Innehållsförteckning för May-12-14 från The Nation

Locked Up in Alabama
 “The Return of the Debtors’ Prison,” by Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan Seville [April 14], mentions so many injustices that I describe in my book Calla Lilies: A True Story of Four Sisters and Their Struggle to Survive Abuse, Addiction, and Poverty in America. The sisters, from Tuscaloosa, have a similar story to tell. It is not quite as bad as in Harpersville, but these women have repeatedly experienced debtors’ prison, which is exactly what I call it. 
 When arrested for misdemeanors like traffic tickets, they end up “sitting it out” in jail to pay for their fines and court costs. At least, unlike in Harpersville, fines can be paid off through jail time, sometimes lasting months. When will we learn that there are constructive…

In defiant defense of ZunZuneo, the Agency for International Development’s secret text messaging program in Cuba, USAID spokesman Matt Herrick declared the agency “proud” of its Twitter clone, which, at its height, reached more than 60,000 Cuban cellphone users. The aim of the program, according to Herrick, “was to create a platform for Cubans to speak freely among themselves, period.” US officials at first denied that it had any political intent or sent out any political messages. But AP, which broke the story, decisively refuted those claims by publishing the political tweets and interviewing a subcontractor who wrote them. 
 Administration officials nevertheless remained unapologetic. In a Senate hearing, USAID administrator Rajiv Shah insisted the program was not covert, merely “discreet,” and that it was just trying to “enable open…

At a panel titled “Grassroots Organizing” at the Network for Public Education conference in Austin in March, an audience member asked the all-white panel for its definition of “grassroots.” The conference had been called to “give voice to those opposing privatization, school closings, and high-stakes testing.”
 As the questioner pointed out, those disproportionately affected by these developments are poor and minority communities. Chicago, for example, a city that is one-third white, has a public school system in which 90 percent of the students are children of color and 87 percent come from low-income families. When the city schools shut down last year, 88 percent of the children affected were black; when Philadelphia did the same, the figure was 81 percent.
 You’d think black people might have something to contribute to…

This is a story about bad timing.
 One of the most disturbing ways that climate change is already playing out is through what ecologists call “mismatch” or “mistiming.” This is the process whereby warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses. 
 The migration patterns of many songbird species, for instance, have evolved over millennia so that eggs hatch precisely when food sources such as caterpillars are at their most abundant, providing parents with ample nourishment for their hungry young. But because spring now often arrives early, the caterpillars are hatching earlier too, which means that in some areas they are less plentiful when the chicks hatch, threatening…

The Black-Eyed Blonde A Philip Marlowe Novel. By Benjamin Black. Henry Holt. 290 pp. $27. The dirty truth about reading books when you’re in the publishing business is that it is impossible to do so free of preconceived notions. Before we read a single word of prose, we judge the cover, the title, the jacket copy, and we wager whether our friends were compos mentis when they urged us to “read this now.” We skim the reviews, analyze the blurbs and dig beneath the coded “marketing plans” to speculate whether the book has a better-than-even chance of selling more than a token number of copies.
 Add a famous literary character to the mix, one with a secure, enduring reputation, and our prejudices (positive or negative) grow even stronger. The character…

It used to be that only works by blue-chip artists got traded like currency, but these days, clusters of speculators have figured out how to manipulate the market for up-and-comers, too. They buy quantities of work by kids just out of graduate school, trade them among themselves at escalating sums to whip up some buzz, then call the auction house when the price looks right. Selling stock this way could land you in jail, but the art market in 2014 is like the California gold rush in 1849. It’s not clear to me whether the artists involved gain anything more than being able to pay off their grad-school debts. “The road is littered with people who’ve been chewed up and spit out” by this system, according to one market insider.
…

@EdgeofSports
“It’s not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old. They grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” Rest.—G.G. Marquez @KarinaNation
“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember & how you remember it.” Marquez. @NicholsUprising
William Kennedy called One Hundred Years of Solitude the first book since Genesis “that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
 @chrislhayes
What’s the overlap of people defending Cliven Bundy who also say “the law is the law” on undocumented immigration?
 @JessicaValenti
Love that
@ChelseaClinton announced her
pregnancy, looking
forward to a future with “strong young female leaders.” Win.
 @gzornick
GOP sure to debate ACA numbers. Uncon­tested: 5.7m uninsured in ’16 because 24 states have not expanded Medicaid.
…

If you were among those who followed the reports on French economist Thomas Piketty’s US book tour in support of his university-press-published, 696-page, Marxism-tinged treatise on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and taxed your brain trying to recall a remotely recent antecedent for the ensuing excitement, well, relax—there isn’t any.
 No less remarkable is the fact that one can, for once, believe the hype. Beautifully translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Piketty’s Capital is simultaneously intellectually rigorous, historically grounded, culturally nuanced and, in important respects, politically visionary. Even nitpicky economists who take issue with some of his interpretations of the mountains of data he and his colleagues assembled feel compelled to shower the book with praise beforehand—and frequently after as well. Paul Krugman credits Piketty with inspiring “a revolution in our…

In 1990, Kirkpatrick Sale published an essay in The Nation titled “The Trouble With Earth Day” in which he called it “an operation—however well meaning, however many good people involved—that is, at its core, a shuck….
 “It never gets around to asking—much less proposing answers for—those fundamental questions this society must be forced to face: Who, really, is causing the degradation and destruction of the environment? How can they be stopped, and stopped short, not just ‘regulated’ and ‘overseen’ and reformed?… What would it take to accomplish the serious, wrenching, full-scale readjustments that in fact are necessary to save the earth, including reduced standards of living, consumption and growth; severe population reduction; and a new, 
modest, regardful relationship with the earth and its species? Who is going to carry this…

In November 2013, American climate scientist Richard Heede, of the Colorado-based Climate Accountability Institute, published a paper with a revolutionary thesis. After nine years of researching the energy industry in dozens of countries, he concluded that nearly two-thirds of the world’s carbon dioxide and methane emissions dating back to the dawn of the industrial era were the responsibility of just ninety companies. Heede called them the “carbon majors.”
 Not surprisingly, the biggest players were publicly owned fossil fuel corporations like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron, along with state-held or nationalized energy monopolies in countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia. Just five investor-owned companies—BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, ExxonMobil and Shell—produced enough fossil fuel to account for 12.5 percent of human-generated CO2 since 1854. Seven of the carbon majors are cement manufacturers, a particularly noxious,…

O that common verb. Dress me in spatulas put the moon around my neck. Parting air the poet waves a hand, too much lace and I wonder if the trolley’s real, a giant upside-down flying spoon. God and hair I knew you in the Mechanical Age. Now I am someone who gets off and on trains with dads and bags everyday. Look, it’s 4:43 in the afternoon people go home. My mother wore Obsession in the eighties. I smell fire which has no hands, did you hear me? I have no horses now. Someone did not make your sweater, someone didn’t make it who loves you.…

Just in time for Earth Day came a fresh sign of the growing strength of the grassroots climate movement: the Obama administration announced on April 18 that it would delay yet again a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, probably until after the November elections. Delay is not victory, and Big Oil and its friends in high places will continue to insist that the project go forward. But make no mistake: Keystone XL would have been approved years ago if a feisty popular movement of farmers in Nebraska, indigenous peoples in Canada and environmentalists across the United States had not marched, filed lawsuits, gotten arrested and otherwise opposed a pipeline that would bring to market some of the most carbon-intensive oil on earth. Delay gives activists more time to educate…

For all the media focus on crime and criminals, the needs of working-class and low-income victims of color tend to get scant attention. In a new report, Californians for Safety and Justice take a look at what may be a common but overlooked experience in high-crime neighborhoods: repeat victimization.
 Fully two-thirds of 500 people surveyed last year described having been victims of multiple violent crimes within the past half-decade alone. According to the report, low-income persons rarely access the support they need after a crime, leading to a kind of “walking wounded” phenomenon in high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods.
 —Carla Murphy
 Colorlines.com…

Before the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about “violations of the Constitution of the United States” and “encroachments upon the reserved rights of the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words was money. So much goddamn money. 
 The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession. The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced…

In February, the Russian director Dmitri Tcherniakov produced a new staging of Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor at the Metropolitan Opera. It was last performed there in 1917, sung in Italian. The opera, which was left unfinished at the time of the composer’s sudden death while attending a military ball in 1887, is based on a twelfth-century Slavic epic, The Song of Igor’s Campaign, best known by the English-speaking world in a translation by Vladimir Nabokov. Borodin had left several plot points unresolved: What happens to the young lovers, for example? Other important events, including a major battle in which Igor suffers defeat and is taken captive, were left to the audience’s imagination. Because Borodin died before finishing most of the orchestrations, they were eventually provided by two of his friends,…

In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Žižek’s rambling psychoanalytic diagnosis of classic Hollywood films, the Slovenian philosopher claims that the three Marx Brothers—Groucho, Chico and Harpo—each represent a single element of the Freudian psyche: superego, ego and id, respectively. A similar scheme is at play in E.L. Doctorow’s twelfth novel, Andrew’s Brain (Random House; $26), which is structured as an ongoing conversation in an undisclosed location in the early 2000s between a middle-aged cognitive scientist named Andrew and someone he calls “Doc,” presumably his psychotherapist, though Doc’s identity is never made explicit. The novel features two speaking characters at most, but many more personalities. Throughout, Andrew refers to himself alternately as the Holy Fool (spontaneous, gregarious, smoking a cigar), Sir Andrew the Pretender (happy, rational, ephemeral) and “the brain,”…