Innehållsförteckning för June 6-13, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com The Article, Unfinished Thank you for publishing Barry Schwabsky’s thoughtful meditation on the role of the critic in today’s art world, “The Complete Thing, Unfinished” [March 28/April 4]. His observations about the difference between participants in, and observers of, art show how some old debates about art spectatorship—the debates animating Rousseau’s theory of theater, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle—are still very much alive. I’ll be bringing Schwabsky’s work to my seminar on aesthetics, precisely because it shows the continued vitality of a grand old debate. ROBERT ARCHAMBEAU HIGHLAND PARK, ILL. Schwabsky presents a most interesting view of the status of contemporary art criticism. Allowing that critics no longer have much, if any, power in the art market, he says that he has “other…

COMMENT Several years ago, I asked the civil-rights lawyer Michael Ratner, who died on May 11 at the age of 72, whether he thought he had any chance of prevailing when, with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), he sued George W. Bush in early 2002 on behalf of some of the first Guantánamo detainees. “None whatsoever,” he replied. “We filed 100 percent on principle.” The law was against him: The Supreme Court had ruled during World War II that prisoners of war could not challenge their detention in US courts. And the politics were even worse: The World Trade Center cleanup was still ongoing, and the detainees—who, as alleged foreign terrorists, had been declared “the worst of the worst”—elicited little sympathy from Americans. But to Ratner, challenging the president…

You know you’re living in a bubble when no one you know voted for the far-right candidate and everyone’s astonished when he wins. From my Viennese friends and the cheery young Greens handing out campaign literature at the upscale Karmelitermarkt farmers’ market to the international scholars at Vienna’s Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (where my husband is a fellow this year and I am a guest), everyone I spoke with before the first round of the Austrian presidential elections on April 24 confidently predicted victory for the Green candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen, who ended up with 21 percent. The first-place finish of Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party (35 percent) came as quite a shock. But then, living in Vienna, a multicultural world capital that has been…

A little over nine decades ago, some 35,000 households received The Nation’s 1926 “Spring Book Number” in the mail. It included an essay by the American philosopher Irwin Edman, then in his early years at Columbia, on the position of the aspiring writer in the American university. Then as now, it was a cautionary tale. “Even after he is safely ensconced in the comfortable rank of an assistant professor,” Edman warned, the budding young writer “will find, unless he is extremely self-possessed, that the university has got under his skin. He had imagined himself joining a society of free spirits moving in the communion of high, clear thoughts upon vivid perennial issues. Instead he finds himself caught in the treadmill of men who have the habits of mind of rather…

The Abundance Narrative Essays Old and New. By Annie Dillard. Ecco. 271 pp. $25.99. Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a lecturer and writer in residence at the University of California, Irvine. She is working on a cultural history of the Walkman. F or an epoch defined by mass attention-deficit disorder, Annie Dillard would seem to be the perfect antidote. Dillard, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), is devoted to patience and to presence. “It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open,” she has declared. She is thoroughly and ecstatically attuned to her surroundings, willing to wait hours for a glimpse of a muskrat. Her words are painstakingly selected and arranged. The contrasts with our screen-tethered, logorrheic selves hardly need to be belabored. A chapter in Teaching…

ACROSS 1 Davis and Tatum, circling a piano at a great distance (5,5) 6 Swindle results from reverse-engineered computers (4) 9 Finnish company? No, Korean company (5) 10 Uncle enters ancient city in Oregon with 22 cub? (4,5) 12 Undertaker Fudd gets an advanced degree (8) 13 Careless “I do!” feeds bone-chilling stupidity (6) 15 Play a more powerful card—a moon, perhaps? (9) 16 Spelling “extremity” as “exhaust” (5) 17 Pour water over resin concoction (5) 19 Conscientious objector and sister beat a challenging puzzle (9) 21 Elk to return that thing on one foot (6) 22 Merely substituting cast for opening is delightful (8) 25 Ice cream drink with a serving of restaurant food for savages (9) 26 Diana turned into a nymph (5) 27 Organ uful for a…

Maybe Ted Cruz and John Kasich looked at the numbers and just gave up. Or more likely, Republican grandees decided that short-circuiting the final primaries would deprive Donald Trump of the oxygen of campaigning, thus buying a few quiet weeks to regroup. Instead, the party’s slowly widening fracture is now a gaping, unbridgeable chasm. The Bushes, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Lindsey Graham can hold their collective breath until they pass out; their condemnations only strengthen Trump’s grip on the news cycle and further embolden his supporters. This is a candidate who understands only one language: brute animal dominance. Trump has won. A generation of unimaginative and entitled Republican careerists have lost. It’s Trump’s Republican Party now. That makes it all the more important to recognize that, while Trump is…

As if dealing with airlines wasn’t enough of a hassle, now flyers have to deal with airline monopolies. A recent study by Jose Azar, Martin C. Schmalz, and Isabel Tecu found that five of the seven largest institutional shareholders of United Airlines were also among the largest shareholders of Southwest and Delta. The researchers showed that mergers among these giant shareholders, such as with BlackRock’s purchase of Barclays Global Investors, results in higher prices for consumers. Even more disturbing, such monopolies are on the rise in dozens of other industries. The infographic to the right shows the growth of monopoly power in the United States: Industries are becoming more concentrated, more profitable for their owners, more concentrated in their ownership, and older in age. Tackling these monopolies must become a…

In an election season dominated, even here, by America’s Got Trump and the increasingly dismal debate over whether Britain should leave the European Union, the May 7 victory by the son of a Pakistani bus driver over the Etonian son of a billionaire in the London mayor’s race offered a rare moment of satisfaction. That was especially true because voters rejected a Tory campaign based on fear of Muslims and a largely manufactured scandal about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. The day after he was sworn into office, Sadiq Khan attended a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony; in his second week, he unveiled plans to force developers to make as much as half of all new housing affordable. He also bested Donald Trump—who first offered the new mayor an “exemption” to…

A Life Beyond Boundaries By Benedict Anderson. Verso. 205 pp. $24.95. Scott Sherman, a Nation contributing writer, is the author of Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library (Melville House). I n 1967, Sudisman, the general secretary of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), whose ranks had just been decimated in a series of massacres that left hundreds of thousands dead, was put on trial. Of the top five PKI leaders, Sudisman was the only one who appeared in court; the others were shot. Two foreigners were always present in the Jakarta courtroom: Benedict O’Gorman Anderson, a 30-year-old scholar of Indonesia, and Herbert Feith, a colleague of Anderson’s from Australia. Amid the parade of Communist witnesses, only two of them spoke out in protest…

According to a recent survey by Public Policy Polling, of those with a favorable view of Donald Trump: 65% believe President Obama is a Muslim. 59% believe he was not born in the United States. 24% believe Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered. “A single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authori-tarianism.” Matthew MacWilliams, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst…

Donald Trump The Republican presidential candidate, who has endorsed physical violence against protesters at his rallies, is running even with Hillary Clinton in national polls. Jair Bolsonaro An army paratrooper in the days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, the Social Christian Party congressman celebrates torture while denouncing immigrants (“the scum of the world”) and gays. He will likely run for president in 2018 with the backing of the Brazilian elite. Marine Le Pen After scrubbing her National Front party clean of anti-Semitism, if not of Islamophobia, Le Pen will run for president next year on a platform calling for an end to the “Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism” whose “first victims are white male heterosexuals.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Erdoğan has persecuted journalists and critics, launched a renewed war against the Kurds, and ignored unfavorable…

On May 16, the Supreme Court issued a terse per curiam opinion deferring resolution in the case of Zubik v. Burwell. The petitioners were nonprofit employers who argued that federal rules requiring employee health benefits for birth control were contrary to their religious beliefs. They maintained that even merely requiring employers to opt out by formally asserting a conscientious objection substantially burdened the free exercise of their beliefs. For now, the justices chose not to decide that issue, instead remanding it back to the Court of Appeals level, requesting further briefing as to “whether contraceptive coverage could be provided to petitioners’ employees, through petitioners’ insurance companies, without any such notice from petitioners.” This deflection has postponed a contentious showdown pitting reproductive rights against religious rights—a contest that has become all…

These lost stars tomorrow will they be there when we wake in our sorrow, is it us so lost in the moment, is it today we look to flower If it were because the time we saw and loved, if it was because we are and should be this, the way it was then, we find it glowing this our future and bravado We say how could this be when did this happen that we’ll find ourselves somewhere else in some future laughing, why is it incompatible I mean what does it matter, whether the ship were in the trees or the ground was in the water The stars doubled in the river the stars once floating in past futures we ran to, if it all seems dizzy and mayhem…

I hate how syntax connects me to shit, or say the day is jeweled and burning, the fires banking, and none of its letters produce the horror at the heart of the index. The old document hangs over the twinned stair of murder and something else— that original slap of glove. The project is archival, all that blood in the mouth. The old language could have told you, it’s too late, we watched you die, watched you move through shocking losses and the solo flight you are taking back into the old language. It’s the same but different, different now. The mouth knows the bit, the taste of it.…