Innehållsförteckning för Jun-23-14 från The Nation

Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Going So Fast…
 Buyer beware [Doug Henwood, “The Bitcoin Fantasy,” May 19]. Until governments sanction these things for official purposes, they will remain in the realm of speculators and shadow operators. The run-up of price (in dollars) is probably over. Then again, there once were those tulip bulbs. FriendlyGoat
 Bitcoin will be inflating for years to come (this is the “mining”), and there are several other coins that inflate perpetually. So be careful not to get the technology mixed up with the libertarian baggage of its first iteration. JehanT
 _________________________ Students Keep Up the Pressure
 It’s great to read in “Student Nation Dispatches” about students fighting for social change. I am an alumnus of Pitzer College, one of the Clare­mont Colleges; it is divesting itself of oil/petroleum products.…

Can we sustain the utopian promise of a democratic Internet even as it undergoes rapid centralization? Activist, author and filmmaker Astra Taylor considers that timely question. Taylor’s films include Žižek! and Examined Life, the latter a series of excursions with contemporary thinkers including Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, Cornel West and Peter Singer. She helped launch the Occupy offshoot Strike Debt and its Rolling Jubilee campaign. We discussed her latest book, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.
 —Sarah Leonard
 Sarah Leonard: A lot has been written lately about tech. What was missing?
 Astra Taylor: An accessible political economy of technology was missing. People have, for example, been debating the utility of digital tools in social movements. There was all the hype about the Twitter revolution…

When the United States supported Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, its oil supply from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya and Algeria was cut off. US oil prices tripled.
 To guard against future disruptions, Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, dictating that US crude could no longer be exported, with a few exceptions.
 This ban on domestic crude exports still stands today—though maybe not for much longer. In May of this year, US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced that lifting the ban is “under consideration.” In April, it was discussed in a House subcommittee hearing on terrorism, nonproliferation and trade. In March, politicians suggested that the United States export oil to Ukraine to replace the oil that Russia threatened to withhold during…

June 4 marked twenty-five years since the People’s Liberation Army slaughtered hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed civilians in a crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Beijing.
 Robin Munro, then a researcher for Human Rights Watch, witnessed the final moments in Tiananmen Square that fateful night. Writing for The Nation one year later, Munro sought to correct the popular misconception that students bore the brunt of the violence and that the massacre took place in the square itself. In reality, “the great majority of those who died…were workers, or laobaixing (‘common folk,’ or ‘old hundred names’) and they died mainly on the approach roads in western Beijing.”
 Munro’s article, “Who Died in Beijing, and Why,” shed essential light on the Communist Party’s true fear in 1989: a “full-fledged insurrection” by working-class…

The Most Dangerous Book The Battle for James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” By Kevin Birmingham. Penguin Press. 417 pp. $29.95. In 1946, a precocious student at the University of Toronto wanted to read the library’s copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He was informed that he needed first to submit two letters, one from a clergyman and the other from a doctor. The Canadian ban on Ulysses would not be lifted until 1949, so the young man headed south, to Yale University, where after some wrangling he was permitted to write his PhD dissertation on Joyce, and in 1956 it was published as Dublin’s Joyce, one of the first large-scale examinations of Joyce’s career. Even then, twenty-three years after the US ban against Ulysses had been lifted, Joyce’s book was more often talked…

On June 2 the Obama administration proposed a regulation that, by 2030, would cut carbon pollution from power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels. Many hailed this as the strongest action against climate change launched by an American president. That may be true, but the first
 thing to understand is that the administration had no choice: if he’d done nothing, Obama would have been violating the Clean Air Act by failing to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and he would have been sued, as was the administration of George W. Bush in 2003 by seven states for the same transgression. 
 Questions of compliance aside, is the regulation aggressive enough to meaningfully mitigate the climate crisis? The answer is a resounding no. 
 The key problem is that 2005…

By dressing up three white men and three black men of similar age and build in identical clothes and sending them out into a busy intersection in Portland, Oregon, researchers from Portland State University and the University of Arizona were able to determine that drivers in Portland—and likely elsewhere—don’t treat all pedestrians equally. 
 According to the researchers, the black men had to wait 32 percent longer than the white men and were passed by twice as many cars before they could cross the street. 
 “It’s amazing to look at something you thought might be subtle, and to see it instead so clearly,” said Portland State University researcher Tara Goddard.
 —Julianne Hing
 Colorlines.com…

On May 23, 22-year-old Elliot Rodger stabbed three men to death in his apartment and then went on a shooting spree that killed three more people, injured thirteen and ended with his suicide. Before leaving a trail of carnage and grief across Isla Vista, California, Rodger went to great lengths to create a digital record of his alienation and rage, most of which was directed at women, who he believed had sexually rejected him. There’s a 140-page autobiography titled “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger”; a chilling last video, “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution”; and a stream of comments on bodybuilding websites and the now-defunct PUAHate
.com, a forum for men who have grown disenchanted with the so-called PUA or “pickup artist” community. Thanks to profiles in The New York Times…

During her freshman year at Occidental College in Los Angeles in 2010, Audrey Logan says, she was raped on two separate occasions by a young man she considered a friend. Because she knew him and had been very drunk both times, it took a while for her to identify what had happened as an assault. “I really believed rape happened in the dark, by people you barely or don’t know, and weapons or group force were always involved,” she says. 
 Such a reaction isn’t uncommon. According to a National Institute of Justice study, campus rape victims who are incapacitated by drugs or alcohol very rarely report their attacks to police, and more than a third say it’s because they didn’t realize a crime was committed or harm was intended.…

The Art of Choosing By Sheena Iyengar. Twelve. 368 pp. Paper $14.99. Tough Choices Structured Paternalism and the Landscape of Choice. By Sigal R. Ben-Porath. Princeton. 192 pp. $29.95. The Myth of Choice Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits. By Kent Greenfield. Yale. 256 pp. Paper $16. The Tyranny of Choice By Renata Salecl. Profile Books. 224 pp. Paper $15.95. We are lousy at making up our minds. Advertisers may goad us with slogans like “The choice is clear” and “There is only one good choice,” and the economists who champion rational-choice theory may still evoke a generic, utility-maximizing consumer who sizes up every situation in terms of his or her personal advantage. But after several decades of research—most famously that of Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and Amos…

One way former Kremlinologists were able to detect trends behind the Iron Curtain was to read the poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky. My white students have been writing poems for years about dysfunctional behavior behind the lesser-known “Suburban Curtain.” They write about absentee white fathers who were “tourists” in their homes or absent parents who gave them money, which they spent on drugs. “Debutantes sniffing cocaine from dirty toilet seats” appeared in my student J. Cody Peterson’s “La Jolla. In 3 Acts,” about one of California’s high-income cities.
 Now suddenly, that curtain has been drawn back. Three MSNBC moderators—Tamron Hall, Andrea Mitchell and Luke Russert— were recently shocked to discover that white people use heroin. Hall said white people are not the image that one usually associates with…

First Greg Mortenson, the world-famous author of Three Cups of Tea, raised millions of dollars for schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan that turned out not to exist. Now Somaly Mam, the world-famous Cambodian campaigner against sex trafficking, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, has stepped down from her eponymous foundation in the wake of charges that she fabricated her harrowing autobiography of having been sold into sex slavery as a child. According to an exposé in Newsweek, Mam had a normal childhood and adolescence and is remembered by neighbors as “a happy, pretty girl with pigtails.” Not only did Mam apparently invent her past, she allegedly coached others in her organization, AFESIP, to tell similarly lurid false tales. Long Pross, who has just stepped down as…

On May 10, students attending graduation ceremonies at the University of Mississippi adorned their caps and gowns with positive signs of equality to protest Governor Phil Bryant’s keynote commencement speech.
 Bryant recently signed a controversial law, the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act, potentially allowing privately owned businesses to refuse service to same-sex couples in the name of religious freedom.
 With support from Equality Mississippi, the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, and the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, more than 1,000 students wore rainbow Mississippi stickers on their lapels or “I Am Mississippi, I Don’t Discriminate” stickers on their caps. In addition, more than 100 students, faculty and deans wore lavender honors cords symbolizing equality.
 —Patricia Tortora…

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.” —Martin Luther King Jr.
 Hilton Kelley stood smiling in the clear April sunshine outside Kelley’s Kitchen in the Gulf Coast city of Port Arthur, Texas, and extended a hand. Kelley, 53, is a big-framed man, with generous, gentle eyes and white stubble. The sign on the small corner restaurant reads Delicious Home-Cooked Food, but Kelley’s Kitchen is no longer serving. Kelley opened the place up in his beloved hometown in 2010 and managed to keep it running for about two and a half years. “It was going fairly well,” he told me. “But, you know, the town really doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic on this side of Port Arthur anymore.” 
 Kelley’s Kitchen is the only structure…

Five Came Back A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. By Mark Harris. Penguin Press. 511 pp. $29.95. There’s a brief scene just a few minutes into William Wyler’s acclaimed war film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) when the three lead characters, all veterans returning home, hitch a ride on a repurposed bomber. They’ve just concluded their respective odysseys at the battlefront and are eager to get back to Boone City, a fictional stand-in for pretty much any Middle American town. The fittingly named Homer Parrish, a Navy veteran who lost both his hands in battle and now wears prosthetic hooks (and is played by Harold Russell, a nonprofessional actor who had suffered a similar injury in a training accident during the war), stands alongside Fred…