Innehållsförteckning för Oct-06-14 från The Nation

Bread, Not Bombs
 Re “Slippery Slope in Iraq?” [Sept. 1/8]: unfortunately, this entire episode of military disaster is panning out like many of us feared it would back in 2003 when it started. The United States is left holding the bag for an event that will never have a clear end. Doesn’t the time frame of eleven years since this fiasco began say to a jaded public, “We need to find other solutions”? W., Cheney and Rumsfeld are madmen/sociopaths with all the wrong values for who we are. More bombs won’t help. Walter Pewen
 _________________________ Too Big to Jail
 Regarding the sidebar “Why the Bank Settlements Don’t Add Up” accompanying “Jamie Dimon’s $13 Billion Secret,” by William D. Cohan [Sept. 1/8]: there is another question that needs to be answered,…

Michael Bloomberg is a case study in the reputational value of thirty-five or so billion dollars. His foray into gun control apparently stalled by the National Rifle Association’s vise-like grip on US legislators, the former New York City mayor has announced that he will now return to running the massive media and technology corporation that bears his name.
 Bloomberg News employs many fine journalists who rightfully take pride in their work, but it has a rather odd rule—for journalists, that is—when it comes to its own actions. As stated by Matthew Winkler, the company’s editor in chief, Bloomberg News does not cover itself, because doing so is “an inherent conflict of interest and no outlet does it well.” Instead, when other news organizations cover its activities, Bloomberg News employees are…

Adebate erupted in the comment section of Dave Zirin’s Nation blog after he wrote that “showing and reshowing [the elevator video of then-fiancée, now wife, Janay Palmer] just because we can is an act of harm.” He argued that “just as we would protect the name of an alleged rape victim, just as we would not show a video of Ray Rice committing a sexual assault, we should not be showing this video like it’s another episode of Rich People Behaving Badly.” 
 Yet it’s not necessarily against the law to publish the identities of rape victims. And there are thousands of online “we’s” who post everything from the rape of drunken classmates to the torture of kittens to human beheadings. But Zirin’s point is an important one, reminding us…

Representative Elizabeth Esty’s blueprint for her first term in Congress changed as soon as Adam Lanza rampaged through Sandy Hook Elementary School. Elected five weeks earlier and not yet sworn in, she was suddenly thrust into a calamity that convulsed the nation.
 Esty was already familiar with how outside events—shocking crimes in particular—could change a political career in unforeseen ways. As a freshman in the Connecticut Legislature in 2009, she voted to abolish the state’s death penalty. But as her first term unfolded, so did the trial of a man accused and then convicted of a brutal home invasion in her hometown of Cheshire. A woman and her young daughters were raped and murdered; they were apparently chosen at random by two career criminals.
 The crime made international news and…

The milk of figs, cows and nuts; lemon juice, orange juice and onion juice; saliva, urine, blood, vinegar, aspirin and laxatives: the list of substances from which invisible ink can be concocted is long and sometimes gross, and as strong a testament as could be imagined to the strength of our intertwined desires for communication and privacy. Why else would someone bother not only to squeeze the juices from a dormouse’s corpse, but also to write a foul-smelling letter with them?
 In Prisoners, Lovers, and Spies: The Story of Invisible Ink From Herodotus to al-Qaeda (Yale; $27.50), espionage historian Kristie Macrakis discusses invisible ink (or “sympathetic ink,” as the French call it) within the broader history of steganography, or secret writing: of scrolls stuffed in rabbit bellies, messages inscribed on…

Too often in the United States, when responding to international crises, we equate “doing something” with “doing something military.” In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush gave a traumatized American public two options: either we go to war, or we let the terrorists get away with it. 
 Faced with that choice, it’s hardly surprising that a vast majority of Americans supported war. 
 But when there are no military solutions—which is most of the time, including on September 12, 2001—the alternative is not nothing, but active, nonmilitary engagement. Diplomacy becomes even more important. President Obama has repeatedly said there is no military solution to the overlapping conflicts in Syria and Iraq. He’s right—but now he’s surrendered to an unholy alliance of neocon armchair warriors, liberal interventionists…

It’s been thirteen years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but Muslim Americans from South Asia are still treated with suspicion and outright hostility, according to a new report by South Asian Americans Leading Together.
 For example, more than 80 percent of the hate violence that researchers uncovered was motivated by anti-Muslim sentiment.
 But there’s hope: the US South Asian community is growing. This fact, the researchers say, has enabled South Asian Americans to make crucial allies in government and civil society who can ensure productive—rather than hateful—discussion following events like the Boston Marathon bombing.
 —Jamilah King
 Colorlines.com…

One of the earliest environmental movements in the United States was the late-nineteenth-century effort to protect Niagara Falls from development and defacement at the hands of industry. One of the movement’s leaders, Frederick Law Olmsted, was a founder of this very magazine.
 In September of 1881, The Nation published an anonymous plea for the New York State Legislature to assure the falls’ preservation.
 “This is the place we are asked to preserve. Surely no one to whom beauty is worth more than pulp and paper, and character of more importance than stored electricity, can ask if it be worth while. A million dollars—a few cents from each taxpayer—is all that is needed. With the influence of the word of every man who cares, the bill will pass the Legislature. It…

An Uncertain Glory India and Its Contradictions. By Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen. Princeton. 432 pp. $29.95. The Indian Ideology By Perry Anderson. Verso. 191 pp. Paper $19.95. In May, in a national election widely perceived as marking a dramatic new phase for India, the Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won an absolute majority in Parliament. The Indian National Congress Party (INC), the country’s oldest political party and the winner of more elections than any of its rivals, saw itself jeered to defeat, its prime-ministerial candidate, the Harvard-educated Rahul Gandhi, portrayed as an ineffectual representative of a political lineage out of touch with the impatient, assertive mood of contemporary India. That mood, it was said, was far better captured by the 64-year-old Narendra Modi, who led the BJP campaign…

Selected Stories By Kjell Askildsen. Translated from the Norwegian by Seán Kinsella. Dalkey Archive. 99 pp. Paper $11.95. Kjell Askildsen writes what might reasonably be called ghost stories in which there are no ghosts. His prose, uniformly muted and bare, seems haunted by absence. His characters are inscrutable. His landscapes are stage sets in which houses and lawns exist alone in an empty world; beyond them may be a “fjord” or a “beach,” but these are nouns rather than places. When the characters venture beyond their own property, they rarely encounter other people. Often they go to “the restaurant at the railway station.” They smoke. They drink. Nowhere are they at home.
 Askildsen, who is 84, is a major figure in contemporary Norwegian literature, but Selected Stories, superlatively translated by…

I f you read enough news or watch enough cable television about the threat of the Islamic State—the radical Sunni Muslim militia better known simply as IS—you will inevitably encounter a parade of retired generals demanding an increased US military presence in the region. They will say that our government should deploy, as retired general Anthony Zinni demanded, up to 10,000 American boots on the ground to battle IS. Or as in retired general Jack Keane’s case, they will make somewhat vaguer demands, such as for “offensive” airstrikes and the deployment of more military advisers to the region.
 But what you won’t learn from the media coverage of IS is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of…

Columbia University students are attempting to make college more affordable with an old but largely untried idea: a student credit union.
 Credit unions are an alternative to traditional banking: profits go to providing better rates and lower fees. Members become shareholders in the institution.
 Created in 2013, the Lion Credit Union Initiative (LCUI) is led by a team of twenty-two students and has a strong base of support. The LCUI is currently seeking approval by the National Credit Union Administration as well as the endorsement of the university. The credit union would be open to anyone who has studied at or worked for Columbia.
 “It’s about connecting a community while saving each other money,” says Jared Greene, the LCUI’s director. “It’s how it’s supposed to be.”
 —Hélène 
Barthélemy…

About a year ago, I was having dinner with some newfound friends in Athens. I had an interview scheduled for the next morning with Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Greece’s official opposition party and one of the few sources of hope in a Europe ravaged by austerity. I asked the group for ideas about what questions I should put to the young politician. Someone suggested: “History knocked on your door—did you answer?”
 At the time, Tsipras’s party, Syriza, was putting up a fine fight against austerity. Yet it was struggling to articulate a positive economic vision of its own. I was particularly struck that the party did not oppose the governing coalition’s embrace of new oil and gas exploration, a threat to Greece’s beautiful seas as well as to the…

The first time I fell in love with a book, I was 3 years old. The book was large, with pages of cold, smooth, glossy cardboard that acted as the perfect backdrop for its story: a lonely rabbit has finally found a friend—an egg. The egg is cold, smooth, a most unsatisfactory companion, and after a while the rabbit gets annoyed with it, rolling it around, even throwing rocks at it. Eventually he falls asleep, and the egg does what eggs do: it hatches according to its own timing and plan, and out comes a fluffy duckling. In my memory, the duckling feels soft and fuzzy, but perhaps that wasn’t the book at all, just the feeling it gave me. I was already reading prodigiously at this age—driving my father…