Innehållsförteckning för May-11-15 från The Nation

@thenation.com Gender Trouble While Katha Pollitt is a fierce advocate for abortion rights, she missed the mark in her column “Who Has Abortions?” [posted online, March 13]. The article, which discusses abortion funds’ shift away from talking about “women” in favor of referring to “people who have abortions,” is a fearmongering and unsubstantiated piece about how this change erases women from the abortion-rights movement. I serve on the board of the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF), one of the funds featured in Pollitt’s article. I am also the executive director of Third Wave Fund, a feminist, activist foundation. I believe language that doesn’t equate abortion with women increases accessibility of services for trans and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) people, who, because of discrimination at clinics and because these clients are disproportionately…

MC and SJ: The premise of your book is that we need a “Care Grid” to support aging baby boomers. Why do you see home care as integral to that model? Ai-jen Poo: My grandfather on my father’s side spent the last three months of his life in a nursing home. It was an experience I’ll never forget—visiting him in a room at the back with half a dozen other people, half of whom were completely unmoving, and the other half were wailing in pain and suffering. My grandfather hadn’t eaten or slept for what seemed like days. He was afraid. He was convinced that he was going to die, and indeed he did pass away after three months. It was an incredibly dehumanizing experience, and it haunts me today.…

Alexandra Schwartz received the National Book Critics Circle 2014 Nona Balakian citation for excellence in reviewing for her Nation essay “Nobody Else Sounds Like Lydia Davis,” published in the June 2, 2014, issue of the magazine. Naomi Klein has been honored with the Izzy Award for outstanding achievement by independent journalists. The judges recognized her “landmark book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate—as well as powerful columns in The Nation and The Guardian on topics from climate change to racism to torture.” See our October 6, 2014, issue for an excerpt from the book. Dave Zirin, The Nation’s sports editor, has received the National Headliner Award, first place, for writing on a magazine website. His political sports coverage is unparalled and a perennial hit with Nation readers. Lee Fang…

Nathan Schneider’s report in this issue reads like the dystopian echo of a Nation essay from the 1950s. Commentators like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. despaired that productivity gains would only lead to leisure time for those who would fill the time with second jobs to facilitate their crass consumerism rather than, say, dining with the Kennedys on the Cape. Now, as Schneider shows, many workers are so burdened by unpredictable part-time schedules they are unable to use their off-hours for leisure or for profit. In 1958, the novelist Harvey Swados asked: “Will leisure become a term of mockery covering longer hours spent in working to obtain, and then to replace, household objects carefully engineered for rapid obsolescence?” Swados thought a shorter work-week would someday arrive and, sadly, prove Schlesinger’s point about…

WHEN HE WAS YOUNG, Cadeem Gibbs was really into school. Bright, curious, and naturally rebellious, he enjoyed arguing the opposing point of view in a classroom discussion just to see how well he could do it. “I was always academically inclined,” says the Harlem native, now 24. “I always wanted to learn.” But there were plenty of stressors in his young life—a violent upbringing, a household in poverty—and the struggle to navigate them pulled him away from his education. He started getting into trouble and ended up in the juvenile justice system at the age of 12. That first contact with “the system” began a 10-year cycle of incarceration that ended only when Gibbs was released from an upstate New York prison two years ago, at the age of 22.…

We saw the 2016 GOP presidential field for the first time in mid-April, when 19 Republicans appeared onstage in New Hampshire for a “First in the Nation” candidate forum. Most of the speakers had not yet formally declared for the presidency, and everyone was testing out their tentative campaign message on primary voters. But this was not the beginning of the GOP contest—in fact, the most important part is almost over. For months, the candidates had been frantically competing in the “invisible primary,” an ignominious feature of post–Citizens United politics in which the dollars of generous conservative benefactors are the prize. Candidates crisscrossed the country at a furious pace, and with as little public fanfare as possible. Even those who desperately need media attention studiously avoided reporters as they visited…

100K Number of workers who participated in Fight for $15 protests in over 230 cities on April 15 170 Number of US college campuses that participated $7.25 Current federal minimum hourly wage 1.5M Number of US workers who earned the federal minimum wage in 2013 73% Percentage of people on welfare who have an earning adult in the family “We demand the right to earn a living wage. We have a right to take care of our families just like the Trumps.” George Gresham, president of 1199 SEIU in New York City…

Why are reproductive rights losing while gay rights are winning? Indiana’s attempt to enshrine opposition to gay marriage under the guise of religious freedom provoked an immediate nationwide backlash. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has allowed religious employers to refuse insurance coverage for birth control—not abortion, birth control—to female employees; new laws are forcing abortion clinics to close; and absurd, even medically dangerous restrictions are heaping up in state after state. Except when the media highlight a particularly crazy claim by a Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock, where’s the national outrage? Most Americans are pro-choice, more or less; only a small minority want to see abortion banned. When you consider, moreover, that one in three women will have had at least one abortion by the time she reaches menopause, and most…

Aglance across the exhibit halls ofthe National Retail Federation’s annual conference gives little indication that this sector is the country’s largest employer. Inside the glass-walled Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on the west side of Midtown Manhattan, the human fray shuffles beneath a skyline of towering displays that compete with one another to present the most alluring glimpse of a spotless, angular, automated future. They announce countless machines for point of sale, for payments, for disembodied experience. Mixed among them, one slowly begins to notice, is trace evidence of actual retail workers—for instance, a “gamified” console “to help sales associates personalize in-store shopper interaction.” Another display summarizes the prevailing ambition: “Sell more…manage less.” Somewhere on that floor this past January, Carrie Gleason was rapt in conversation with a salesman from…

The soldier the patrol forgot in the garden, the patrol the border guards forgot at the checkpoint, the checkpoint the occupation forgot at the doorstep, the occupation the politician forgot in our lives, the politician who was a soldier of the occupation. The Merkava the army forgot at the school, the army the war forgot in the city, the war the general forgot in the room, the general whom peace forgot in our sleep, the peace that was driving the Merkava. They still open fire at our heads, without orders, just like that, out of habit. (translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah)…

On November 2, 1983, Darrell Cannon found himself in the Chicago Police Department’s Area 2 headquarters with a shotgun barrel stuck in his mouth as a white officer yelled, “Blow that nigger’s head off!” The officer pulled the trigger, but no round was fired, so he pulled it again. But the shotgun wasn’t loaded; it was just one of the tactics that the three CPD officers present that day would use in trying to get a murder confession out of their suspect. Another was applying repeated electric shocks to his penis and testicles until he finally confessed to a murder that he didn’t commit. Cannon served a 24-year sentence and was exonerated after his release. From 1972 to 1991, at least 110 African-American men experienced similar forms of torture at…

In Atlanta, eight teachers, administrators, and testing coordinators have been sentenced to prison terms of one to seven years for falsifying results on standardized tests. Twenty-one others who accepted plea deals will serve lesser sentences. The Fulton County district attorney accused the educators of having “altered, fabricated, and falsely certified” answer sheets as part of a cheating conspiracy that touched a majority of the city’s public elementary and middle schools. Remarkably, the educators were charged under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—an unprecedented application of a law intended to attack organized crime. By press time, Superior Court Judge Jerry Baxter, facing widespread criticism, had announced that he will resentence three administrators given seven-year prison sentences. Meanwhile, the policies that motivated cheating remain in place. Back in 2002,…

In protest of mandatory high-stakes testing, parents in New York pulled more than 100,000 children from classrooms in April. Also in April, members of the US Senate’s Education Committee voted unanimously to send a new bill to the floor that would replace No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2002 law that mandated the use of standardized tests to evaluate and punish teachers and schools. The new legislation, the Every Child Achieves Act, still requires annual testing in grades three through eight and once in high school, but the proposal allows states to determine how the results are used. As NCLB critic Diane Ravitch wrote, shifting the battleground from the federal to the state level could be positive, because that’s “where parents can make their voices heard.” And that makes state…

East Finchley IT WAS THE MORNING THE LABOUR PARTY released its election manifesto, and the papers were full of spin. So with three weeks to go before the polls opened on May 7, I decided to take a look at the ground campaign here in the constituency that once sent a young Margaret Thatcher to Parliament, but has been what the British call a “marginal seat”—held by a relatively small majority—for the past 20 years. The current member of Parliament, Conservative Mike Freer, won by 5,800 in 2010—in a race where the Liberal Democrats got more than 8,000 votes. That won’t happen this time. After five years of propping up the Tory-led coalition, Lib Dem leader (and former Nation intern) Nick Clegg will be lucky to hold on to his…

While reading the first half of Eric Foner’s Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (Norton; $26.95), I flinched at the language used to describe the movement of fugitive slaves: Operatives “dispatch” the runaways from town to town and “forward” them to safe houses further north. It seemed to objectify the slaves (were they pieces of mail?) and to be at odds with the spirit of the book. But when I read the report by Joseph Ricketson Jr., an abolitionist in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to his New York accomplice, Sydney Howard Gay—“I received your valuable consignment of 200 pounds of humanity”—I realized that the underground railroad, a miracle of dignity and defiance, was also one of logistics. Neither the “highly organized system” of early abolitionist lore nor…

“THE HISTORY OF BLACK PEOPLE IN America is full of paradox,” Darryl Pinckney writes in Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy (New York Review Books; $16.95). The controversy surrounding the right to vote, which Pinckney calls “a much-debated and set-upon instrument,” is one of those central paradoxes. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin argued for universal suffrage for all males, but most of his colleagues, despite their lofty rhetoric, disagreed. That “all men are created equal” did not mean that all men, or women, could be entrusted with the vote. “The vote was not a right but a franchise that could be extended or withdrawn depending on social conditions,” Pinckney writes. That contradiction has become particularly evident in the Obama years, when the election of the first…

ACROSS 1 Crazy proposal for travel (10) 6 Assistant reversing digital divide? (4) 10 Business associate sending back money for housing strike (7) 11 Yale student invested in plastic dyes—they keep out the light (7) 12 You sat awkwardly with a poet (5) 13 Where some children learn arrangement of crop holes (9) 14 Think about a swindle, with employee behind schedule (11) 17 and 18 across Miscellaneous source of heat, without liquid (6) 18 See 17 across 19 Where you could get milk or grain, in the past, with raw material (6,5) 21 In the far south, tactic ran off the rails (9) 24 Wood from a plank, turned over (5) 25 Terribly bored, sanction magazine (7) 26 Water shortage is severe within the boundaries of Detroit (7) 27…