Innehållsförteckning för Mar-10-17-14 från The Nation

Hunger Games?
 I am a huge fan of the Olympics. I love the different events and the competition among nations and athletes. A big part of my love of the Games was because I thought of them as so much cleaner than US professional sports. Your February 10 issue on Sochi pretty much shattered that illusion—especially Andrew Jennings’s article on the IOC and Samantha Retrosi’s “The Cruelty of the Olympics.” I still watch, but… a bit of the magic is gone. I’ll not complain, though. It was a great eye-opening issue, and I’m better off if I have fewer illusions.Aaron Bennett Somewhere In Cyberspace
 _________________________ It’s true. The magic of the Olympics is gone. It’s like Disneyland now; we’ve all seen the man behind the curtain. It’s all constructed. We…

In November 1992, Vanity Fair published an article about the bitter breakup of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen that concluded: “A gripping courtroom drama may be in the making, one that would undoubtedly give tabloid TV its highest ratings ever. Or things could be settled overnight. Left unresolved, however, is the healing process.” The timbre of that conclusion, a combination of hoped-for salaciousness and therapeutic cliché, is typical of its author, Maureen Orth, a journalist breathless for the lurid detail, who years later would relay as fact any story of priestly perversion an accuser or his personal injury lawyer fed her. 
 Trampling on an accused priest’s due process rights doesn’t matter to a lot of people, even civil libertarians. Ordinarily, an overgrown gossip column with pretensions wouldn’t matter either,…

Last year, a Washington State Dream Act that would give undocumented students access to state financial aid passed with bipartisan support in that state’s House of Representatives, before it was stalled in the State Senate’s Higher Education Committee. 
 Since then, Dreamers have increased the pressure. On the first day of this year’s session, the House passed the Dream Act again. On January 17, Dreamers met with Republican State Senator and Dream Act opponent Barbara Bailey to share how unequal treatment has impacted their lives. Bailey changed her mind once a funding source for the measure was identified. On January 31, with Bailey’s support, the Senate passed similar legislation, dubbed the Real Hope Act. 
 As the bill heads back to the House, Dreamers are confident that bipartisan agreement will…

It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and I found myself hanging around the House-side entrance to the Capitol building, hoping to interview lawmakers during the protracted government shutdown in October. The members had been called by the Republican leadership to open just one slice of the government without authorizing funds for the Affordable Care Act, a partial solution that had rallied Democrats in opposition. As dusk settled in, I lingered to interview the representatives as they walked in and out of what everyone considered at this point to be a scene of political theater.
 While I waited, a small crowd gathered, composed of men and women in business attire, creating something of a receiving line where they could exchange pleasantries with members of Congress as the latter made their…

Whistler A Life for Art’s Sake. By Daniel E. Sutherland. Yale. 440 pp. $40. Was formalism drilled into American culture at West Point? Neither Edgar Allan Poe nor James McNeill Whistler were notable successes there. The young writer was dismissed in 1831 for gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders, and twenty-three years later, the future artist was declared deficient in studies and conduct and likewise shown the door. Yet it’s hard to read Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition”—the essay in which he claims to lay out the process of ratiocination by which he composed “The Raven”—without wondering what effect an education in engineering and military tactics might have had on his distinctly calculated approach to the construction of a poem. And to hear Whistler tell it, his paintings—vague and…

@chrislhayes
Impeach winter.
 @KatrinaNation
Consumed with True Detective...Woody & Matthew...and consumed w/building a progressive future.
 @scATX
We are on the verge of having 5 clinics in a state of 26 million. Know why? The GOP. Know who tried to stop that? WENDY DAVIS.
 @JessicaValenti
“Davis was wearing a fitted black dress & high heels.” I long for the day a reporter writes that a male politician wears clothing THAT FITS.
 @KathaPollitt
“Can Wendy Davis Have it All?” Can you imagine NYT mag editorial meeting that came up with that sexist cliché hed?
 @EdgeofSports
Anyone who says they “fight for the future of journalism” has to fight for a paid future. Or just those who can work for free will do it.
 @brycecovert
Min wage worker: “I don’t feel like I have anything for myself. After 22 years,…

Whenever death or scandal visits a famous actor or director, conservatives find a way to blame liberalism. Did addiction kill Philip Seymour Hoffman? Not according to National Review’s Ben Shapiro. He blamed what he called “libertinism,” explaining that “the Hollywood demand is for more self-abasement, less spirituality, less principle, less [sic] standards.” He then added: “[W]ithout a sound moral structure around those in Hollywood who have every financial and talent advantage, the path to destruction is far too easy.”
 The comment recalled nothing so much as Newt Gingrich’s 1992 observation that “Woody Allen had non-incest with his non-daughter because they were a non-family. It’s a weird situation, and it fits the Democratic Party platform perfectly.” The connection? “The left-wing Democrats will represent the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total…

There is a moment in the film 12 Years a Slave when Solomon Northup understands the depth of the trouble he is in. Lying shackled in a pen after having been drugged, kidnapped and sold to slave traders, he wakes up to protest to his captors that he is a free man. They demand to see his free papers. Just a few days earlier, he had thought carrying such papers unnecessary, even in a slave state. “I thought at the time, I must confess, that the papers were scarcely worth the cost of obtaining them,” he wrote in his memoir. “The apprehension of danger to my personal safety never having suggested itself to me in the remotest manner.” Only after he finds himself without them does he discover their—and therefore…

Raleigh, N.C. On February 1, 1960, four black students at
North Carolina A&T kicked off the decade’s civil rights movement by trying to eat at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Greensboro. Two months later, young activists founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University in Raleigh, which would transform the South through sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration drives. 
 So it was fitting that when North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement held a massive “Moral March” in Raleigh on February 8, it began at Shaw University, exactly fifty-four years after North Carolina’s trail-blazing role in the civil rights movement. Tens of thousands of activists from thirty-two states—representing all different backgrounds, races and causes—marched from Shaw to the State Capitol, protesting the right-wing policies of the government (sample…

Weltschmerz ran deep at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan in January when Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, and Elizabeth Diller, of Diller, Scofidio and Renfro (DS+R), defended their recently announced plans for the museum’s expansion. These have sparked controversy because they include razing the neighboring, now-empty American Folk Art Museum building, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and purchased by MoMA in 2011. The vitriol from the local critical and architectural community has been raucous, ad hominem. The crowd at Ethical Culture wanted blood, to see DS+R taken down a peg, shamed. Why? To be sure, the quirky little building—which opened in 2001, just after 9/11—is worthy of defense: it is a beautiful and unusual work with the remnant scale…

The proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable into a telecommunications behemoth is the media equivalent of “too big to fail” banking. If the largest cable provider in the United States is allowed to merge with the second-largest, people living in major cities, suburbs and small towns across the country will find themselves even more tightly locked into a dysfunctional relationship with a monopolistic corporation focused on maximizing profits rather than serving local citizens. At the same time, the new cable giant will own national news, entertainment, sports and Spanish-language networks. With its dominance of communications in population centers, its networks and its defining role in digital communications (as a prime provider of Internet service), a single corporation will be in an unprecedented position to dictate the development and…

US courts continue to imprison people for being poor, and private probation companies are profiting from the practice. 
 The initial charge in such cases is usually only a misdemeanor, according to a new Human Rights Watch report focusing on Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. In Georgia alone, private probation companies collect a minimum of $40 million in fines each year.
 Take the case of Thomas Barrett: after failing to pay a $200 criminal fine for shoplifting a $2 can of beer, Barrett racked up more than $1,000 in extra fees to his probation company. So he was jailed. At the time, Barrett was selling his own blood plasma twice a week to raise money. 
 —Carla Murphy Colorlines.com…

The president advocates an unprecedented “free trade” deal, backed by powerful corporate interests, that will further erode the security of workers and the middle class, irreparably harm the environment, and undercut important financial, medical and food-safety regulations.
 Barack Obama and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? Yes. But it also describes President Bill Clinton and NAFTA, which went into effect just over twenty years ago. In March 1993, The Nation published “Notes on NAFTA” by Noam Chomsky, who argued that such agreements reflect what Adam Smith called “the vile maxim of the masters of mankind”: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other People.”
 Chomsky wrote that agreements like NAFTA and today’s TPP “override the rights of workers, consumers, and the future generations who cannot ‘vote’ in the market on environmental issues. They…

Cameras never did sit easily in Parliament. Only recently, almost twenty-five years after electricians wired the House of Commons for television, a proposal to shoot House members from more flattering angles was struck down. The eight cameras that Margaret Thatcher fought to keep out of Parliament—and whose introduction converged with her final months in power—will remain fixed from a great, feature-distorting height. Still intact as well is a provision from a 1989 broadcasting agreement stipulating that “no extracts from parliamentary proceedings may be used in comedy shows or other light entertainment such as political satire.” In setting down their terms, the Select Committee on Broadcasting determined that wack angles and bad lighting are one thing, feeding Britain’s raging satire complex quite another.
 The global edition of Comedy Central’s The Daily…