Innehållsförteckning för Oct-27-14 från The Nation

Can We Talk?
 In her tribute to the late comedian Joan Rivers, Katha Pollitt wrote that “comedy had a big No Girls Allowed sign on the door for most of her career” [“Rivers Gets the Last Laugh,” Sept. 29]. But I remember, as a boy growing up during the late 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s, enjoying the excellent humor of funny ladies of radio, television, movies and live theater: Billie Burke, Eve Arden, Judy Canova, Ethel Waters, Shirley Booth, Kathleen Lockhart, Connie Brooks, Jane Ace of Easy Aces, Ann Sothern in Maisie, Myrtle Vail and Donna Damerel in Myrt & Marge, Cathy Lewis and Marie Wilson on the My Friend Irma show, Gale Storm in My Little Margie and Audrey Totter in Meet Millie.
 There were many hilarious co-equal stars…

On paper, the new California law mandating an affirmative consent standard for sex between students in the state university system is a feminist dream come true: yes means—at long last—yes. True, it’s a bit hard to imagine how it will play out in practice, even bearing in mind that consent to each sexual activity need not be verbal. I can see asking for a lot of yeses, or moans of pleasure, or whatever, as you progress from kissing to et cetera with a new partner, but months into a relationship? Is there never a point at which you can take some things for granted and just get on with it?
 Still, it’s not as if the current understanding of consent works so well. The new law, after all, comes on…

In late August, Secretary of State John Kerry took to the op-ed page of The New York Times to rally a global coalition for a mission of utmost urgency. “No civilized country,” Kerry warned, “should shirk its responsibility to help stamp out this disease.” He was referring not to the West African Ebola epidemic—which by that point had killed at least 1,552 people and, as of this writing, has claimed 3,439 lives—but the “cancer of ISIS,” which must “not be allowed to spread to other countries.”
 Kerry’s choice of words was no isolated rhetorical flourish. In pounding out the drumbeat to war, the Obama administration has increasingly trafficked in disease metaphors. On at least six occasions, President Obama has referred to ISIS (also known as ISIL and the Islamic State)…

When Darren Wilson, a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed Michael Brown on August 9, King D. Seals, age 27, was at the crime scene within the hour. He lives just a few blocks away from Canfield Green, the predominantly black apartment complex where the unarmed teenager was shot. He saw Brown’s body, which would lie on the street for an additional three hours. “It wasn’t even a protest yet,” Seals said about the gathering when he first arrived. “It was a black boy being shot in the community. It was about ten other women and men out there, and the family.” The next day, members of the community passed around a large plastic bag for donations to Brown’s family. Seals put in $100; others donated $50,…

A Report From the Cell Block Knaus. 320 pp. €22. Tadellöser & Wolff btb. 480 pp. €10. We’re Still Golden btb. 384 pp. €11. Did You Ever See Hitler/Did You Know About It? Knaus. 352 pp. €19.99. Sonar: A Collective Diary btb. 3,070 pp. €74. Alkor: Diary 1989 Knaus. 608 pp. €29. All by Walter Kempowski. Walter Kempowski A Biography. By Dirk Hempel. btb. 320 pp. €9.50. Walter Kempowski’s writing career began on a winter evening in 1950, nineteen years before he published his first novel. Then 21, he was serving time for espionage in an East German prison at Bautzen. For two years, he had passed the time by going from bunk to bunk and plying his fellow prisoners with questions about their lives. He met a glassblower…

Before Ebola became an epidemic that has killed more than 3,400 people, before it jumped borders and crossed oceans, it was a deadly, if rare, disease that had been contained during each of its twenty-four previous outbreaks. This is crucial to remember as the disease churns through Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, because it underscores a troubling conclusion: today’s wildfire Ebola epidemic was not inevitable.
 Despite its frightening virulence, Ebola can be contained through robust public health efforts. It thrives in chaotic and impoverished environments where public health systems are frayed and international assistance weak. Though experts will debate the roots of this current crisis for years, one point on which many agree is that local poverty and global indifference played starring roles. “This isn’t a natural disaster,” international health…

On September 17, the Occupy Wall Street offshoot Strike Debt announced that it had purchased more than $3.8 million in student-loan debt and then forgiven the debtors. 
 The debt belonged to 2,761 students of Everest College, part of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges. Corinthian is on the brink of financial collapse and facing some 200 lawsuits, including one for more than $500 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, over its allegedly fraudulent and predatory practices. Even so, students may still be liable for the loans they took out to attend. 
 Strike Debt’s purchase is a small step toward alleviating this burden. The group recently launched the Debt Collective, which aims to unite student-loan debtors in order to build leverage and provide tools for organizing. Visit debtcollective.org for more…

When the transfer of Hong Kong from British to Chinese control was completed in 1997, Christopher Hitchens wrote in his “Minority Report” column about visiting “a joint called Club 64…. At first look, it could be a hangout for any group of wised-up young people anywhere on the globalized globe. But put a slash between the 6 and the 4, and you have the date—the fourth of June—on which the Tiananmen Square massacre occurred in 1989.”
 Hitchens also paid a visit to the headquarters of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions on Peking Road. “There were the tottering piles of strike leaflets and the posters about child labor in Western brand-name factories. Here were the grizzled old militants, some of them refugees from the mainland, and the young idealist…

The Allegheny River pulses through the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, like a muscle. Along its waters traveled the steel that became the backbone to our railroads and skyscrapers, and the coal that fired up the factories fueling America’s twentieth-century industrial might.
 In the 1980s and early ’90s, however, the steel started leaving. Today, some two decades after the flight of the last mill, the Allegheny has been transformed into a new kind of symbol—one of the modern “green” city. The river has been cleansed of many of the most toxic substances that formerly poured from those factories; now its meandering flow is featured in municipal sites against a glittering downtown skyline that hosts one of the highest concentrations of green buildings in the United States.
 From green skyscrapers to a…

A movie that’s sure to make you feel better about your marriage, Gone Girl begins and ends with the screen-filling image of a woman’s head, viewed as if through a haze of powdered sugar. First, for a long moment, you see only the puzzle of her piled-up hair. Then she turns and reveals her face, which is lovely and clear-eyed but tells you nothing, except that she’s looking back at you from her pillow. Meanwhile, in voiceover, a man speaks reflectively about the impenetrable mysteries that lie at the heart of his marriage. (Gone Girl is definitely the man’s story, even though a whole series of women will vigorously contest the narrative.) These same mysteries confront every spouse, he proposes: What are you thinking? Who are you?
 Yes, the viewer…

The umbrella is a perfect icon for Hong Kong’s uprising: inclusive, a bit aloof and pragmatically defiant of the elements (and, in cinematic lore, readily convertible into a lethal kung fu weapon). It embodies the central plea of the protesters who took to the streets throughout the city beginning on September 26: a civilized demand for self-determination. Yet the biggest worry in Beijing isn’t the threat of universal suffrage, but what might come afterward—the struggle for social justice that Hong Kongers face as they pivot between postcolonial limbo and authoritarian capitalism.
 The immediate spark for the protests was a controversy over the nascent electoral process. Activists were incensed by Beijing’s decree—via its proxy authority, the National People’s Congress (NPC)—that candidates for Hong Kong’s 2017 executive election must be approved by…

It’s been estimated that half of the people shot and killed by police officers in the United States have some type of mental-health problem. James Boyd was killed in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after a five-hour negotiation with police, who were trying to get the homeless man to leave his illegal campsite. Boyd had only two small camping knives, but he was shot in the back after the officers set off a stun grenade. 
 When they aren’t killing people with mental-health issues, the police are arresting them, a harrowing and harmful experience in its own right. “Jails are the number one mental-health facilities across the country,” San Antonio Police Officer Joe Smarro explains in a new video series about overcriminalization, which launches at TheNation.com on October 9. Produced by Brave…

Ever since New York Times reporter James Risen received his first subpoena from the Justice Department more than six years ago, occasional news reports have skimmed the surface of a complex story. The usual gloss depicts a conflict between top officials who want to protect classified information and a journalist who wants to protect confidential sources. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Sterling—a former undercover CIA officer now facing charges under the Espionage Act, whom the feds want Risen to identify as his source—is cast as a disgruntled ex-employee in trouble for allegedly spilling the classified beans. 
 But the standard media narratives about Risen and Sterling have skipped over deep patterns of government retaliation against recalcitrant journalists and whistleblowers. Those patterns are undermining press freedom, precluding the informed consent of the governed and…

The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli, foreword by James Ivory. Chicago. 494 pp. $45. Writing in 1930 with Baudelaire and, subsequently, Goethe on his mind, T.S. Eliot took up the question of what it means for a poet to possess “the sense of his own age.” While it may be true, he noted, that Goethe was the representative Enlightenment dilettante, pursuing his scattered scientific and aesthetic “hobbies,” and Baudelaire a “theological innocent,” writing as if the problem of evil had never occurred to anyone before, Eliot nevertheless concluded that “they are both…men with restless, critical, curious minds and the ‘sense of the age’: both men who understood and foresaw a great deal.”
 Is there any poet in the postwar period…

“One Person, One Vote”: Is there any more concise expression of American sentiments about democracy? We know that people are sometimes intimidated into not voting or stripped of the right to cast a ballot; that not every ballot always gets counted; and that money plays an outsize role in shaping the roster of candidates. Who could argue with a straight face that it could ever be otherwise?
 In truth, though, “one person, one vote” has been more principle than reality for much of US history. To this day, it doesn’t really apply at the federal level. Hawaii has 1.4 million residents; California has 38 million. And yet both states have two US senators. While each Californian’s vote counts equally when it comes to selecting California’s senators, those votes influence the…