Innehållsförteckning för Feb-24-14 från The Nation

Superb Cover
 The cover of the January 27 issue is stunning, in all senses of that word! Your note lists the artwork as “Hale Woodruff’s mural Mutiny on the Amistad (1939), courtesy of Talladega College, Alabama,” which was enough to set me off on a research mission. Thank you. 
 Readers not in the know, as I was not, may be interested to learn that the Paris-trained Woodruff was influenced by the muralists of his day, Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera (he apprenticed under the latter); the cover painting is one of three scenes depicting the rebellion, Supreme Court trial and return to Africa of the freed men of the Amistad; Woodruff had not heard of the Amistad incident before he was commissioned to paint the murals; and Talladega…

First in line of succession after the mayor, Letitia “Tish” James is New York City’s new public advocate—the city’s watchdog and ombudsman. (This was Bill de Blasio’s job before he became mayor.) A former public defender, elected to the City Council in 2003, James was a founding member of the Progressive Caucus and the first Council member to run solely on the Working Families Party line. —Laura Flanders
 Laura Flanders: None of the major papers endorsed you, and The New York Times gave you quite a trashing after your inauguration, accusing you of making “a prop” of homeless 12-year-old Dasani Coates. Do you think it was media bias?
 Letitia James: My inauguration, where a number of newspapers blasted me for my critique of the city, ended with hope, but they…

In November 2006, the people of the purple-hued state of Virginia succumbed to their ruddier tendencies and voted to pass the Virginia Marriage Amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions. At the time, states were busy popping off same-sex marriage bans—six other states rushed to enshrine discrimination in their constitutions that election cycle—and Virginia’s passed with a hefty 57 percent of the vote. In a fit of complacency, Victoria Cobb, executive director (now president) of the Family Foundation, which helped whip up support for the ban, crowed: “We can say once and for all that Virginians have rejected redefining marriage.”
 Well, not so fast. On January 31, US District Court Judge Michael Urbanski ruled that a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal on behalf of…

On January 15, Mayor Bill de Blasio officially launched his Swedish-influenced “Vision Zero” initiative to eliminate all automobile-caused cyclist and pedestrian deaths in New York City. It is a laudable and much-needed program: nearly 300 New Yorkers died in traffic accidents in 2013.
 One hundred years ago, The Nation was concerned with exactly the same problem. An editorial in the February 5, 1914, issue noted: “By far the greater part of this automobile slaughter is caused by people driving for pleasure or desiring to save a few minutes of time in getting from one point to another.… Those who ride in automobiles are a small minority, fortunate in the possession of a luxury and a convenience to which nine-tenths of the people have no access. They have the benefit of…

Apostles of Reason The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. By Molly Worthen. Oxford. 331 pp. $27.95. The Twilight of the American Enlightenment The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief. By George M. Marsden. Basic. 219 pp. $26.99. To the “culture war” opponents of American evangelicalism, the movement presents itself, reassuringly, as a towering monolith—if, that is, monoliths can come in the shape of a cross. The anti-clerical left has rehearsed a long and familiar litany of evangelical perfidy: they’re theocrats, anti-intellectual propagandists, political power brokers and fear-driven purveyors of superstitious folly. Such caricatures may hold water in extreme and absurdly shallow cases, such as Michele Bachmann or Pat Robertson. But ascribing this blunt, authoritarian set of motives to a group as vast and diverse as the American evangelical…

@TheReidReport
It’s emblematic of what the Republicans have become that their idols are a cleancut yuppie family in hillbilly costumes.
 @anastasiakeeley
So @stevenjhsieh was all ready to fact check that response and then THEY DIDN’T EVEN PUT ANY FACTS IN IT. Well played, Republicans.
 @KathaPollitt
Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars: important @thenation piece by @michelleinbklyn. So proud to be her colleague.
 @rgay The Nation piece was well-reported, quoted women of color, and is only one entrant in a huge, messy conversation.
 @prisonculture
I don’t think it’s an accident that many who laud this essay already have megaphones and platforms assured. Pay attention to this.
 @andrea366
I just see that awful @thenation article as hate speech against
@Karnythia and Black feminists who dare to think WW don’t own feminism.…

The genius of Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch in the creation of Fox News has two primary components. The first is financial: it doesn’t take that many disaffected, ill-informed, angry old white guys who couldn’t care less that they’re being lied to to make a cable-news network profitable, but apparently there’s enough of them to make Fox News about $1 billion a year. The second is political: by posing as a ref while actually being a player, Fox manages to corrupt the entire political playing field. What was once considered a “fact”—such as the near-airtight scientific consensus on the reality of man-made global warming, or the birthplace of the current president of the United States—becomes merely one pole in an endless “debate” in which actual evidence carries the same weight…

Jewish college students have started protesting the policies of Hillel, a Jewish organization located on campuses nationwide. Hillel forbids its chapters from collaborating with groups or speakers that support positions it deems anti-Israel.
 Now members of Swarthmore’s Hillel chapter have voted to partner with other organizations regardless of Hillel’s guidelines. And Open Hillel, an organization started by Jewish Harvard students, is attempting to promote free speech within Hillel itself, inviting students and speakers regardless of their beliefs about Zionism.
 More than 1,000 Hillel community members from dozens of universities have signed on to Open Hillel’s petition urging the group to change its guidelines: “Campus Hillels should acknowledge and engage with a full spectrum of political views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” it reads.
 —Aryeh Younger…

It’s an odd thing, really. in certain precincts of the left, especially across a broad spectrum of what could be called the economic left, our (by which I mean humanity’s) accelerating trajectory toward the climate cliff is little more popular as a topic than it is on the right. In fact, possibly less so. (Plenty of right-wingers love to talk about climate change, if only to deny its grim and urgent scientific reality. On the left, to say nothing of the center, denial takes different forms.) 
 Sometimes, though, the prospect of climate catastrophe shows up unexpectedly, awkwardly, as a kind of non sequitur—or the return of the repressed. 
 I was reminded of this not long ago when I came to a showstopping passage deep in the final chapter…

A little over a year ago, I was in Beijing during an extreme toxic event. After hacking in the leaden air for days, I was forced into bed, gasping for breath and gulping down antibiotics and herbal elixirs. Although the weather and the landscape aggravated the problem, nobody—not even the Party—could deny that the polluting particles were being disgorged by local factories and power plants and the cars choking the Fourth Ring Road. This was an anthropogenic nightmare, a symptom of planetary disaster and a byproduct of the headlong development in China that has both lifted hundreds of millions from poverty and fouled their new nests.
 China has a history of such nightmares, the consequences of headlong transformations. The Japanese invasion, the civil war, the Great Leap Forward and the…

American presidential election campaigns are absurd. Absurdly expensive. Absurdly long. Absurdly structured. And absurdly narrow in the range of ideas and options offered to a nation with an absurdly low level of voter participation. If ever there was a time to rethink how this country
chooses its chief executive, this is it. And we don’t mean that in some rhetorical sense. We mean that this is the time, right now—two years before the first caucuses and primaries, thirty-three months before the November 2016 election names the forty-fifth president—to get serious about the process. That’s why The Nation is launching what we call “Project 45,” an initiative that refuses to accept the assumption that the 2016 campaign has to be dictated by insiders. We will identify and promote the reforms (and reformers)…

The United States Postal Service is commemorating Shirley Chisholm this year for its annual Black Heritage stamp series. Chisholm, the first black congresswoman in the United States and the nation’s first African-American to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, was also an outspoken political firebrand. New Yorkers who are feeling extra-festive can head to the Shirley A. Chisholm Post Office in Brooklyn to pick up the commemorative stamps, which promise to elevate any kind of mail you’ve got.
 —Julianne Hing Colorlines.com…

In late January, Kansas State Senator Mary Pilcher-Cook introduced a bill that would have criminalized the use of surrogate contracts in pregnancy and imposed a $10,000 fine and up to a year in jail for anyone participating in such a transaction. The effort was quickly abandoned amid a storm that included pro-lifers battling pro-lifers, invocations of God having hired the Virgin Mary as a surrogate, sonograms performed live in a senate committee and a host of other risible posturings.
 If the bill hadn’t been body-slammed into the dust by some of the sillier statements of its chief proponent (Pilcher-Cook asserted, for example, that surrogacy creates children who are “not going to have either a biological mother, biological father or both”), the discussion might have garnered more attention. The laws regarding…

In 2007, Stephanie Costello
had a boring office job with a lot of downtime that she spent online. She recalls the day she read one of those articles on MSN.com that have become a staple of the Internet: how to make extra money online. These types of articles often appear in the soft-news sections of MSN, Yahoo and other sites, usually with the message that there is money being left on the table. Costello was intrigued at the prospect of cutting through the boredom of her day with the opportunity to pick up a little extra cash. She went to the website, Mechanical Turk, where companies can post tiny tasks and workers can find and perform them online. It was free to register—no call for an “investment” up front, which indicated…

Late in Robert May’s documentary Kids for Cash, you see a broadcast video of former judge Mark A. Ciavarella as he emerges from the courthouse in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to face a scrum of reporters and camera operators after his February 2011 conviction on twelve of thirty-nine counts of racketeering, bribery and extortion. According to federal prosecutors, he had used his power as the juvenile court judge of neighboring Luzerne County to funnel thousands of children into for-profit prisons in exchange for kickbacks from the operators. As Ciavarella stands in grim silence beside his lawyer, who is making the obligatory futile effort to portray disgrace as exoneration, a slim blond woman named Sandy Fonzo, the mother of one of the wronged children, sweeps around the right flank of the press corps…