Innehållsförteckning för Jun-02-14 från The Nation

Everything Is Piketty-Boo Timothy Shenk’s “What Was Socialism?” [May 5] was something you could sink your teeth into. Lefties are ambivalent about revolution. The revolutions of the twentieth century proved to be ephemeral flops that paved the way not for socialism but for a resurgent capitalism. They destroyed traditional societies, created working and professional classes, industrialized their countries and did the work of capitalism in record time. Those who benefited most are the plutocrats studied by Piketty & Co. Randy Cunningham Cleveland, Ohio _________________________ Shenk’s article on a revival of Marxism is long overdue. Marx’s analysis of capitalism seems much more persuasive now than it did in the early postwar era. Then we had at least some cooperation between capital and labor. Predictions of the immiseration of the working class…

Sandra Tsing Loh is author of Mother on Fire, inspired by her hit solo show of the same name, which ran off Broadway for seven months. She’s a contributing editor at The Atlantic and host of The Loh Down on Science, heard weekly by 4 million people. Her new book is The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones. This interview has been condensed. —Jon Wiener 
 JON WIENER: This is the only menopause book I’ve ever read. Are there others?
 SANDRA TSING LOH: The literature of menopause is the saddest, the most awful and the most medical of all genres. You’re sleepless, you’re anxious, you’re fat, you’re depressed—and the advice is always the same: take more walks, eat some kale and drink lots of water. It didn’t help.…

Brown didn’t end segregation—big government did.
 When Thurgood Marshall won a case, he would throw wild celebrations—and when he won Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, the champagne flowed like waterfalls. Sixty years ago in May, Marshall joined his NAACP colleagues to toast their success and to drink well into the night. And yet, as the evening wore on, Marshall grew increasingly sober. “I don’t want any of you to fool yourselves,” he warned the jubilant crowd. “The fight has just begun.”
 Marshall, as it turns out, was too optimistic.
 As Harvard’s Michael Klarman has documented, five years after the Court’s decision, just forty of North Carolina’s 300,000 African-American students attended integrated schools. A year later, only forty-two of Nashville’s 12,000 black students studied alongside white children.…

On April 29, Providence, Rhode Island, Mayor Angel Traveras announced he was expanding the city’s free bus pass program for high school students. 
 Under the current program, the city provides bus passes to high school students who live more than three miles from school. For months, the Providence Student Union (PSU) has campaigned for the expansion of this program. In February, the PSU hosted “Walk in Our Shoes,” an event that brought elected officials and education leaders together to walk a PSU member’s average 2.96 miles to school.
 PSU’s advocacy led the mayor to announce that bus passes will be provided over the next two years to students living two miles from school, expanding free public transportation to a total of more than 1,800 high schoolers every year.…

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis By Lydia Davis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 733 pp. $30. Can’t and Won’t By Lydia Davis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 289 pp. $26. Remember Zeno’s paradox, the one about the millet? Drop a single grain of millet and it won’t make a noise, but put a thousand in a sack and you’ll hear them when they hit the ground. One near-nothing has become a big something: absurd, and not absurd at all.
 There’s not necessarily a wrong way to read the stories of Lydia Davis, but there is a right way: begin at the beginning of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009), the sack that holds the four major collections Davis published between 1986 and 2007, and read until you reach the end,…

The Open Mind Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. By Jamie Cohen-Cole. Chicago. 397 pp. $45. Earlier this year, the Arizona State Legislature passed a bill that would have allowed business owners, as long as they were asserting their religious beliefs, to deny service to lesbian and gay customers. Under pressure from the Chamber of Commerce, the state’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer, vetoed the legislation, but it was a close call. As far as its supporters were concerned, the bill was a victory for the civil rights of people of faith; for its opponents, it was just as clearly an assault on the rights of nonheterosexual minorities. This impasse highlights one of the most ticklish questions of liberal philosophy: How tolerant should tolerance be of intolerance? The…

Here are the old folks anchored by old wisdom to the ground, or by old wisdom swiveling on one foot and deliberately tracing a camber in the horizon, karate chop by karate chop. So many meticulous minutes into this, if no castles in the air, they’ve outlined that curvilinear ebb and flow in one of Gehry’s pipe dreams: receding chambers, curls, soft arches cantilevers, like canvases unfolding to wind. The dog stops dead on its tracks, sits and gives a slant look that’s all dog candor and nosiness. The embarrassed owner pulls. The cellophane-wrapped jogger turns also. Pure formalists, they are, the old folks, focusing on the movement of an ostensible form, a structure, something wrought within and needing outing though it’s nothing like art, just fending off stuff inside,…

When the New York Public Library abandoned its controversial renovation plan on May 7, we celebrated the power of journalism to shape policy and its ability to influence a progressive mayor who knows the importance of the city’s public institutions. In July 2011, we asked contributing writer Scott Sherman to profile the new president of the New York Public Library, Tony Marx. Sherman quickly discovered that the NYPL had embarked on a colossal plan to transform its main branch. The resulting article, “Upheaval at the New York Public Library,” published in December 2011, and his follow-up last September, “The Hidden History of New York City’s Central Library Plan,” sparked a major public debate. When candidate Bill de Blasio sought our mayoral endorsement, we challenged him to address the problems revealed…

There are probably more than a few women, safely cloaked in anonymity, who are deeply frightened by Monica Lewinsky’s new essay in Vanity Fair. Lewinsky, after all, is far from the only political ingénue to have sex with a powerful man—and while most of these affairs presumably remain private, her story is a reminder of what can happen when a once-obscure person is involuntarily dragged into the spotlight, her secrets bared to a jeering global audience. Any past or present paramour of the players-to-be in the 2016 election must know that she could become a national punch line. Worse, as Lewinsky’s piece suggests, there may be no coming back from the experience. We still make it much harder for women to transcend sex scandals than men.
 Clinton’s reputation has largely…

Of the more than 800 complaints filed from January 2009 to January 2012 against US Border Patrol agents within 100 miles of the southwest border, 97 percent resulted in no action being taken. According to a report by the American Immigration Council, “physical abuse” followed by “excessive use of force” were the most common complaints. Abuse complaints have grown as the budget of US Customs and Border Protection has more than doubled in size since 2006. Federal officials say they take the complaints seriously but insist that their number is small compared with the more than 1 million people apprehended over the same three-year period. —Carla Murphy Colorlines.com…

“The Climax of an Era,” declared The Nation’s headline marking the Supreme Court’s May 17, 1954, ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. 
 “The decision was a fine antidote to the blight of McCarthyism and kindred fevers,” Carey McWilliams observed, arguing that the widespread approval of the Court’s ruling should be taken as a guide to policy. “For it demonstrates once again the measure of unity and confidence and pride that can be aroused whenever unqualified expression is given to the individual and social values to be found in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Fortunately we continue to redeem, often after costly delays and protestations, the promises to which we are committed by history and tradition and, we can now add, by current conviction.”
 The previous October,…

The Logic of Discipline Global Capitalism and the Architecture of Government. By Alasdair Roberts. Oxford. 220 pp. Paper $24.95. Ill Fares the Land By Tony Judt. Penguin Press. 256 pp. Paper $15. The Society of Equals By Pierre Rosanvallon. Translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard. 376 pp. $35. The Crisis of the European Union A Response. By Jürgen Habermas. Translated from the German by Ciaran Cronin. Polity. 120 pp. Paper $12.95. The Confidence Trap A History of Democracy in Crisis From World War I to the Present. By David Runciman. Princeton. 381 pp. $29.95. if information technology turns out to have world-historical significance, it is not because of its economic promise, still less because it may facilitate the toppling of dictators. It is because information technology makes plain…

Zündel’s Exit By Markus Werner. Translated by Michael Hofmann. Dalkey Archive. 126 pp. Paper $13.50. Zündel’s Exit arrives in an English translation for the first time since its appearance in Austria thirty years ago. Its author—a Swiss student of philosophy and psychology, born in 1944 and responsible for more than a half-dozen books, most of which have been unavailable to English readers—is hardly known in this country, making Michael Hofmann’s translation of this sly, confounding work a welcome contribution. Markus Werner finds company among an elect and heroic group of voluptuaries, but of a special kind; like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, or Beckett’s Murphy, or the high-pitched monodrama of the impasse we get in Buster Keaton, Zündel’s Exit gorges on the limit point of madness, of fidgeting hands and heads…

The Jackson Rising: New Economies Conference, held on the campus of Jackson State University, went off without a hitch the first weekend in May. That, in itself, was testament to something new growing in the heart of the South.
 Conceived as part of Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba’s plan to develop Mississippi’s crumbling capital from the bottom up, Jackson Rising ended up taking place just two months after Lumumba’s sudden death, less than two weeks after the election of a new mayor, and days after the key leadership of Lumumba’s administration—including many of the conference’s organizers—found themselves out of office and out of a job.
 Jackson is a pre–Civil War city whose city hall was built by slaves. With a population of 175,000, it is home to some of the poorest…

The civil war in Syria grinds on, and conditions for Syrian civilians—those inside its borders as well as the millions forced to flee to neighboring countries—continue to deteriorate. As global and regional powers not only fail to help end the war but actively engage in arming and funding all sides in the fighting, we in civil society must sharpen our demands for a different position from that of our governments. 
 The crisis began with a popular call for an end to repression and a nonviolent movement demanding accountability from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and the release of political prisoners and detainees. Economic and environmental traumas, including a crippling drought and the slashing of key government subsidies, underpinned the crisis. The government responded with a promise of reform—which went…

Cecily McMillan was arrested on the night of March 17, 2012, which fell on both St. Patrick’s Day and the six-month anniversary of the Occupy movement—a date that would also become known for the seventy-three arrests that occurred in Zuccotti Park that night. While the police were clearing the park of the throng of protesters, McMillan’s elbow struck NYPD Officer Grantley Bovell’s face. The defense argues that this event occurred when McMillan, leaving the park as directed, was suddenly grabbed from behind by her right breast; her elbow then struck Bovell as a reflex. The prosecution claims that McMillan deliberately elbowed Bovell without provocation while he was escorting her from the park.
 Throughout the case, the prosecution set out to distract the jury, and Judge Ronald Zweibel gave them free…

My Struggle Book One: A Death in the Family. Archipelago. 430 pp. $27. Book Two: A Man in Love. Archipelago. 573 pp. $26. Book Three: Boyhood. Archipelago. 427 pp. $27. By Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett. In 2009, Norwegian state television broadcast “minute-for-minute” coverage of the seven-hour railway journey from Bergen to Oslo. The program was watched, at some point in its duration, by one-quarter of the Norwegian populace. In 2011, the ante was upped: 134 hours of continuous live coverage of the maritime Coastal Express. Half the country tuned in. Two years later came National Firewood Night: four hours of chopping, stacking and drying followed by eight hours of a live fireplace. The word of the year in Norwegian, it was announced that December,…

O beggar, bigwig, mugwump       —W.H. Auden If you got to look it up, don’t use it. A pity since we’ve all known one, guy checking time cards, signing requisitions, woman working her way center stage of my worries. Every decision she weighs, I’m on the balance, the bigwig. Turns out, as from the mess of history because the Algonquians had no clue about Imperator and Centurion and seeing no way to excise dominion and ranks from the account, giving Caesar what’s Caesar’s so to speak, and Antiochus the Seleucid’s also, John Eliot, to let his catechumens into the kindling of the lord, his Praying Indians in Natick, Ponkapoag, Lowell, rendered the smug of sovereign, war-lord, arrayer in a single Wampanoag word, come down as Mugwump, dated but still chiefly…

Divine Fury A History of Genius. By Darrin M. McMahon. Basic. 312 pp. $29.99. If you took piano lessons as a child, chances are you spent a lot of time being looked down upon by a miniature bust of one or another great composer. Placed beside the metronome, in plaster or in plastic, was the glowering Beethoven, the dreamy Chopin, the serene Bach, the puckish Mozart or the sovereign Wagner, each a reminder of the mountain your little fingers were scaling and the mastery required to ascend the summit. More or less unwittingly, you were participating in the rites of a cult. The celebration of the supremely gifted, uniquely creative individual is a modern phenomenon, insists Darrin M. McMahon in Divine Fury, an engaging survey of the history of genius…