Innehållsförteckning för Nov-24-14 från The Nation

War on Whistleblowers Thanks for the cover story “The Government’s War on Whistleblowers,” by Norman Solomon and Marcy Wheeler [Oct. 27]. Nearly simultaneously, The New York Times ran a story about former top White House lawyer Harold Koh, who advised President Obama against using torture via loopholes in the law. Koh says no. Military types want torture as policy. Obama wavers. I’ve corresponded with incarcerated whistleblower John Kiriakou, who revealed that torture was being used by our government. He went on ABC News in 2007 to reveal that—a brave act of conscience for a twenty-year CIA employee who’d earned honors! I appreciate Solomon and Wheeler’s conclusion that we are up against the “uninformed consent of the governed” if journalists and insiders cannot do what needs to be done—whistleblowing—to keep us…

On September 30, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a $46 million investment in new tools to study the brain in action. The work of more than 100 neurobiologists, chemists, physicists and engineers, these tools seem to emerge from a futurist’s fantasy. Infrared tags to visualize brain chemistry from outside the brain in real time. A device that can monitor thousands of nerve cells for months while delivering drugs or electrical pulses. A system for altering information flow across the brain using radio waves and magnetic nanoparticles. Even to a scientist, this technological mash-up hardly seems possible.
 These futuristic projects are the NIH’s first investment in the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which was launched by President Obama in 2013. The BRAIN Initiative is a broad…

On October 15, the School District of Philadelphia screened Won’t Back Down, an anti-union education-­reform drama, for its parent-appreciation night. The movie blames teachers and neighborhood schools for the broken education system while demonizing unions and promoting charter expansion.
 Just one week before, Philadelphia’s unelected School Reform Commission canceled its contract with teachers, so the screening was seen as a ploy to manipulate parents into supporting the district’s plans for privatization.
 In response, members of the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) disrupted the film by chanting “SOS—Save Our Schools!” and “Philly is a union town!” while blocking the screen. Students exited the building just as several police officers arrived; no one was arrested at the event. 
 The PSU has vowed to fight for public education with forums and continued protests.…

The Monied Metropolis New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896. By Sven Beckert. Cambridge. 492 pp. Paper $37. Making Money Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism. By Christine Desan. Oxford. 496 pp. $85. The Half Has Never Been Told Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. By Edward E. Baptist. Basic. 498 pp. $35. Empire of Cotton A Global History. By Sven Beckert. Knopf. 640 pp. $35. The Cambridge History of Capitalism. Volume 1. The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848. Edited by Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Cambridge. 616 pp. $130. River of Dark Dreams Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. By Walter Johnson. Harvard. 526 pp. $35. When Dr. William Levingston came to town, he arrived wearing a silk…

Letters 1941–1985. By Italo Calvino. Translated by Martin McLaughlin. Introduction by Michael Wood. Princeton. 619 pp. Paper $19.95. The Complete Cosmicomics By Italo Calvino. Translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 402 pp. $24. Michael Wood begins his introduction to Italo Calvino’s Letters: 1941–1985 with a kind of disclaimer: Calvino often said that biographical information and autobiographical pronouncements were irrelevant to the task of criticism. When, for instance, students at Coletti Middle School in Treviso wrote to ask why an anthology gave his birthplace as San Remo, Italy, and not Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, which was the literal truth, Calvino said that he had spent his childhood in San Remo, and that this coastal city was “present in many of [his] works.” He…

After the most expensive and negative midterm elections in American history, Republicans have gained control of the Senate. That’s going to make it possible for a GOP-dominated Congress to follow Mitch McConnell’s lead by advancing the agenda of the right-wing billionaires and corporate interests that pay for elections while neglecting the issues that matter to the great majority of Americans. 
 So what will they be doing? McConnell told the Koch brothers and their allies that Republicans will seek to undermine President Obama’s ability to implement programs by writing spending bills that “go after them on healthcare, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board.” But Obama is not without options. He has a bully pulpit, the authority to issue executive orders and a veto pen—and he…

I’m writing this column before the results of Tuesday’s election are known, but I’ll go out on a limb and predict that abortion opponents will do very well. Assuming that’s true, we’ll be hearing a lot from them. We’re all familiar with their talking points—day-before-birth abortions, confused women, coercion, pro-choicers as a “death cult,” whatever that means. But surely that’s not all they’ve got. So in the spirit of rational discourse, here are some questions for abortion opponents—real questions, not rhetorical—that I’ve tried to frame in an open-ended way. I’d love to hear some thoughtful answers.
 1. Illegal abortion. You often talk as if banning abortion would drastically reduce or even end it. You don’t seem very concerned about death and injury to women who have illegal procedures. (In fact, you…

Timothy Shenk writes in this issue about histories of capitalism—a new cottage industry, you might say. Ninety years ago, former Nation managing editor Henry Raymond Mussey reviewed The Industrial Worker: 1840–1860, by Norman Ware:
 “The Industrial Revolution…brought with it a great degradation in the status of the industrial worker. The control of manufacture passed out of the hands of independent artisans into those of a new race of proprietary capitalists who had acquired their wealth in trade. The ‘price’ of labor went down, in many occupations very sharply; but, even more important as a cause of discontent, the worker lost ground as a person. Helpless in the grip of economic forces that he could not control, he saw himself losing his old-time position of independence and consideration in the community….…

We’re a fleshy circle of beached bachelorettes, tramp-stamps fading, bent over mini Boursins and Bordeaux brought down from the room on top of a resort on top of a reef: the garlic-breathed fruit of four thousand years of human habitation, from the good old Aceramics, the Taíno, fluorescing, and tireless reincarnations of colonizers to the new ground-sloths, the new giant island shrew: you, sunburnt, evolved, sipping rum and corn syrupv from a purple plastic penis straw— barbasco to sacred vomit sticks to Tylenol factories to this sludge-filled veiny verisimilitude— wondering how you landed yourself here: bridesmaid, la isla, Borinquen, a fortified interrobang trimmed in a Whore-Glo faux-feather boa as Russian businessmen offer you their warm Coronas, when all your life you’ve just been trying to make some progress.…

   Florida I-95 America Needs a Faith Lift; a pregnant woman with a stem rose and a pointing, bearded God quoting Jeremiah quoting God; a gray, washed-out steak: What Vegetarians Eat When They Cheat— or was it what the Vegetables ate? You could see where the grease once shone on the old meat. Inside, the silence. —Tell me something. —No, you! We unbutton our pants. Arms jiggling over fifty-five, thighs spread out on the seatv and as far as the eye can see: thousands of carfulls of spreading thighs, the feel and smell of the seatbelt nylon, cricked trapezii. V a s e c t o m y. Oh, to feel your hand on my knee! A lone willow in the field: textbook, and the toxic cows, the steak…

Governor Andrew Cuomo has claimed that he’s “a progressive Democrat who’s broke.” But in his most recent executive budget, he proposes ending a little-known tax that could make all the difference. For the last century, New York State has had a stock-transfer tax, which taxes nearly every stock trade. Since 1981, it’s been instantly rebated—no money is actually collected—leaving potential revenue on the table even as financial profits skyrocket. Cuomo suggests ending the tax, citing “unnecessary administrative work.” But New York’s stock-transfer tax can be easily re-implemented, instead putting that administrative work to good use. 
 Cuomo should work to end or reduce the tax rebate, rather than take the tax off the books. New York isn’t broke so much as unequal: one in every twenty-two people in New York…

In early September, Ryan Boyko, a PhD student in public health at Yale, heard of an opportunity to travel to Liberia to help fight the spread of Ebola. Boyko had been to Africa eight times, including a trip to Liberia in 2012 to study the transmission of intestinal worms from domestic animals to children. The decision to go again was an easy one: his work could have a big impact, and the risk of infection, he surmised, was very low, especially given what he would be doing there. 
 Boyko is not a physician; he’s a data analyst. While in Liberia, he hooked up with Dr. Mosoka Fallah, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist, to improve Monrovia’s system for contact-tracing—the process by which people who have been exposed to an Ebola patient’s bodily…

Family Life By Akhil Sharma. Norton. 218 pp. $23.95. Akhil Sharma’s Family Life is not a model minority story. No one could accuse it of sentimentalizing or even remotely encouraging immigration from India to the United States. In this novel, immigration means a skull cracked open in a swimming pool, brain damage and bedpans, alcoholism and depression. But it is still an American story, long before the Mishras land on American soil in 1978. Mr. Mishra has always dreamed of moving to the West, a place of scientific rationalism and development. For her part, his wife says to her mother, who questions her decision to leave India, “What is here? Thieves? That Indira woman will eat us.” And Ajay, our protagonist, adopts the condescension that comes with privilege even before…

Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. By Danielle Keats Citron Harvard. 343 pp. $29.95. Like a surprisingly large proportion of Americans, I have a cyberstalker, whom I shall call S. “You know I hate you more than Aphrodite hates Helen,” S announced in his most recent e-mail. “If anyone hates you, it’s me.” A gifted, disturbed and drug-abusing former student, S slipped into paranoia almost three years ago, one fall night in 2011—I remember the shock of receiving about twenty obscene messages in a single hour. He has bombarded me with abusive, lewd and often threatening messages ever since—punctuated by periods in residential rehab, and by all-too-brief periods of lucidity thereafter. S is a gay Latino man, and the special nature of his paranoia is extreme hatred for the dominant white heterosexual…

The Nation of April 5, 1917, carried a brief review of a new anthology, “chastely bound in blue paper covers,” with selections from the first 100 issues of The New Republic. Founded in 1914 by Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl to promote their vision of an expansionist government benevolently guided by elites, The New Republic was, for a time, far to The Nation’s left. “The whole point is that we are trying to impose views on blind or reluctant people,” Croly wrote to the magazine’s financial backer. That was progressivism. “The controlling idea of the editors,” the critic Stuart P. Sherman observed in these pages, “is that an ounce of fresh experiment is worth at least a pound of experience, and that the day after tomorrow is better…