Innehållsförteckning för March 14, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Southern Discomfort This story is a great look at South Carolina’s politics [“South Carolina in Black and White,” Feb. 22]. As a Connecticut Yankee who has lived and studied and worked in this state since 1970, I can second every one of D.D. Guttenplan’s observations. Although South Carolina isn’t as vicious as some of her Southern neighbors, the state is still all about race. Go out into the countryside, to some of the rural towns, and race simmers under the gossamer veil of civility, recognizable only as a wink and a spoken code. FRANK DOUGHERTY What’s Gender Got to Do With It? Thanks to Katha Pollitt for expressing my thoughts about women supporting another woman for president [“Now I’m With Her,” Feb. 22]. I, too, supported Barack Obama in…

Caledonia Curry, a.k.a. Swoon, is among the most recognized street artists in the world. Her work is now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. She has also created projects with communities in New Orleans, Pennsylvania, and Haiti, as well as a floating city on rafts. —Laura Flanders Laura Flanders: Why street art? Swoon: In 1999–2000, I was still in school and had a breakdown around painting, fine arts, and the role of art in our lives, and I started to create projects that would function differently. The first was a series of posters that happened outside in the street. It became a total obsession from there! There’s this feeling that what you’re going to make is a square that is for investment, that goes over a…

Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement From the New Deal to Reagan by Kim Phillips-Fein W.W. Norton & Company, 2009 Conservatives trace their intellectual history to the reaction against the French Revolution, if not earlier—but in the United States, the movement assumed its modern form in the revolt against Franklin Roosevelt. Focusing on a decades-long campaign by a faction of the business elite to roll back the New Deal, Kim Phillips-Fein provides a tour of the right’s 20th-century journey from the fringes of American politics to its very center. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 by George H. Nash Basic Books, 1976 Complaints about the marginalization of conservatives on the nation’s campuses have been a staple of right-wing punditry since William F. Buckley Jr. inveighed against…

Writing in this issue about Bernie Sanders’s foreign- policy record, Robert English cites the work of scholar Hans Morgenthau, who formulated the “Six Principles of Political Realism” as a guide to international affairs. In an essay for The Nation’s 85th-anniversary issue, published in December 1950—six months into the Korean War—Morgenthau decried the escalating conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, which he termed “a historical event of unprecedented magnitude,” and cautioned against its impacts, both at home and abroad. “In embarking upon a holy crusade to extirpate the evil of bolshevism powerful groups attempt to outlaw morally and legally all popular movements favoring social reform and thus to make the status quo impregnable to change,” Morgenthau observed. “The non-existent threat of Communist revolution becomes, as it was for…

Apple and the FBI are engaged in a pitched battle over encryption, and we’re Team Apple—for now. Over the past few years, the company has quietly added better encryption and security features to iOS, the iPhone’s operating system. Today, even Apple doesn’t have the key to information stored only on your device, and couldn’t look at it even if compelled by law. Your privacy is protected by technology. But the FBI wants Apple to build a version of iOS with weak security; specifically, it wants to use this alternative system to break into the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters. The government insists that it will use this tool only once. Apple argues that this precedent could compromise millions of users in the United States…

Eric Alterman, at right, discusses the right-wing strategy of “working the refs,” focusing the media’s attention on the “size of government.” But for most people, the real issue is whether government spending improves their lives. Here are a few of the scariest states in Europe by GOP standards—countries with high state spending (about half of GDP in each case) and generous public benefits. Denmark The country is known for its superb record on gender equality, fostered through social-democratic programs—so much so that famed pickup artist Roosh V wrote a book called Don’t Bang Denmark. The women were too independent for his taste. France The healthcare system here offers universal coverage and was ranked by the World Health Organization as the best-functioning in the world. France also spends less on healthcare…

At right, Patricia Williams describes a harrowing nominee for best documentary short: Last Day of Freedom, about a mentally ill Vietnam veteran sentenced to death. The other nominees are: BODY TEAM 12 Garmai Sumo is the only woman on the film’s eponymous team, which collects the corpses of Ebola victims in Liberia. CHAU, BEYOND THE LINES Chau, a Vietnamese teen living in a care center for children born with birth defects caused by Agent Orange, dreams of becoming an artist and designer. CLAUDE LANZMANN: SPECTRES OF THE SHOAH Lanzmann discusses the personal and professional difficulties he encountered three decades ago making Shoah, a film that took 12 years to complete. A GIRL IN THE RIVER: THE PRICE OF FORGIVENESS Saba, an 18-year-old Pakistani, tells the story of how she fell…

In the middle of the political foodfight that was the ninth Republican presidential debate, the front-runner suddenly abandoned the petty politics of the moment and delivered a message that mattered less to the scramble for South Carolina primary votes and more to the November fight for the battleground states that ring the Great Lakes. “This country is dying. And our workers are losing their jobs,” Donald Trump declared. Noting the announcement of plans by the air-conditioner company Carrier to transfer production (and 1,400 union jobs) from Indianapolis to Mexico, the billionaire said, “Carrier is moving. And if you saw the [workers]…. They were crying.” Promising a no-more-tears presidency, Trump said he’d renegotiate “trade pacts that are no good for us and no good for our workers” and tell corporations to…

Dark Corners By Ruth Rendell. Scribner. 288 pp. $26. Charles Taylor is a writer and teacher based in New York City. Some novelists write comedies of manners. Ruth Rendell wrote autopsies of manners. The 73 novels and short-story collections she published were chilly and unforgiving, written with the precision of a scalpel wielded by someone who waits until the blood has settled, the better to observe, probe, and describe the body laid before her with as little muss as possible. Rendell peeled back the layers and described exactly what she saw. Her method allowed no pretense of unfamiliarity, no false shock at whatever she found in her dissections, whether curiosities or diseases. But neither was there any nihilism. It’s tempting to think of Rendell in relation to another English artist,…

When I was a younger man, I made an arrangement with Gray Line Tours that would allow me to drive in the evenings and on weekends (it was called “working the extra board”). Their business included tours of Marineland of the Pacific, Forest Lawn cemetery, Hollywood Park, and Universal Studios, as well as shuttling conventioneers around downtown. Most of the time, however, I was punching the clock on the hugely popular tour of Hollywood and Beverly Hills. We dressed up like airline pilots from a Mel Brooks comedy. COMMENT Oddly, the company did not provide any information for the tours. There was a fixed route, of course, but otherwise new drivers were expected to purchase celebrity addresses and the tour “rap” from older drivers. But I was a tightwad, so…

This season’s Republican debates have been characterized by an avalanche of purposeful and ideologically driven disinformation, sometimes fact-checked a day later but largely given a pass by moderators and political analysts. A recent case in point: When CBS’s John Dickerson challenged Ted Cruz’s fib regarding past Supreme Court nominees at the February 13 Republican face-off, Dickerson’s correction, not Cruz’s lie, became news. The Republican audience booed, because the facts themselves, alas, have a liberal bias, and Dickerson apologized. But the debates are hardly the only place where the right has bullied the media into submission. No less important, though operating under the radar, is the framing of the issues: which ones matter and what solutions are defined as “responsible.” The Bernie Sanders campaign has fought to expand America’s ideological bandwidth,…

Midway through February, poised between an unusually controversial Super Bowl and an unusually controversial Academy Awards ceremony, I sit listening to the presidential primary debates in South Carolina. Twitter has been a jangled mess: Donald and Beyoncé, Peyton and Hillary, JLaw and Cam. It’s as though you could take a sentence uttered by any of them at some point in their life, jumble it in a Vitamix, place a spoonful into the mouth of the next, and it would make as much sense: “Anyone who thinks my story is anywhere near over is sadly mistaken.” “I get nervous when I don’t get nervous.” “Pressure is something you feel when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.” “I have a million ideas. The country can’t afford them all.” “You have…

Aaron Thier’s second novel, Mr. Eternity, will be published in August. ON THE EDGE (NEW DIRECTIONS; PAPER $16.95) is only the second of Rafael Chirbes’s many novels to be translated into English, and the first since Mimoun in 1993. Chirbes, who died last August, was one of the leading lights of contemporary Spanish literature, but if On the Edge is the most palatable of his works, then it’s easy to understand the hesitation to translate them. The narrative consists almost entirely of a rambling, discursive monologue delivered by a 70-year-old carpenter, soon to be an ex-carpenter, named Esteban. He lives in the town of Olba, near Spain’s Mediterranean coast, with his mute, ancient father, and he’s just lost his business and all of his property in an idiotic investment. As…