Innehållsförteckning för Jul-21-28-14 från The Nation

Saving the Venerable NYPL Scott Sherman deserves a lot of credit for helping to stave off what would have been an act of vandalism [“The Battle of 42nd Street,” June 2]. Thank you, and please keep reporting on the New York Public Library. Hal Grossman New York City * * * Gotta get some NYPL trustees elected by the people, as is the policy in many libraries around the country. There’s too much public money in the mix not to have more representation by NYC taxpayers. Larry * * * I was very pleased by Scott Sherman’s essay, but I must call into question one phrase in it. Mayor de Blasio is a great improvement on Bloomberg, not least for his effort to save the library from being gutted. Sherman…

Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir is used to lighting things up on the basketball court. She did it first as the all-time leading high school scorer in Massachusetts history, and then as a college athlete at Memphis and Indiana State. But she’s having trouble getting her professional career started overseas, thanks to rules preventing her from wearing hijab.
 FIBA—the international basketball federation—does not allow hijab because it says it wants the game to remain “religiously neutral.”
 “As of right now, I’m really in a holding pattern because of FIBA,” the Muslim-American athlete told MassLive. “‘International’ means everyone, and FIBA isn’t inclusive because of its ban on wearing my hijab.”
 —Jamilah King
 Colorlines.com…

Reproductive rights advocates warned of intimidation and violence in the wake of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision to eliminate fixed buffer zones around abortion facilities. It’s a reasonable response given a history of physician assassinations, bombing of medical facilities and harassment at clinic entrances. The decision in McCullen v. Coakley, handed down on June 26, pays lip service to the idea that patients should not be subject to harassment, encouraging localities to implement narrowly tailored laws to prevent it. But the decision is not only a threat to women’s safety when seeking medical care. It is also an insidious attack on their personhood.
 Distinguishing between rowdy protesters and supposedly reasonable “petitioners,” Chief Justice John Roberts imagines a more civil and deliberate process, writing that “petitioners wish to converse with their…

Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Senator Ted Kennedy, did several stints in rehab after crashing his car into a barricade on Capitol Hill in 2006, a headline-making event that revealed the then–US congressman for Rhode Island had been abusing prescription drugs, including the painkiller OxyContin. Kennedy went on to make mental health—including substance abuse—a cornerstone of his political agenda, and he is reportedly at work on a memoir about his struggles with addiction and mental illness. In 2013, he also helped found an advocacy group, Project SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana), which has barnstormed the country opposing the growing state and federal efforts to legalize pot.
 Taking the stage to rousing applause last February, Kennedy joined more than 2,000 opponents of marijuana legalization a few miles south of Washington,…

A Climate of Crisis America in the Age of Environmentalism. By Patrick Allitt. Harvard. 384 pp. $28.95. Scatter, Adapt, and Remember How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. By Annalee Newitz. Anchor. 305 pp. Paper $16. The Sixth Extinction An Unnatural History. By Elizabeth Kolbert. Henry Holt. 319 pp. $28. Oil and Honey The Education of an Unlikely Activist. By Bill McKibben. Times Books. 255 pp. $26. Apocalyptic Planet A Field Guide to the Future of the Earth. By Craig Childs. Vintage. 343 pp. Paper $16.95. If a single book has haunted the environmental movement, it’s The Population Bomb, by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Published in 1968 by Ballantine, the work is remembered for a handful of striking passages: its opening description of seething crowds in Delhi; its prediction that…

We didn’t protest. It’s not like you’re going to get anything from anybody. They don’t have it either. And the new system moved pretty quick— I had found a feral walking stick stripped from a tree by a new June shower nursing trumpets of crumbled lilac & held her scarlet eye on the outpatient pharmacy line— If the breadth of the difficulty rejects one ardent name I may still call the hour a phasmid or phantom freely stealing my heart from the other needs that burn it.…

On the last Tuesday in June, six-term Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran narrowly won a hard-fought Republican run-off election against his virulently anti-government Tea Party challenger, Chris McDaniel. The reason, the pundits quickly concluded, was an unprecedented surge in black Democrats—some 13,000 or more—crossing over to support Cochran. “It should send a message,” said retired school principal Ned Tolliver. “It shows that we have the power to elect who we want to elect when the time is right.” Around the time the polls closed, a very different view of Mississippi was playing out on PBS, in the form of the documentary Freedom Summer. A gripping account of the 1964 movement that brought hundreds of college students to register black voters, the film is part of a flood of fiftieth-anniversary commemorations of…

Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams famously said. Unless, that is, you’re talking about religion. Then facts don’t seem to matter at all: right you are if you think you are. The Hobby Lobby case was billed as a test of religious freedom versus the power of the state: Did the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) mean that David Green, the evangelical Christian CEO of a chain of crafts stores, could be exempt from providing coverage for the full range of contraceptives for his employees under the Affordable Care Act? Green balked at including Plan B, Ella (another form of emergency contraception) and two kinds of IUD, because, he claimed, they caused “abortion” by preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg. 
 The Court’s 5-to-4 decision—which featured all three…

On June 4, after an eighteen-month campaign, the University of California Student Workers Union (UAW 2865) won a game-changing contract.
 The union, which represents 13,000 teaching assistants, readers and tutors, gave priority to class size and civil rights issues during bargaining. The university disciplined the TAs for picketing, and the UAW responded with “unfair labor practice” charges and two system-wide strikes.
 In June, as a third strike loomed, the two sides signed an unprecedented agreement. In addition to progress on wages, the contract addresses such things as growing class sizes, opportunities for undocumented students, and expanded parental leave and childcare support. The contract also includes provisions on gender-neutral bathrooms.
 —Josh Brahinsky, Michelle Glowa and Jonathan Smucker…

The misery caused by Israel’s actions in the occupied territories has elicited serious concern among at least some Israelis. One of the most outspoken, for many years, has been Gideon Levy, a columnist for Haaretz, who writes that “Israel should be condemned and punished for creating insufferable life under occupation, [and] for the fact that a country that claims to be among the enlightened nations continues abusing an entire people, day and night.” 
 He is surely correct, and we should add something more: the United States should also be condemned and punished for providing the decisive military, economic, diplomatic and even ideological support for these crimes. So long as it continues to do so, there is little reason to expect Israel to relent in its brutal policies. 
 The…

Leonardo Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $35), translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner, tells the story of Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río, Trotsky’s assassin, as he is transformed by his Soviet handler from an idealistic Catalan communist to a brainwashed killer. It also purports to tell the story of Trotsky himself, in the years of his exile, and of an impoverished Cuban writer who, meeting Mercader on the beach in the late 1970s, decides to write it all down.
 The sections devoted to Mercader are hard to bear. They consist of sentences like the following, in which Mercader, now calling himself Ramon Pavlovich, thinks about the daughter he never met: “Ramon had felt the weight in his chest of the fundamentalism to which he…

I’ll Take You There Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the March Up Freedom’s Highway. By Greg Kot. Scribner. 308 pp. $26. Respect Yourself Stax Records and the Soul Explosion. By Robert Gordon. Bloomsbury. 463 pp. $30. The Staple Singers traveled to Ghana in March 1971 as part of a revue featuring American jazz, rock, and rhythm-and-blues artists who wanted to befriend musicians on the other side of the Atlantic. A film documenting the tour, Soul to Soul, is mostly a celebration of shared musical affinities, but one sequence casts the trip in a different light. Right after a scene in which Mavis Staples describes a visit to a former slave dungeon, the group performs “When Will We Be Paid?” The song, written by Randall Stewart, is one of the…

The Fourth Amendment continued its transformation into a twenty-first-century protection on June 25, as the Supreme Court, in one of the most important decisions of the term, ruled unanimously that police officers may not search an arrestee’s cellphone without first obtaining a warrant. The result, a surprise to many Court watchers, is nonetheless in keeping with the Court’s unanimous decision two years ago holding that police must have a warrant to install a global positioning device on a car in order to monitor its movements for an extended period. In both cases, the Court declined the government’s invitation to mechanically apply pre-digital-era precedents to digital technology, which would have given the police the ability to intrude on privacy in previously unimaginable ways. 
 The Court has long held that when…

In this year of anniversaries, this summer of rainbow flags flying in commemoration of what happened one steamy night outside a bar in Greenwich Village, we can pretend the politics of liberation can be tracked along clear lines marked Revolution, Betrayal, Progress, Mainstreaming; or we can remember that history is like desire. Complicated, socially shaped, alive in the creation and re-creation of the now. Oh my! So many people say they were outside the Stonewall Inn the night of June 28, 1969, that anyone might have thrown the first brick at police, and in a sense what propelled that brick was the accumulated rage of not just those present in the streets but everyone whose experience of oppression made defiance inevitable. Twenty years ago in this magazine, a quarter-century after…

Noam Chomsky’s essay in this issue touches on the January 1976 veto by the United States of a UN resolution favoring a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis. The following month, The Nation published “The Israeli Debate We Never Hear,” by Irene Gendzier, professor of history at Boston University.
 “Dependent on news media that emphasize the monolithic aspect of Israeli political life and that present exclusively the view of the current Israeli administration and its right-wing supporters, Americans in general are ignorant of the nature of Israeli political debate on the Palestinian issue…. They have been deprived of the extensive discussions that have taken place on this question, and they have often been prevented from hearing the views of even a ‘loyal opposition’ by the effective strategy of the most…

Housed in a brick church on a residential
corner in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Beloved Community Center is a living monument to the city’s role in civil and human rights struggles, from the early 1960s to the present. Pay it a visit and the people who run the place will point out their younger selves in the decades-old photos of rallies and voter-registration drives that cover the walls. They’ll recount a standoff between local black students and the police in 1969 that left a 20-year-old dead. They’ll tell you how they organized a citywide truth and reconciliation commission after members of the Klan gunned down five people in the Greensboro massacre of 1979. They’ll talk about why, nearly a decade ago, they supported black and Latino workers in the state who…

Henri Matisse is supposed to have encountered someone who complained that the arm of a woman in one of his portraits was too long. “Madam, you are mistaken,” he replied. “This is not a woman, this is a painting.” She might have replied, “That’s not an argument, that’s attitude.” The painter’s bon mot is what E.H. Gombrich (to whose classic study Art and Illusion I owe the anecdote) called “one of the paradoxes with which modern artists and critics like to tease the long-suffering public.” Such paradoxes can be hard to avoid. Gombrich thought the development of pictorial illusionism—that is, of the European canon of realistic representation—“was stimulated by the dissatisfaction which certain periods of Western civilization felt with images that failed to look convincing.” The statement is itself paradoxical,…