Innehållsförteckning för Feb-02-15 från The Nation

Mutualize Uber? I’m writing to note that, while I really appreciated Mike Konczal’s fantastic piece “Socialize Uber” [Dec. 29], which advocates the restructuring of app-based ride-sharing along worker co-op lines, the title is misleading. In common usage, “socialize Uber” suggests that the state should take ownership of and run the service. However, what Konczal advocates is not that, but instead the reorganization of Uber-esque services along cooperative lines, which is “mutualization,” not “socialization.” Unfortunately, the mistitling of this wonderful and important piece in a way that invokes the bureaucratic disasters of the Cold War era undermines the article’s ability to reach a critical mass of people in a moment when its message very much needs to be heard. Matthew Cropp Burlington, Vt. * * * I say this as a…

The unpunished killings of Michael Brown, Miriam Carey, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and so many others reflect a racist criminal-justice system whose roots are economic. As the #BlackLivesMatter movement grows, it’s worth understanding the major economic force that sustains the racial wealth disparity in America: housing segregation.
 Consider the history of Ferguson, Missouri, where Brown was killed. St. Louis passed one of the first redlining ballot measures in the country in 1916, designating some areas “Negro blocks.” While the Supreme Court struck this measure down a year later, real-estate-agent practices and covenants continued to bar black people from buying property outside of certain zones.
 The federal government soon got into the redlining game. The New Deal’s mortgage programs, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration, used racial…

“Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack,” writes Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. “It opens the possibility that anyone may be a soldier in disguise, a sleeper among us, waiting to strike at the heart of our social slumber.”
 As France returns to a new normal following the horrific assassinations in and around Paris, the fear of the next attack is likely to intensify the frightening rightward and xenophobic trend in the nation’s politics.
 Such is the inevitable fallout from terrorism. When a clique of self-indulgent individuals act violently on behalf of those with whom they have no organic political connection, they don’t win broad support or convert the doubtful; they make those they ostensibly champion more vulnerable. Even when their professed goals are…

On a Sunday morning in July, a stream of cars motors up the scrub-oak-lined roadway that leads to Apopka High School. Passing under a marquee sign with Chick-fil-A: Outstanding Partner in Ed spelled out in black letters, they pull into the parking lot. Single adults, families and groups of teens gather in the school auditorium’s spacious vestibule. Two adolescent boys, one wearing a sports jersey and the other a Confederate-flag T-shirt, linger for a few moments by their truck before making their way inside.
 At 10 am, the crowd files into the auditorium to hear the Gospel. Every Sunday, Apopka High School turns into Venue Church. Its motto: “Partnering with schools and communities to serve students and families to gain the privilege of sharing the love of Jesus for eternal…

In her poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” Adrienne Rich writes of a woman who is “Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before / an unlocked door, that cage of cages.” The subject of these lines is unclear, and so is the boundary between the woman and the cage; only the relation between the two is firm, defining. It is also alienating, divisive and halting. Like Rich, Eula Biss—essayist, poet, linguistic trespasser—has an eye for identifying insecurities around dividing lines. Her uncanny knack for seeing cages that entrap others is continuous with her talent for anxiously building them around herself. 
 In 2008, Biss won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and published her first collection, Notes From No Man’s Land. Over the course of thirteen essays and innumerable apologies, she travels from New…

The editors, columnists and cartoonists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were not the first journalists to die in 2015. The day before Chérif and Saïd Kouachi attacked the magazine’s Paris office, murdering twelve, the International Federation of Journalists condemned the killing of
 TV correspondent Khalid Mohammed al Washali in Yemen. Fourteen journalists and media workers have already been killed worldwide in 2015, and 118 were killed last year. “Today, we are all Charlie in our thought but, as journalists, we very much share the reason for which they were targeted,” declared IFJ general secretary Beth Costa. “Those bullets were also meant for all of us who stand up for press freedom.”
 Satirists and cartoonists use sharp instruments—pens—to open up contentious debates. The journalists of Charlie Hebdo were known…

For most of us, the mass murder at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the subsequent killings at a Paris kosher supermarket inspired shock, horror and sadness. These feelings were not, however, universal. Among politicians with a direct interest in exploiting nihilistic violence for personal gain, the tragedy was quickly assimilated into just another bullet point. “We’ve been predicting this for a long time,” explained the neofascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose daughter Marine could very well finish first in the initial round of France’s next presidential election. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in the midst of a fierce re-election campaign, was also unsurprised by the attack, which he attributed, with impressive indiscrimination, to a combination of Israel’s enemies—the “terrorist fanatics of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic State and al-Qaeda”—adding that…

A century ago next month, D.W. Griffith released a controversial new film. “Wherever it goes, the ‘Birth of the [sic] Nation’ film arouses widespread indignation,” The Nation’s publisher, Oswald Garrison Villard, wrote in an editorial. “The play continues to do its devilish work of misrepresentation and of arousing race hatred.”
 The problem was cinema itself: “The truth is that this new means for public amusement and education has brought with it grave perils.” The film “is not only designed to make large sums for its promoters, but is admittedly a deliberate propaganda to degrade and injure ten millions of citizens.” Villard worried “that others inspired by this shameful example [will] turn to religious propaganda,” which “might lead to most serious breaches of the peace.” But he also noted that censorship…

“They control the people through the people’s own money.” — Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914)
 Like tens of millions of baby boomers, I have a retirement fund, and like over 4 million of us, I am building my nest egg with the venerable Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America–College Retirement Equities Fund. Heeding the TIAA-CREF newsletter’s recommendation to “diversify” my holdings, I have dutifully directed my savings into mutual funds, which invest that money with large and medium-size corporations spread across the economy. 
 Although I have contributed on a monthly basis for twenty-five years, it never occurred to me to find out which corporations I have an investment in. Then, in September, the US Senate failed in a party-line vote to…

Not long ago, while crashing with my parents for a few days, I had the opportunity to sift through a wicker box stuffed with memorabilia from my youth: cards, letters, notes scribbled furtively in class. I’m not that old—the historical period in question was the 1990s—but the exercise felt like stepping back into an ancient era. There were letters from old flames, grandparents and, disproportionately, my childhood best friend; creased paper and smudged ink, the occasional drawing, inside jokes that still made me laugh. An erstwhile sentimentalist, I had saved paper fragments with the scrawled names of people I could no longer place (who was Sharon?) and their phone numbers (most of which, quaintly, had no area codes). For several evenings, until I’d touched and devoured every last scrap, the…

Two armed men in balaclavas attacked Charlie Hebdo’s office in Paris and opened fire on the editorial staff, in the end killing five cartoonists, a columnist, a copy editor, a maintenance worker, an economist, a visitor and two police officers.
 To make sense of the senseless, we tell ourselves stories. In this case, the story is that the attack on Charlie Hebdo is the latest salvo in an ongoing clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. The story is that the satirical magazine was the last bastion of free thought in an otherwise cowed press—a press that has given in to political correctness and is now too afraid to criticize Islam. The story is that Muslim leaders remain silent about this atrocity. The story is that France has failed…

On January 9, President Obama announced a plan to make two years of community college free for those maintaining a 2.5 GPA and attending at least half-time. The White House estimates that the plan will benefit 9 million students to the tune of $3,800 a year.
 Everyone—poor, working and middle class—would benefit from controlling the costs of college. State and private colleges will have to consider if they offer enough value over community colleges to make their higher tuitions reasonable. This is what economist J.W. Mason refers to as “progressive supply-side economics,” and it’s part of why public options are so valuable.
 Former poet laureate Kay Ryan once said: “Right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly—and with very little financial encouragement—saving lives and…

If the current poll numbers hold, Spain’s next prime minister will be Pablo Iglesias, a pony-tailed 36-year-old political scientist who cut his teeth in the Communist Youth and the anti-globalization movement—but whose party, Podemos, wants “to change the rules of the political game,” Iglesias told the journalist Jacobo Rivero. Left and right, he added, are metaphors that are no longer “useful in political terms”: “the fundamental divide now [is] between oligarchy and democracy, between a social majority and a privileged minority.” Or, as Podemos likes to put it, between la gente and la casta, the people and the caste. 
 Podemos was founded only a year ago and, in May, it stunned Spain’s political establishment by winning five seats in the European Parliament (1.25 million votes, nearly 8 percent). In…

Although it was shot in Argentina, partially bankrolled in Spain (by Pedro Almodóvar’s company), given its premiere at Cannes and then shortlisted for the Oscars, the true mark of the internationalism of Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales is that it bears the artistic stamp of Quentin Tarantino. Many other films destined for US art houses display comparably global credentials, but Wild Tales is exceptional for the brio with which it imitates a style that is already proudly imitative—and as accepted worldwide as the American Express card.
 You will immediately recognize the genre-movie settings (a cheap roadside diner in the rain, a lonely stretch of mountain highway), the pop-archivist musical choices (Giorgio Moroder’s Flashdance soundtrack, Bobby Womack’s cover of “Fly Me to the Moon”), the frequent pauses to let you admire a…

When I first started traveling to Berlin in the 1980s, piles of rubble still marred the landscape. I was most struck, though, by what was missing. Nazi vandalism, Allied bombing, the postwar razing of Nazi offices, the construction of the Berlin Wall and vigorous urban renewal had all contributed to erasing the architectural traces of the city’s fraught twentieth-century history. But the absences were always palpable, even if walking tours devoted to Nazi sites or Jewish Berlin often had to conjure up what was no longer there. 
 Since the fall of the wall a quarter-century ago, and the subsequent reunification of a divided Germany, the pace of rebuilding has accelerated. The sprawling agglomeration of skyscrapers at Potsdamer Platz gestures, however clumsily, toward the future. And the past, too, seems…