Innehållsförteckning för Oct-20-14 från The Nation

ICE Age
 As alarming as the dragnet tactics of ICE might be, and as heartbreaking as the disruption to immigrant families, none of this should be a surprise to Zoë Carpenter [“ICE’s Widening Net,” Sept. 22], or anyone. So long as neighboring countries with insufficient resources encourage birth rates higher than they can sustain and provide a level of education inadequate to change the situation, there will be desperate people pouring over the borders. Accompanying them will be the predictable, often politically motivated reactions of individuals and government agencies, many of which reflect shamefully on civil society and its members. 
 If progressives want to do anything about any of this, they need to direct their energies to identifying and resolving the root causes of this tragedy rather than decrying…

It is the best of times; it is the best of times. 
 Deploying life in New York City today as a symbol of what he takes to be the improvement of almost everything everywhere, New York Times columnist David Brooks explains: “There has never been a time when there were so many interesting places to visit, shop and eat, when the rivers and the parks were so beautiful, when there were so many vibrant neighborhoods across all boroughs, with immigrants and hipsters and new businesses and experimental schools.”
 This description is accurate if you’re David Brooks (or me, for that matter). It may be true for as many as half of the city’s 8.4 million inhabitants. But what Brooks appears not to know is that in recent decades, New…

On August 5, at a Young Chicago Authors event, Mayor Rahm Emanuel read the late Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.” A poem so explicitly written in the voice of a black woman (“Does my sexiness upset you? / Does it come as a surprise / That I dance like I’ve got diamonds / At the meeting of my thighs?”) must have sounded odd coming from his lips.
 And yet politically, if not aesthetically, the choice made perfect sense. For as the mayor was channeling one black woman, he was desperately trying to neutralize the challenge of another. A poll a few weeks earlier had given Chicago Teachers Union leader Karen Lewis a nine-point lead if she ran against him for mayor; another poll a week after the reading gave her…

Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, one of the least worthy placeholders in minority leader Mitch McConnell‘s Republican caucus, suddenly came alive during a September debate over whether to amend the Constitution to get big money out of politics. Roberts, whose forty-seven years as a congressional aide, House member and senator have been spent almost entirely in the shadows, stepped into the limelight as the most ardent defender of the theory that multinational corporations and rich people should, simply by virtue of their wealth, be allowed to have more influence over elections than working people, small farmers and small-business owners. 
 That’s an outrageously out-of-touch stance. But it would not have earned Roberts much attention except for the fact that he has unexpectedly become one of the most vulnerable incumbents in a…

What happens in a typical immersive performance makes the curtain call improbable. The proceedings—part theatrical event, part bacchanal—have very little in common with conventional stage drama. Immersive theater takes place, as it has in New York City, London and Sydney over the last few years,
 without a proscenium or stage of any kind, in deserted warehouses and hospitals, improvised hotels and film studios, clandestine bars and nightclubs. An audience is usually either herded into groups or scattered, sent out on a two- or three-hour self-guided detective hunt through clots of elaborately outfitted, interconnecting rooms. What passes for a story is assembled, and in the loosest possible way, inside a multilevel, fully functioning theater set: hidden passageways, scraps of newspaper, handwritten letters, unlit corridors, empty parlors and bedrooms are as perplexing…

Can words be pop? A few decades ago, “Anthropocene” did not really exist, but its Google Ngram looks like a swift takeoff, similar in shape to the graphs for atmospheric CO2 concentration or species extinction. It is at least bubbling under.
 “Anthropocene” doesn’t refer precisely to climate change or global warming. Rather, it indicates the idea that we are living in an era akin to other geological epochs, like the Pleistocene, but characterized by the fact that human activities now make and remake the planetary ecosystem in the most concrete sense: the composition of the earth’s crust, the makeup of its atmosphere, the direct and indirect relations among the whole rig’s parts.
 Formulated by ecologist Eugene Stoermer and popularized around 2000 by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist, “Anthropocene”…

As the nation’s first black attorney general, Eric Holder built a legacy as a tough defender of civil rights and racial justice. Recognizing that the crisis of mass incarceration is the most urgent civil rights issue of our time—that “the path we are currently on is far from sustainable,” as he put it in 2013—Holder rolled back some of the criminal justice system’s worst features, including mandatory-minimum drug sentences and disparate penalties for crack and powder cocaine, while investigating police misconduct and pushing alternatives to incarceration. The same week that he revealed his impending departure, Holder had another announcement: for the first time since 1980, the US prison population is on the decline, falling by nearly 5,000 this past year and set to drop by another 12,000 in the next…

Yvonne Montoya, a sophomore at Santa Monica College (SMC), spent part of 2011 homeless. Hoping a degree would help her escape her situation, Montoya returned to college in 2012.
 It wasn’t easy: her only local access to food was a nearby CVS that accepted food stamps. Ultimately, thanks to her own determination and the support of a professor, she was able to secure stable housing.
 Montoya, a public policy major, is now president of the Roosevelt Institute Campus Network chapter at SMC. RICN allows students to promote policy change within their own communities, and Montoya jumped at the chance to help SMC’s more than 400 homeless students. She’s leading an effort to get the school to start accepting food stamps, and hopes to help students at other schools to do…

If you’ve been tearing through Ken Burns’s The Roosevelts, as have we, you already know what a small-time pundit like George Will thinks of Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps a more contemporaneous (and nuanced) consideration is in order. Roosevelt died in January 1919; the following November, the literary critic Stuart P. Sherman opened The Nation’s fall books supplement with “Roosevelt and the National Psychology”:
 “Roosevelt quickened the pace of national life by his own mental and physical speed. His special contribution, however, was not the discovery but the direction of strenuousness. The captains of industry had been strenuous enough. He found a new object for physical and mental energy on the grand scale. More than any other man of his time he made political eminence a prize of the first order by…

The purpose of Pink Meth, a notorious “revenge porn” site, is not just to share photographs of naked women that have been obtained without their consent. It’s to destroy their lives and reputations. The pictures, submitted by anonymous users, typically include a woman’s full name, e-mail address and screen shots of her Facebook profile. Commenters crowdsource the contact information for the woman’s family, friends, bosses and colleagues, then revel in sending the pictures to them. If she’s a member of a church or synagogue, the pictures will go out to her clergy, as well as others in the congregation. The users plot to make sure that the photos appear at the top of any Google searches of the woman’s name. “I’m hoping this goes on for months and years and…

China’s Second Continent How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. By Howard French. Knopf. 285 pp. $27.95. The Emperor Far Away Travels at the Edge of China. By David Eimer. Bloomsbury. 322 pp. $28. China’s friendship with Africa was forged in revolutionary solidarity during the early years of the Cold War. This was the era of national liberation struggles, and China, seeing in Africa a reflection of its own humiliation by Imperial Japan and the West, offered military intelligence, weapons and training to revolutionaries across the continent. 
 This did not last—most African countries severed ties with China when it sided with apartheid South Africa in the Angolan Civil War—but since China’s capitalist transition began, 1 million Chinese have migrated to Africa, and accusations of China’s…

The headlines immediately following the “Republican Wave” election of 2010 focused on Congress, where Democrats lost control of the House. But attention quickly shifted to the states, where a new class of Republican governors, often working with allied legislative majorities, began implementing agendas far more extreme than those of their compatriots in gridlocked Washington. 
 That extremism has made many of these Republican Wave governors vulnerable in 2014—so vulnerable that billionaire campaign donors and business interests are scrambling to save them. Recent revelations of secret meetings organized by the Koch brothers and secret donations to groups like the Republican Governors Public Policy Committee confirm the connections—and the sense of urgency. But even a massive spending spree may not keep these governors in office. 
 That’s because what’s good for campaign…

Sometimes it feels like we’re living in an era in which information has finally become “free”—unlimited media access, twenty-four-hour wellness tracking, endless dating possibilities. But there’s nothing inherently progressive about Big Data. A new report shows that when Big Data creeps into our workplaces and our financial lives, it may simply create new ways of reinforcing old racial and economic injustices. 
 The report, “Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future,” by the think tank Robinson + Yu, notes that technological advances, the declining cost of data storage, and the intensified surveillance climate of post-9/11 America have spurred massive data collection. This accumulation of private information by corporations and government has created troubling new issues in the areas of labor rights, privacy and ethics. Consider the influence of Big…

Dean Blanchard says three prayers at night: “An Our Father, a Hail Mary… and I pray that the idiot in North Korea can figure out how to blow up Washington, DC, so we can start over.”
 The Louisiana shrimp processor sat looking over the marina at Grand Isle, a ramshackle resort destination south of New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico. Blanchard’s business was hit hard by the BP oil spill in 2010 and is still struggling. BP, he noted, is doing fine. Just two years after the spill, the company announced a record profit. 
 The BP spill may be the most obvious destruction that the oil and gas industry has inflicted on Louisiana, but a slower devastation is happening all along the coast: the equivalent of a football…

“We’ve been engaged in a failed policy with Cuba for the last fifty years, and we need to change it,” Barack Obama declared as a presidential candidate in 2007. Just last November, Obama reiterated to his Cuban-American supporters in Miami: “The notion that the same policies that we put in place in 1961 would somehow still be as effective…in the age of the Internet and Google and world travel doesn’t make sense.” For six years, President Obama has been saying that US policy toward Cuba needs to change, but for six years he’s been unwilling to take the political risk of sitting down at the negotiating table with the Cuban government to make it happen.
 Despite rampant rumors in Washington that administration officials at the “highest levels” want to break…

Poetry of Witness The Tradition in English, 1500–2001. Edited by Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu. Norton. 641 pp. Paper $29.95. In 1993, a poetry anthology appeared that seemed to speak directly to the spirit of the times and, in so doing, appeal to an audience far larger than what poetry in English could generally boast. More than 800 pages long and featuring the work of 145 poets, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness was a heady book for a turbulent era, when several ideologies against which Americans had tended to define their own politics for generations, among them Soviet communism and South African apartheid, were unraveling or had collapsed. As Carolyn Forché, the anthology’s editor, explained in its introduction, the express purpose of the project was to monumentalize poems about…