Innehållsförteckning för Mar-31-14 från The Nation

En Pointe
 Just letting you know how much I liked the cover of your February 24 issue and Wen Stephenson’s article “From Occupy to Climate Justice.” I always thought the ballerina on the bull was one of the most striking images to come out of Occupy Wall Street, and I love what you’ve done with it. I was a member of the Occupy sustainability working group in 2011 and did some workshops at the park on the climate crisis.
 At its best, Occupy prefigured a world beyond the growth model, and the climate crisis has added a terrifying deadline for getting to that world, as Stephenson suggests. The two problems are mutually exacerbating, with climate impacts intensifying inequality, and inequality blocking solutions to the climate crisis (Christian Parenti’s Tropic of…

About a month ago, The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof wrote a much-discussed column calling for academics to take on a greater role in public life. Most professors, he lamented, “just don’t matter in today’s great debates,” having instead burrowed into rabbit holes of hyper-specialization. PhD programs, he wrote, “have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” Professors, Kristof pleaded, “don’t cloister yourselves like medieval monks—we need you!”
 Shortly before his column came out, Carole Vance and Kim Hopper, longtime professors at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, learned that they were losing their jobs because they hadn’t brought in enough grant money. Both, ironically, are models for the sort of publicly engaged intellectual Kristof wants to see more of. Vance has done pioneering…

On March 4, the Florida Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the so-called “warning shot” bill, an expansion of the state’s “stand your ground” law.
 The bill would make it legal to fire warning shots based on a perceived threat, turning what is now considered an armed aggravated assault into a case of self-defense. 
 The bill may also impact the retrial of Marissa Alexander, who faces sixty years in prison for firing a warning shot at her abusive estranged husband. She was unsuccessful in using the “stand your ground” defense in her first trial.
 —Von Diaz Colorlines.com…

More than forty years ago, during my first days at college, I was made instantly and acutely aware that a lot of people seemed never to have met a black person. For the most part they were not intentionally belligerent, but they were excruciatingly, unself-consciously, dopily innocent. (“Leontyne Price actually studied opera? I thought she was just naturally musical… ”)
 Plus ça change, I suppose, but it is a disheartening testament to the intractability of America’s housing and educational segregation that, so many decades after the civil rights movement, many white students still seem never to have truly engaged with a black person till they get to college. More discouraging still, they then seem to turn interrogation of that void upon their black classmates’ right to be there, rather than…

In a small regulatory office 
in Sacramento, California, in 2007, a handful of farmworkers and scientists gathered to explain to state officials why chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide, should be considered a toxicant under Proposition 65, a state law that pro-
hibits businesses from discharging substances known to cause birth defects and reproductive harm into the drinking water.
 Chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate insecticide, was first developed as a cousin to the nerve agents stockpiled during World War II. The chemical has been banned for household use for more than a decade, and studies have shown that infants born to mothers with high levels of chlorpyrifos in their bodies have significantly higher rates of neurodevelopmental disorders, problems with in utero development, brain impairments, low birth weights and endocrine disruption [see Susan Freinkel, page…

Amost ten years after New York
 magazine asked “What Ever Happened to Hal Hartley?”, we still don’t have a satisfactory answer. In the 1990s, Hartley established himself as an eccentric torchbearer for American independent cinema and made (more than once) a very specific type of great film. Filtering Gen-X grunge through a punctilious Bressonian formalism, and anticipating the deadpan dolor of Wes Anderson and Todd Solondz, Hartley wrote and directed irreverent date movies for and about self-fashioned intellectual misfits. No other filmmaker has gotten as much mileage out of filming people read. The quotable ennui and well-protected romantic core of these films mark them, perhaps, as embarrassingly earnest totems of youthful self-importance.
 Mannered, minimalist and
arch, even the director’s best movies can seem a little diffident about their power. Often accompanied…

@KatrinaNation
Sunday talk show champion & armchair interventionist John McCain should just
go & fight in every conflict he wishes to ramp up. Pathetic.
 @NicholsUprising
Awkward! Turns out source for Paul Ryan’s #CPAC speech on low-income kids not wanting “soulless” free lunches now says she, um, “misspoke.”
 @EdgeofSports
THANK YOU Paul Ryan for having the guts to speak out against free school lunches. About time someone stood up
to the freeloading-kid lobby.
 @gzornick
Been at #CPAC2014 for 17 minutes. “Implication that Obama is gay from a speaker” count: 1.
 @RichardKimNYC
Congrats to @mskatemurphy, @MiriMarkow & @gzornick on their promotions! (AME, Dep. Lit Ed, Washington Ed).
 @EmilySDouglas
At the current rate, it will take 500 years for women to achieve fair representation in government! 
…

Almost forty years ago, a Senate select committee known as the Church Committee for its chair, Idaho Senator Frank Church, investigated America’s secret government. The committee’s investigation remains the most extensive of its kind in this nation’s history. Now it is time for a new committee to examine our secret government closely again, particularly for its actions in the post-9/11 period. 
 This need is underscored by what has become a full-blown crisis, with Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein accusing the CIA of spying on the committee, possibly violating the Constitution’s separation-of-powers principles, the Fourth Amendment and other laws. 
 The Church Committee uncovered shocking conduct by numerous agencies, including the FBI, CIA and NSA. For example, the FBI tried to get Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide;…

Whether talking secession, hoarding bitcoin or refusing to expand Medicaid, the American right these days is obsessed with opting out of a society that its members increasingly see as an assault on their way of life. Their latest attempt to liberate themselves from the polity was Arizona’s SB 1062, a bill that would have exempted individuals and businesses from state law if it burdened their exercise of religion. The legislation did not single out lesbians and gays, but it was plainly motivated by anti-gay animus. Recognizing as much, corporations like Apple, AT&T and Intel, as well as the Super Bowl Host Committee, condemned the measure, and the threat of a statewide boycott prompted the state’s Chamber of Commerce to go to “DefCon 1” against it. Critics also pointed out that…

The Beatles’ arrival in New York City fifty years ago last month was “the PR man’s finest hour,” a young book editor named Alan Rinzler wrote in The Nation that March. The media “had instructed novitiates on what to expect and how to react,” which “contributed to a triumphant exploitation of the affluent teen-ager. By the time the Beatles actually appeared on the stage at Carnegie Hall, there wasn’t a person in the house who didn’t know exactly what to do: flip, wig-out, flake, swan, fall, get zonked—or at least try.…
 “The full house was made up largely of upper-middle-class young ladies, stylishly dressed, carefully made up, brought into town by private cars or suburban buses for their night to howl, to let go, scream, bump, twist and clutch themselves…

In the spring of 2011, months after a popular revolution in Egypt had toppled the regime of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian artist Shady El Noshokaty was making enemies. El Noshokaty had been chosen by Egypt’s Ministry of Culture to organize the Egyptian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, and he had selected a piece by Ahmed Basiony, a former protégé of his whose conceptual work bucked the trends of previous Egyptian entries. In the past, ministry officials had chosen more traditional artists whose work tended to depict Egyptian culture in traditional media, painting or sculpture. 
 But Egypt was in a dramatic transition, and Basiony—who was shot and killed by Egyptian police on January 28, 2011, while protesting in Tahrir Square—was a poignant reminder of that. He was also, in…

It was a promising sign last November when the Obama adminis tration nominated Debo Adegbile, one of the country’s most respected civil rights lawyers, to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division. Adegbile spent twelve years at the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), where he skillfully litigated a wide 
 range of civil rights issues, including twice defending the Voting Rights Act before the Supreme Court. He was endorsed by prominent lawyers on both sides of the aisle, including Paul Clement, the former solicitor general under George W. Bush. His experience would have been a vital asset, especially as the Justice Department navigates the fallout from the Court’s decision last June gutting a key section of the VRA. 
 Instead, Adegbile’s nomination suffered an unceremonious defeat on March…

As the demand for cheaper consumer electronics grows, workers are paying the price. 
 Seventy-five percent of the world’s population owns a cellphone, billions of which are made in China. Included among the hundreds of chemicals used in electronics manufacturing are known carcinogens and toxins. Workers exposed to these dangerous chemicals can develop cancer, leukemia, nerve damage, liver and kidney failure, and reproductive health issues.
 The Nation and Green America are calling on industry leader Apple to commit to eliminating benzene, n-hexane and other harmful chemicals from its supply chain. With an estimated 1.5 million people working in its supplier factories, Apple’s leadership on this issue could make a big difference. Join the campaign at 
bad-apple.org.…

On February 19, more than 500 students and faculty at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, protested the latest evisceration of its academic budget.
 A whopping 84 percent of the proposed cuts will come from academic affairs, including the loss of an estimated 390 course sections and $400,000 in graduate student support; UNC’s retention and graduation goals have also been compromised.
 Meanwhile, administrators plan to build a $91 million recreation center, further increasing the cost of attendance even as enrollment continues to drop. 
 Student activists are demanding that the school prioritize funding academics and end the corporate influence on UNC’s advisory committee. The students continue to meet weekly to coordinate pressure on university and state officials.
 —Hannah Mendoza and Juan Miranda…

Driving along Highway 101 through California’s Salinas Valley, it’s hard to miss the fact that you are traveling through one of the most bountiful farm belts in the country. No matter the time of year, it seems, green fields unfurl toward the mountains that flank the valley, and crews of workers are stooped in the act of picking. Some unique alchemy of air, soil and climate exists here to create a place where dozens of crops flourish, from artichokes to zucchini. Growers plant red and green lettuces side by side in rows so they can be picked and packaged directly as ready-mixed salads. Eighty percent of the country’s leafy greens come from the valley, thus its longtime nickname: “America’s Salad Bowl.” 
 For all the natural blessings, that bounty also…

Already, in Rushmore, you could sense that Wes Anderson felt a nostalgia for world-historical sufferings he hadn’t endured. It’s not an uncommon imaginative kink among the more privileged Americans of his age group, the ones who reached adulthood in the safely self-involved years between the demise of the Soviet bloc and the start of the “war on terror.” In the novels of Jonathan Safran Foer—those reconstructions of the twentieth century’s Top 10 enormities, done in a mode of sighing whimsy—you may find one example of an artist of this generation measuring his ease and cleverness against the horrors of the past. Another example is Rushmore, where a 1990s prep-school boy idealizes the Vietnam War as a test of manhood that he will never get to pass, and a thrilling adventure…