Innehållsförteckning för Apr-28-14 från The Nation

This Is Your Brain on Poison Susan Freinkel’s “Warning Signs: Pesticides and the Young Brain” [March 31] should be required reading for everyone who cares about the well-being of children (and thus, about our future), especially for those who believe that childhood vaccines cause autism. A mountain of solid evidence from all over the world indicates no connection between immunization and autism; this article presents some of the compelling evidence that the tsunami of toxic compounds is responsible for neurodevelopmental and endocrine-disruptor damage in children. How much better for us all if the movement blaming vaccinations for autism came to appreciate this evidence and turned its sights away from life-saving vaccines and onto industrial toxins as the likelier source of this heartbreaking epidemic. Alan Meyers, MD, MPH Professor of pediatrics,…

In early April, Brendan Eich resigned his new position as CEO of Mozilla following an uproar over the $1,000 donation he made in 2008 to California’s anti–gay
marriage Proposition 8 campaign. Ever since,
conservatives—obsessed as they are with their putative culture war victimization—have been screaming about a new age of political oppression. “It is one of history’s little ironies that some of our current batch of prim-faced, puritanical, intolerant, and miserable thought police call themselves, of all things, ‘gay,’ something they manifestly are not,” huffed a National Review editorial. “The treatment handed out to Mr. Eich by them and their non-gay supporters is contemptible.” Rush Limbaugh ranted against “fascists on the left,” while Newt Gingrich lamented the “new fascism, which says if you don’t agree with us 100 percent, we have the…

In 2011, the Renaissance Providence Downtown Hotel gained some unwanted notoriety when Joey DeFrancesco quit his service job with the help of his bandmates in the What Cheer? Brigade. A video of Joey’s raucous exit has 4.3 million views on YouTube. “They were stealing our tip money, paying us poverty wages, making us work double or triple shifts,” DeFrancesco told The Nation. “When I quit, I didn’t want to go quietly.” 
 On December 4, the workers declared a boycott. The Unitarian Universalist Association, which had intended to hold its annual business meeting at the Renaissance, canceled 847 reservations. Local politicians voiced their support. On March 19, thanks to the combined efforts of students and hotel workers, the Brown University Community Council (BUCC) voted to discourage the Brown community from…

As the country reeled from the Watergate investigation in September 1973—with the most shocking revelations still to come—Senator Alan Cranston of California took to the pages of The Nation to dissect the broader implications of the scandal. “Watergate was a gross perversion of our democracy,” Cranston wrote in “How to Cure the Corruption,” “but it was not an improbable consequence of the way campaign contributions, in huge sums, corrupt the political environment.”
 The only solution, he argued, would be to publicly finance political campaigns:
 “The fact is that big campaign contributions buy economic privileges of various kinds, like tax breaks, exceptions to the law, special subsidies or careless law enforcement. Every one of these economic privileges takes money out of the pockets of the 
average American taxpayer. By spending $1…

Lexington, Miss.
 Students in this central mississippi town
quickly learn that even seemingly minor transgressions can bring down the weight of the paddle. Seventh grader Steven Burns recounts getting smacked with it for wearing the wrong color shirt; Jacoby Blue, 12, for failing to finish her homework on time; and Curtis Hill, 16, for defiantly throwing a crumpled piece of paper in the trash can.
 In Holmes County, where 99 percent of the public school children are black, students say corporal punishment traditionally starts at daycare and Head Start centers, where teachers rap preschool-age students lightly with rulers and pencils, cautioning: “Just wait until you get to big school.” 
 At “big school,” the wooden paddle is larger—the employee handbook calls for it to be up to thirty inches long, half…

What Soldiers Do Sex and the American GI in World War II France. By Mary Louise Roberts. Chicago. 351 pp. $30. It was 4 am, and I was in a McDonald’s in Naha, the capital city of Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture. Down the street—International Street—was the nightclub that supplied the patrons at this hour: mostly US servicemen, young and bleary-eyed. 
 “It’s like the American embassy in here,” one man remarked, looking around. 
 My friend and I had come from the club too, but we were Asian-American women with no connection to the numerous US military bases that crowd the island. Over Quarter Pounders, we struck up a conversation with a serviceman. Justin, from Florida, was a Marine who had been stationed in Okinawa for the past ten months.…

@SenSanders
Our job is to say to these billionaires, “Sorry, you’re not going to buy elections.” #McCutcheon
 @KatrinaNation
I admire Nancy Pelosi: She’s led for those who need a voice inside/“I never expected anything but a double standard.”
 @billmckibben
Exxon’s new statement: we plan on overheating the planet, we don’t
think any government will stop us, we dare you to try. 
 @EdgeofSports
“In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” should be required for all students in the United States. Rest in Power to Peter Matthiessen.
 @LilianaSegura
Grossed out by media promoting Bush’s paintings as journalists keep dying covering the wars he launched.
 @Ali_Gharib
Some home news: Pleased to announce I’ve joined @theIFUND as a reporting fellow.
 @JessicaValenti
Hobby Lobby’s hypocrisy: its retirement plan invests in contraception manufacturers.
…

Arguments about Israel/Palestine often turn, I’ve noticed, on when one chooses to start the clock. The most recent flare-up began, in this view, at 7 am on Tuesday, April 1, when Housing Minister Uri Ariel of the far-right Jewish Home Party issued tenders for 708 new homes in the illegal East Jerusalem settlement of Gilo. In doing so, he set off a sequence of events that saw the Palestinians deciding to apply for membership in fifteen international organizations, which led Israel to reject the deal that Secretary of State John Kerry had painstakingly assembled (in which Israel would release over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners and extend the peace negotiations for four months, while receiving the gift of freedom for superspy-traitor Jonathan Pollard in return). The day ended with chief Israeli negotiator…

On March 7, Southeast Raleigh High School student Selina Garcia was arrested for fighting on a school bus. The school police officer said she needed to “learn a lesson.” Garcia, who was living in fostercare without a legal guardian at the time, spent twenty days in jail, which was deemed an appropriate temporary home until the county found her a place to live.
 NC HEAT, a youth-led group that organizes around education issues, led a campaign for her release, wearing prison jumpsuits to a school board meeting and calling for accountability in an online petition. 
 On March 27, Garcia was released. NC HEAT vows to continue organizing until police are out of the schools and all young people have access to safe learning and living environments.…

(Sung by Republican presidential candidates to the tune of “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair.”) I dream of Sheldon with the bright orange hair. He need but beckon, and I’m quickly there. The views of Sheldon are OK by me. Always I agree, whatever they might be. Many are the good things about him. I love each. Mostly, though, I love the way he does free speech. I dream of Sheldon with the bright orange hair. He need but beckon, and I’m quickly there.…

It’s the afternoon of February 18, a typically rainy, windy day in Seattle. The glass facade at City Hall offers a spectacular view of downtown, the wet streets descending to the Puget Sound waterfront. Inside, a waterfall cascades down a terrace near the main staircase. The City Council chambers are crowded to overflowing, and television camera crews are standing off to the side in anticipation of newly elected Democratic Mayor Ed Murray’s first State of the City address. 
 Wearing a gray pin-striped suit and a lilac-patterned tie, his face slightly florid, Murray strides up to the podium and leans into the microphone. He opens with a call to confront the city’s challenges with renewed enthusiasm, then zeroes in on his top issue. “We face the largest income disparity in…

Rather than waste your time worrying over the relationship between Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac and pornography, I will pass along a lesson from Harry Atkins, who taught phys ed at my high school in South Chicago many years ago.
 It was Mr. Atkins who happened to be monitoring the study hall on the day I first brought my new Modern Library Ulysses to school. As any man of his responsibilities and training would have done, he took one look at the cover and immediately seized the book, along with the likely opportunity to chastise a wiseass kid and a chance to find a few minutes’ diversion. In silence, Mr. Atkins began thumbing through “Proteus,” “Wandering Rocks,” “Oxen of the Sun,” searching for the good bits. In no time at all…

In 1971, before becoming an associate justice of the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell penned a memo to the director of the US Chamber of Commerce advocating a comprehensive strategy to strengthen corporate power in America. Powell wrote, “Under our constitutional system, especially with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.” In its recent McCutcheon v. FEC ruling, which overturned forty years of campaign finance law by repealing federal limits on overall individual campaign contributions, the Court was not so much an instrument as a blowtorch, searing a hole in the fabric of our democracy. 
 It completed a trifecta of bad Court rulings that started in 1976 with Buckley v. Valeo, which reversed the Midas touch by turning money…

Illustrator Steve Brodner’s covers for The Nation will be included in the American Illustration 33 annual award book. Brodner’s caricatures capture politics at their most outrageous: preening billionaires and venal politicos strut right off the page. In 1998, Brodner designed the iconic poster for Warren Beatty’s film Bulworth, and he has reported on national politics extensively for Esquire. He is part of a distinguished line of Nation illustrators that includes Ben Shahn, Edward Sorel and David Levine.…

There are many ways to tell a story. Here’s one: In 2012, Chinese-Americans Grace and Matthew Huang moved with their three children from Los Angeles to Qatar for a construction project on which Mr. Huang was an engineer. In January 2013, their 8-year-old daughter, Gloria, who had been diagnosed with serious eating disorders, died of cachexia and dehydration. In March, the Huangs were sentenced to three years in a Qatari prison for homicide. 
 Here’s another way to tell the story: Instead of pursuing anything like a proper forensic and factual investigation, Qatari police simply arrested the Huangs for starving their daughter to death, and for child trafficking with intent to harvest her organs. In fact, there was no evidence to substantiate any abuse or intentional starvation. Gloria’s two brothers…

After a recent Friday taping, the staff of the Al Jazeera America news discussion show The Stream gathered for a brief postmortem. Standing around the orange L-shaped couch that functions as the newsroom’s public square, co-hosts Wajahat Ali and Lisa Fletcher, executive producer Jennifer Salan and a few others began to run through an obviously familiar agenda. In a matter of minutes, they deconstructed that night’s show—featuring a debate about regulating e-cigarettes—and tallied up the good and the bad of the cable news they’d just produced. 
 One downside was quickly identified: the show’s three white male guests—an academic researcher, an anti-tobacco-lobby advocate and the CEO of an e-cigarette trade group—suffered from demographic uniformity. Also unfortunate: the show hadn’t included the voice of a nonexpert, someone with a more personal…

Kitty Genovese The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America. By Kevin Cook. Norton. 242 pp. $25.95. Kitty Genovese A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences. By Catherine Pelonero. Skyhorse. 352 pp. $24.95. By the FBI’s count, 9,360 Americans were murdered in 1964. One of them was Catherine Genovese, a 28-year-old New York City resident. Early one March morning, she was walking from her car to her apartment in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens when she was raped and stabbed by a stranger wielding a serrated hunting knife. He left her in an apartment building’s foyer, where she died from suffocation when the stab wounds let air into her chest, compressing her lungs. Today, Catherine (or Kitty, as most people know her) is one…

Shortly after arriving at Yale as a graduate student in the mid-1980s, I wandered into a seminar on Wordsworth and Hegel taught by an ambitious junior professor. When I mentioned Wordsworth’s The Excursion, the instructor readily confessed that he hadn’t read much of the poet’s work: “I mostly know the parts of The Prelude that de Man talked about,” he said. That, he implied, was enough. 
 The figure he invoked, Paul de Man, the famous literary critic, had just died, and he was the closest thing to a saint that Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature had ever known. Genial but shrewd, he was the biggest star of “theory”—the burgeoning field of literary study influenced by Continental philosophy. He had guided his friend Jacques Derrida toward the theoretical revolution that…