Innehållsförteckning för May-04-15 från The Nation

Vietnam as Living History George Black’s article [“The Lethal Legacy of the Vietnam War,” March 16] is one of the finest works of journalism I have read in years. Black uses the long-form approach to a long story, but in a way that will engage anyone with an ounce of curiosity or humanity. Not that social media doesn’t have its place, but Black shows us what our culture is losing to chatter. Through characters and vignettes, and without propaganda, he makes the reader understand that Vietnam is not old history, but that the unexploded weapons and cancer-causing chemicals we left behind continue to kill, maim, and deform. Not only people, but whole ecosystems. He describes the journey of an American Vietnam veteran, Chuck Searcy, who stayed behind as a witness…

The framework nuclear agreement announced by US, Iranian, and international negotiators in Lausanne, Switzerland, on April 2 has been hailed by President Obama as a promising step toward peace in the Middle East, and condemned by some as a flawed and inadequate barrier to Iranian nuclear ambitions. Many supporters of Israel—and their allies on Capitol Hill—complain that the agreement will not prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb; some on the left worry about its attendant consequences, such as increased US military aid to Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. Yet if the negotiators succeed in concluding a final deal by the June 30 deadline, Iran’s nuclear-weapons potential will be severely constrained for a minimum of 10 years, and the stage could be set for further progress in reducing regional violence. The…

Last September, Scotland held a referendum on independence. Under the banner “Better Together,” the British media and political establishment campaigned to keep the United Kingdom united. They won that battle: Scots voted against independence 55 to 45 percent. But as the entire British electorate goes to the polls to choose a new Parliament on May 7, it is clear that the political establishment has lost the war—and not just in Scotland. These elections, more than any in over a century, reveal an electoral landscape so fractured by region and party allegiance that the political class barely seems able to keep it together. In reality, there are four or five separate elections taking place, rendering British politics more volatile and unpredictable than at any time in recent memory. In the past,…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2014, SKYLAND SEAFOOD quietly shut down. In Mobile, Alabama, where the shop had been located for 17 years, Skyland’s demise caused a small, heartfelt shock wave, said customer Alice Lang, 67, who regularly mourns the store’s closing in conversations with her neighbors. As she prepared her family’s Christmas gumbo, Lang added that she felt uncertain about the seafood she’d just bought. It was a worry she hadn’t had in years, because she trusted Phoung Nguyen, Skyland’s owner. “Phoung Nguyen was my seafood guy. With him, everything was fresh from the water,” she said. His customers say that six days a week, Nguyen purchased just enough freshly caught seafood to sell that day. When customers bought brown or white shrimp, they waited as he stood behind the…

Hillary Clinton’s long-awaited announcement that she’s ready and running for president touched off saturation press coverage that other contenders can only envy. The former first lady, senator, presidential candidate, and secretary of state has been in the public eye for nearly a quarter of a century. She’s the prohibitive favorite to get the Democratic Party nomination this time, and the odds-on favorite to win the presidency. Yet hurdles remain. Clinton’s challenge isn’t to capture the middle from the Republicans; the GOP’s rightward lurch has already virtually ceded that ground. Rather, it is to inspire the Obama coalition—made up of people of color, millennials, and women—to vote in large numbers, not only to guarantee her victory but also to help Democrats take back the Senate, gain seats in the House, and…

At Google, expectant parents may have plenty to worry about—how much sleep they’re about to lose, stroller brands, baby-proofing—but one thing they don’t have to sweat is taking time off. Both women and men are given paid leave for the birth of a baby—and when they come back to work, the company offers on-site childcare. Most Americans aren’t as lucky as Google employees. Unlike most wealthy countries, the United States doesn’t guarantee paid family leave. We also do little to help families find or afford childcare. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand recently sought to address the problem by reintroducing the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, which would create a new form of social insurance: Workers would pay in a small fraction of their paychecks, and the government would guarantee a portion…

Ever since the House and Senate Republicans released their budget proposals in March, the United States Student Association (USSA) has been leading the charge to defeat the proposed $150 billion in cuts to Pell Grants, subsidized loans, and the income-based repayment and Public Service Loan Forgiveness programs. On March 18, USSA students, staffers, and allies disrupted the Senate Budget Committee’s hearings, chanting: “No cuts, no fees! Education should be free!” Seven were arrested and charged for the interruption. On March 27, more than 200 students and their allies, including Senator Bernie Sanders, descended on the Capitol to protest the proposed cuts. Ten were arrested for blocking an intersection. Days later, 250 students converged on Capitol Hill for a lobbying blitz. USSA is continuing to build support against these cuts while…

Jon Wiener, a Nation contributing editor, teaches history at the University of California, Irvine. WHEN THE PENTAGON ANNOUNCED ITS plans for the nation’s official commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, historians and old-time activists feared the worst. The Pentagon commemoration office, which Congress authorized at a cost of up to $65 million, put up a website in which the war was portrayed as one of “valor” and “honor”—a picture unrecognizable to many Americans, including both veterans and antiwar activists. The general in charge, Claude Kicklighter, promised that the official commemoration would include “educational materials, a Pentagon exhibit, traveling exhibits, symposiums, oral history projects, and much more.” In response, Tom Hayden and a new group, the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee, launched a petition last September declaring that “this…

In the early 1990s, an upstate New York doctor became the medical director of a nursing home populated almost entirely by severely disabled elderly people. Unhappy about all the unhappiness he saw around him, the doctor launched an experiment. Shifting attention from “treatment” to “care,” he introduced plants in the living quarters, flowers and vegetables in the garden, and a veritable menagerie all around the property, including two dogs, four cats, and 100 parakeets. Eventually, he added an outdoor play area for the employees’ children. The results were surprising: greater contentedness in the home’s residents (measurable in part by a large decrease in the need for psychotropic drugs like Haldol), but also extended lives. Atul Gawande believes in targeted fixes, especially small ones. His previous book, The Checklist Manifesto, detailed…

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, THE PROLIFIC 19th-century naturalist and famed ornithologist, wrote in his journal: “A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.” Audubon’s is a vision of the world in which the future is perpetually on loan to those who act in the present, where both procreation and conservation are the destiny of morally upstanding citizens. The idea of saving the earth for the sake of our children remains a secular covenant, even as politics has overtaken it. Nell Zink’s exuberant debut novel, The Wallcreeper (Dorothy, a Publishing Project; $16), which follows the young newlywed couple Stephen and Tiff, American environmentalists living in Europe, wants to break the covenant’s chains by showing how its chains can…

$15M Amount raised by Ready for Hillary from about 150,000 donors $5M Amount Hillary Clinton made by delivering speeches and attending events from February 2013 to May 2014 $2B Amount raised by the Clinton Foundation since its creation in 2001 $1.7B The “educated estimate” of what a 2016 campaign could cost from a Ready for Hillary adviser “I’m now told the Clinton campaign intends to raise $1 billion. Now, that ought to frighten every American.” Gary Hart, former Colorado senator and two-time Democratic presidential candidate…

“Bombs, I write, basically functioned as exploding press releases at a time when there was no Internet or much way of, let’s say, a radical getting his views out to the public.” Author Bryan Burrough on NPR, discussing bombings by leftists in 1970s America The journalist and author Bryan Burrough has spent the last five years researching and writing a book on what he correctly perceives to be an oddly neglected topic: the scourge of left-wing terrorism, much of it by the Weather Underground, during the 1970s. According to FBI statistics, the United States experienced more than 2,500 domestic bombings in just 18 months in 1971 and 1972, with virtually no solved crimes and barely any significant prosecutions. In Days of Rage, Burrough seeks to counter what he views as…

Hillary Rodham Clinton walks in the footsteps of the women candidates who came before her, including Shirley Chisholm, who ran for president in 1972, and Jill Stein, who as the Green Party’s nominee in 2012 won more votes in the general election than any other woman in history. But Clinton’s earliest predecessor is Victoria Woodhull, who was nominated for president by the Equal Rights Party in 1872. The first woman to manage a Wall Street firm and the founder of an American newspaper (both with her sister), Woodhull was an ardent advocate of free love and radical egalitarianism. She was also a member of the First International until its American members were expelled in 1872, with Karl Marx disparaging Woodhull as “a banker’s woman, free-lover, and general humbug.” In 1871,…

THE NATION has been going strong for 150 years, an embarrassing portion of which I have witnessed firsthand. I hesitate to confess the exact number of years, but I am proud to admit that I have left a gift to the Nation in my will. It was an easy decision to make, and not difficult to arrange. I encourage you to join my wife, Annie, and me in doing the same. Please consider leaving a gift to the Nation in your will or through your retirement plan. You don’t need me to tell you that the independent, unfettered voice of the Nation remains as necessary as ever, but I will anyway. Help us keep it that way. Help ensure a home for dissent and dissenters who will challenge the conventional…

On January 7, 2015, the French president François Hollande, speaking in the wake of the Islamist killings in his nation that day, said it was “the Republic as a whole that has been attacked.” Hollande claimed that “the assassins were targeting” not just a few individuals, but the Republic’s core values: free expression, creativity, pluralism, democracy. He vowed that France would defend these values by fighting “against terrorism and fundamentalism.” Almost immediately, some on the left recoiled from such sentiments. The president had implied that there was a fundamental clash of civilizations, which the jihadists may well have hoped to foster—but why should critics of a rapacious capitalism fall in line with the Eurocentric version of that bloody project? After all, Hollande represented a regime that had instituted a kind…

In the back of my classroom stands Blake’s car Bearing Dante’s blest Beatrice; In martial middle, ranked desks, each Packing a lexicon in undercarriage; On one book’s pressed pages, surprise!—a raised Nazi swastika. Find the kid who did it, turn him in to turn Him out? Or claim “a teaching moment,” Redeem the inditer, if woe Like that might ever be removed, might ever Cease being banal? Maybe one should give Credit—extra—for burning Hate not on synagogue wall or lav stall, But on language itself, on thought, A ready reference, a wrought Consciousness, edginess? Perhaps one must Pass on the sinner instead, deal with just The sin, that is, in all Literalness—save at least time and trouble, Change what can be changed, blacken out The offense with more ink (no…

ACROSS 1 Tolerates bad writers (5) 4 Violet kicked back with King Kong, e.g. (a movie for watching at home, once) (9) 9 Team with a specific assignment might ask for certain materials (4,5) 10 Bite a cut of lamb containing bit of mint (5) 11 Without fail, gropes some fish (4) 12 Author discussed something to hold ice-cream-and-peanut product (5,5) 14 Stray scandal concerning an opera singer? (8) 15 Stabs informant, returning contents of desk (6) 18 Get white, and ultimately pastel, in a location where some get tan (6) 19 Capital from friend ahead of a nuisance (8) 22 Wino and lapdog romping in shallow water (6,4) 24 Offensive excerpt from smug lyricist (4) 26 Big cat’s loud growl from Southeast Asia? (5) 27 Pound a long hole…