Innehållsförteckning för Jun-01-15 från The Nation

@thenation.com No Nukes Are Good Nukes Michael T. Klare wants to support the agreement between the US government and the Iranian state [“For the Iran Nuke Deal,” May 4]. I am against Iran having nuclear bombs or nuclear-energy plants, because I am against any government having nuclear bombs or nuclear-energy plants. But who is the United States—armed to the eyebrows with nuclear weaponry and allied with the only nuclear state in the region—to tell Iran what to do? Suppose the Iranians demanded that the US dismantle its nuclear bombs, close down its nuclear-energy plants, withdraw from its approximately 135 overseas military bases, and cut off all aid to Israel? Suppose they then organized an international boycott of US trade, especially of petroleum, to enforce their demands. Would not US politicians…

2 Number of times the USA Patriot Act has been renewed without serious reform 12 Number of instances of “willful misuse” of surveillance between January 2003 and August 2013, according to the NSA 52% Percentage of Americans concerned about the NSA’s data- collection programs “I worry very much about kids growing up in a society where they think, ‘I’m not going to talk about this issue, read this book, or explore this idea because someone may think I’m a terrorist.’” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT)…

In the end, the only reliable poll in the United Kingdom’s recent elections was the one that people cast at the ballot box. The surveys leading up to the election all suggested a close race, with the two main parties, Labour and the Conservatives, finishing within a few percentage points. The outcome seemed certain to be a coalition government. Indeed, with the exception of Scotland, the campaigns had been so dull that the most interesting thing about the whole process promised to be the horse trading in its immediate aftermath. And then the votes came in. The Tories won decisively, with a six-point lead over Labour and a slim majority in Parliament that will enable them to govern alone. It was like watching an innocuous romantic comedy, only to see…

D.W. GIBSON’S ORAL HISTORY, THE EDGE Becomes the Center (Overlook; $27.95), presents the reflections of some 30 people from Brooklyn and Manhattan, diverse in age, origin, race, and wealth, on the meaning of the word “gentrification.” The result is kind of a town-hall meeting that also serves as a snapshot of New York City in 2014, before some of its people and places are swept away by another cycle of development. The first to speak is mKalla, a landlord, poet, musician, and native black Brooklynite, who insists that real estate is an art form, as it entails “people coming together and being understanding and being courageous and breaking through the space where they were and making something new in the universe for themselves.” He celebrates the Barclays Center and newcomers…

ACROSS 1 Chief competitor for the files storing letter of resignation (9) 6 Blog icon features circuits (5) 9 One opposed to some Christian doctrine takes train components and recycles them (4-11) 10 Cut alien’s caseload (6) 11 Russell’s ill-mannered brat and nerd (8) 12 Have difficulty perceiving plant, with orange and blue mixed up (3,6) 14 Persuade Franklin Delano early on (4) 16 Leaders of England’s nasty, violent youth commit a sin (4) 18 Novelist Paul to feel compassion, after losing power in economic squeeze (9) 21 Just before a jab, young woman said the wrong thing (8) 22 He represents the pope with sisters’ union? (6) 25 In the nick of time, two things a small shoemaker might be? (2,3,4,6) 26 Hello! Ruby’s offered a job (5) 27…

What a difference a disastrous midterm election makes. Before the 2014 vote, conventional wisdom in the Democratic Party still counseled political caution on immigration reform. Last summer, few were surprised when President Obama delayed announcing deportation relief until after the November vote; it was the kind of reluctant leadership the modern party has shown consistently on immigration. But less than a month into her campaign, Hillary Clinton struck a markedly different tone. Clinton met with a group of undocumented students on May 5 and described an agenda that reflects just how much has changed since 2008. Young immigrants, in particular, are done waiting for politicians to catch up to the reality of their lives, and their rightful impatience fuels a movement that’s forcing the issue for Democrats and Republicans alike.…

COMMENT London Anybody who says they saw this coming is lying. On May 7, Britain went to the polls confidently expecting some kind of coalition government. The next morning, David Cameron stood outside 10 Downing Street basking in a Conservative majority. Though Ed Miliband actually increased Labour’s share of the vote in England from the 2010 election, it wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the devastation in Scotland, where the party lost 40 seats to the Scottish National Party (SNP), which also picked up 10 seats from the Liberal Democrats. Provided they don’t destroy themselves in the referendum—promised by 2017—on whether Britain should leave the European Union, the Tories will be in power until at least 2020. If a week is a long time in politics, five years is…

On May 5, hundreds of Yale graduate students and allies marched to deliver their demands to provost Ben Polak, calling for official recognition of their union, as well as funding security, racial and gender equity, and improved mentalhealth services. Their petition has more than 1,100 signatures, comprising a large majority of the proposed bargaining unit of doctoral researchers and teaching assistants. The action marks the latest push by the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO–Unite Here). Their yearslong campaign has been reinvigorated with the unprecedented success of a graduate-student union drive at New York University. GESO is now collaborating with other Unite Here locals to pressure the administration. The groups rallying behind GESO are both integral to and dependent on Yale’s institutional economy, and the workers know the university can…

The literary career of Tom McCarthy, one of the leading contemporary exponents of the novelistic avant-garde, is a case study in the application—and misapplication—of theory to fiction. I mean “theory” in two senses: McCarthy’s own ideas, as elaborated in the manifestos of his “semi-fictitious” International Necronautical Society, as well as, more recently, in a series of essays (e.g.,“Writing Machines” and “‘Ulysses’ and Its Wake”); and their principal source, capital-“t” Theory, postmodern philosophical thought of the largely French variety, as expounded severally by Derrida, Lacan, Bataille, Blanchot, et al. William Deresiewicz, a Nation contributing writer, is the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, just out in paperback. Satin Island By Tom McCarthy. Knopf. 192 pp. $24. The former goes something…

COMMENT On May 7, just shy of two years after Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency was collecting and searching virtually all of our phone records, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared that the once-secret program has been illegal from its inception. The court found that Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act does not in fact authorize the dragnet program, in which the NSA collects and maintains records on virtually every American: whom we call, when we call them, and how long we talk. The decision came as Congress considers whether to amend or renew Section 215 before its sunset on June 1. Both of the current options for reform— to narrow Section 215 under the proposed USA Freedom Act, or to let…

Another year, another depressing “State of the News Media” report from the Pew Research Center. This year’s version is almost all numbers, and pretty much all of them are bad. In the crucial category of newspapers, where the lion’s share of reliable reporting is done (before it’s cannibalized by other media), circulation is down around 3 percent from last year’s terrible figures. Ad revenue, down 4 percent, is now less than half what it was just 10 years ago. And if you think these losses can be made up by digital revenue, well, think again. The rise in (cheap) digital revenue doesn’t begin to cover the loss in (expensive) print revenue, especially as ad buyers are fleeing to more specialized social-media platforms. For magazines, the numbers tell an even more…

Shortly after Adolf Eichmann’s arrest in Argentina in May 1960, the sociologist Stuart Palmer wrote in these pages that the fundamental question wasn’t about guilt, but rather: “How can men proceed so that children do not grow up to be Hitlers and Eichmanns?… What could be done about the Eichmann case that would further this end?” His answer: “Eichmann could be understood.” Palmer anticipated the objections: “There will be those who will say that Eichmann is a monster and should be exterminated. There are those who will ask why should the Jews be expected to be ‘better’ than other people; that is, why should the Jews avoid capital punishment in the Eichmann case? And there are those who will say that to ask for understanding of Eichmann is to ask…

My childhood, a grainy old movie,O winter evenings,When mother led me by the handInto darkened cinemasWhere a film had already startedLike a dream someone else was havingInto which we had walked in To find a young woman writing a letterAnd pausing to wipe her eyesIn a room with a view of the gray seaAnd a bird flying about in a cageNo one was paying any attention to,Nor to the white ship on the horizon,Perhaps drawing closer, perhaps sailing away. It was an occupied city, I forgot to say.We trudged our way homeBundled heavily against the cold,Keeping our eyes to the groundAlong the treacherous, dimly lit streets…