Innehållsförteckning för Feb-03-14 från The Nation

Hisssssssssss
 Re E.L. Doctorow’s “Our Virtual Hell,” his wonderful comment about the Internet [Dec. 23/30, 2013]: there is a way to fight back:
 Or, as Eve should have asked the serpent when he offered her the fruit of knowledge (lately known as the Internet), “Did you wash it?” Peter Weiss New York City _________________________ The Scourge of Gentrification
 Re Michelle Goldberg’s “Solving Gentrification” [Dec. 23/30]: zoning cannot fix what inadequate income taxation is causing, not only in New York. But I wish the best to Mayor
de Blasio anyway. Muser 
 _________________________ I know how it feels to suddenly be surrounded by crowds of new, young, ambitious, monied people who start describing my hometown to me in terms I’ve never heard before. Generations of experience and know-how are suddenly thrown out…

In a move hailed as “groundbreaking” by school discipline reform advocates, the departments of Education and Justice recently issued new guidelines for disciplinary policies in a move designed to prevent racial discrimination against students.
 The guidelines are the product of an initiative between the two federal departments to address the school-to-prison pipeline, since school disciplinary measures are often disproportionately applied, with black students receiving harsher treatment than their white peers. 
 —Julianne Hing Colorlines.com…

I wanted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s press conference to go on forever. And, at 114 minutes, it almost did. I wanted to know more about traffic studies, and Christie’s workout and his personal trainer, his four-hour middle-of-the-night heart-to-heart with his wife, the tight-knit family atmosphere he cultivates at the office and how that had no bearing at all on whether he knew what was going on there. I especially wanted to know more about the governor’s feelings. We know he felt “blindsided,” “humiliated” and “embarrassed” by high-level close associates who arranged for a four-day traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge last September, possibly to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, who hadn’t endorsed him for re-election. And we know he was unhappy (“I am a very sad person…

On May 5, 1964, four months after Lyndon Johnson committed America to a “War on Poverty,” Sargent Shriver addressed a meeting of the Advertising Council in Washington, DC. At the time, Shriver was working two jobs: he was head of the Peace Corps and, simultaneously, had been tapped by the new president as a special assistant to run Johnson’s anti-poverty initiative. 
 Standing before his audience, Shriver talked of a meeting that he’d had with an unnamed journalist the previous week. The journalist told him, he reported, that “before you can do anything about poverty, you’ll have to fumigate the closet in which Americans keep their ideas about the poor. You’ll have to rid America of all its clichés about the poor, clichés like the one which says that only…

The massive show of war photographs on display at the Brooklyn Museum is somewhat of a mess. Its unusual, if not bizarre, organization fails to foster—in fact, actually precludes—a creative conversation (moral, political or historic) among the 377 photographs it presents. In this sense, the exhibit, which spans more than 150 years and is modestly titled “War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” is a wasted opportunity. And yet, almost in spite of itself, it also shows precisely what photography can do so well—sadly, perhaps—when it comes to documenting the sufferings and atrocities we gather under the rubric “war.” And so, despite its grave failings, this is a show that is well worth seeing. 
 Perhaps the show’s curators thought they needed some novel device—something unusual, improved and snazzy—that…

All reds come in the shape of lips. Even—s’il vous plaît—our shy little Mazovian cherries. So we shall write with a promiscuous tongue and instead of a period—make a lip print. At the railway station buffet in Radom we drink beer, and the world seen through a full mug is yellowed with the fright of Van Gogh, and a mug—mon Dieu!—also has no ear. Paris! Paris! Ai, dana, da dana! We climb atop our dresser stands and dream of the avant-garde’s New Trick: The Straight Line, which is a stem, and at its end hangs a lip-colored cherry. Oh, sweet drop of Marseillaise, little planet of our malignancy, flow down, drop into our thin borschts! We geometricians of form, puddle-jumpers into others’ imaginations, are waiting for you. And let the…

@KatrinaNation Productivity at
@thenation very low as many glued to screens watching Guv Christie say I’m sorry scores of times.
 @pourmecoffee
“Everything dies baby, that’s a fact, but maybe everything
that dies someday comes back.” —Drunk Chris Christie singing out loud in den
 @JessicaValenti You know your iPhone is hip to your feminist agenda when autocorrect keeps changing “favorite” to “abortive.”
 @brycecovert Unemployment rate for black people (11.9%) still more than twice that for white people (5.9%).
 @mychalsmith Don’t be the “we’re all the same race—human” guy. I
promise you, no one likes that guy.
 @EdgeofSports
Rest in Power Amiri Baraka.
 @LilianaSegura “There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.”
RIP Amiri Baraka
…

The November 24 interim agreement between Iran and the P5+1 world powers, which moved into its implementation phase in January, could be blown apart if Congress, backed by hawks and the Israel lobby, enacts yet another Iran sanctions bill, the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act. 
 Like a scene from The Walking Dead, seventy-seven neoconservative pundits, analysts and former officials—almost all of them the same people who, as members of various committees and ad hoc think tanks, pushed for war against Iraq from the late 1990s to 2003—sent a letter to congressional leaders backing the reckless scheme. Among the signers: William Kristol of The Weekly Standard; former senator Joe Lieberman, Michael Rubin and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute; former Pentagon official Douglas Feith; Fred Kagan, an architect of…

New York University’s expansion plans hit a snag on January 7 after State Supreme Court Justice Donna Mills ruled that the city illegally approved construction within public parklands without the state’s approval.
 By allocating three strips of public parkland for non-park uses without proper approval, Justice Mills ruled, the city had violated the Public Trust Doctrine. Now NYU must seek the State Legislature’s approval before using these small parklands for the project.
 “We’re thrilled by this decision, which will save NYU’s neighborhood—and NYU itself—from an expansion plan that has no academic rationale,” said Mark Crispin Miller, an NYU professor. “That’s why thirty-nine schools and departments have passed resolutions urging President [John] Sexton either to abort it or rethink it.”
—Connor Durkin…

With more than 46 million people living below the poverty line, struggling to survive on $19,530 or less for a family of three, and with more than one in three Americans living on less than twice that amount, scrimping to pay for basics, this country will require a broad-based movement to reverse the decades of failed national imagination.
 The groups listed below are all worth watching as they do just that: galvanize communities, arm activists with information, and fight for living-wage jobs, stable housing and a strong safety net that catches people when they fall.
 1. Coalition of Immokalee Workers: If you want to see what is possible through grassroots organizing by those who are most affected by poverty—or what it means to set a seemingly unreachable goal and persevere,…

The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov By Denise Levertov. Introduction by Eavan Boland. Edited by Paul Lacey and Anne Dewey. New Directions. 1,063 pp. $49.95. “The audience sounds quite frightening & what if they ask me clever questions?” So Denise Levertov confided in a letter to Robert Duncan about a reading he had arranged for her in San Francisco. It was December 1957, and Levertov was 34, a recent bohemian emigrant from England living with her American husband, Mitchell Goodman, and their son in a railroad flat on 15th Street in Manhattan. She had published all of two books, one of them not mature work. William Carlos Williams was “a little in awe” of her; she was scared to read her poems in public. When she wrote to Duncan, she…

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie mounted what the New York Daily News aptly termed a “pathetic” defense amid the growing scandal arising from the abuses of power that gridlocked access lanes to the world’s busiest motor vehicle bridge. In the wake of his claim that he had been “betrayed”
by his closest aides, his campaign manager and his appointees, there were still some politicians and pundits who imagined Christie might be a presidential prospect. But as Thomas Kean, a former New Jersey governor and a Republican elder statesman who was once Christie’s mentor, said, “You look at [his governing style] and ask, do you really want that in your president?” 
 The ultimate answer will be no. Even before the September lane blockages in Fort Lee were recognized as an act…

On December 12, in a decision formulated behind closed doors, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation green-lighted the New York Public Library’s request to demolish seven levels of book stacks inside the main branch of the 42nd Street Library. But first, the corpse must be prepared for burial: before proceeding with the demolition, the NYPL was instructed to hire an archaeologist or historian to document, via photography and archival evidence, the stacks designed by Carrère and Hastings, which were hailed as marvels of engineering when they were unveiled in 1911.
 This is a wake-up call for New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, who held a press conference on the steps of the NYPL on July 12 to declare his opposition to the Central Library…

The brilliant and controversial Amiri Baraka, formerly LeRoi Jones, died January 9 at age 79. In poetry, plays, fiction, essays and film—including some work tainted by anti-Semitism and homophobia—Baraka “taught us how to examine our beauty as well as our ugliness,” in the words of the poet E. Ethelbert Miller.
 Baraka’s most memorable contribution to The Nation was the essay “In the Ring,” about the 1964 fight between Cassius Clay—who would later be known as Muhammad Ali—and Sonny Liston.
 “Clay is not a fake, and even his blustering and playground poetry are valid; they demonstrate that a new and more complicated generation has moved onto the scene…. However, his choice of Elijah Muhammad over Malcolm X (if indeed such is the case) means that he is still a ‘homeboy,’ embracing…

Over the past several decades, multinational corporate Goliaths have helped to write and rewrite hundreds of rules skewing tax, trade, investment and other policies in their favor. The extraordinary damage these policies have caused has become increasingly apparent to the communities and governments most directly affected by them. This, in turn, has strengthened the potential of a movement that’s emerging to try to reverse the momentum. But just like David with his slingshot, the local, environmental and government leaders seeking to revise rules to favor communities and the planet must pick their battles carefully. 
 One of the most promising of these battles takes aim at an egregious set of agreements that allow corporations to sue national governments. Until three decades ago, governments could pass laws to protect consumers, workers,…

Smart Cities Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. By Anthony M. Townsend. Norton. 384 pp. $28.95. “When wireless is perfectly applied,” declared the radio pioneer Nikola Tesla in Collier’s in 1926, “the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain.” To an avowed techno-skeptic and inveterate late adopter like me, this is a provocative statement. That anything wrought by the human mind could ever be applied “perfectly” to “the whole earth” is pure fantasy belied by the evidence of history. One need only consider that ongoing nuclear brinkmanship and global warming are but two outcomes of the human mind’s overweening ambitions. That the majesty of the world can be reduced to the material workings of a “huge brain” is Enlightenment-addled dystopianism of the first…