections, and left-wing parties winning a majority in Parliament, the country risks a political crisis after the left is denied its parliamentary prerogative to form a majority government. Podemos Podemos won 7.98 percent of the national vote in the 2014 European Parliament election, and chose to support local grassroots candidates in Spain’s May 2015 municipal elections. In July, Podemos’s Pablo Igelsias won a landslide vote to spearhead the antiestablishment party’s general-election campaign for December 2015. Die Linke Die Linke has 64 out of 630 seats…

WHEN THE 21ST UNITED NATIONS CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE OPENS in Paris on November 30, annual global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) will be about 32 billion metric tons. This figure is 10 percent higher than the 29 billion tons that were emitted in 2009, when the last major UN climate conference took place in Copenhagen. There is no escaping the conclusion that we are playing Russian roulette with the environment by allowing CO2 emissions to continue to rise. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides conservative benchmarks as to what is required to stabilize the average global temperature at its current level of around 60.3 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) above the preindustrial average of 56.7 degrees. According to the IPCC, global CO2 emissions need to…

From the New World Poems 1976–2014. By Jorie Graham. Ecco. 359 pp. $29.99. Ange Mlinko is poetry editor of The Nation. In her 2003 Paris Review interview, Jorie Graham evokes a radiant image from her childhood in Rome: a “huge marble statue of the reclining Apollo on the landing above the ballet class that we would run up the wide flight of stairs to, sweaty, after class, a gaggle of girls in black leotards, and lie on to cool off; he was so cold!” Years later, this constellation of sensuous details—black leotard and white marble; small, hot, dance-wrung bodies on one big, cold, static one—was transmogrified into a poem. Graham, now a mother, brings a forgotten black leotard through a snowy night to the slumber party where her daughter is.…