Innehållsförteckning för April 23, 2018 från The Nation

@thenation.com Enlighten Us! Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now is making a case for optimism, not offering a balanced analysis of what’s wrong with Western culture. David A. Bell’s review [“The Power-point Philosophe,” April 2] misses the mark. CARL ERICKSON MINNEAPOLIS Thank you, David A. Bell, for this delightful (and wryly humorous) discussion of Pinker’s work. This is the kind of review I thoroughly enjoy, for while I may not agree with your critique of Pinker at all times (I personally loathe Nietzsche and Foucault and Derrida), your insightful observations and clear-sighted criticisms—complete with snarky but hilarious (and appropriate) comparisons between Pinker’s work, TED Talks, and Dan Brown’s Origin)—gives me a clear picture of whether or not I should take a hiatus from my own PhD reading in order to see…

2M Estimated number of people across the US who marched in support of gun control on March 24 200K Estimated number of people who attended the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, DC 800 Minimum number of gun control rallies that took place on March 24—at least one in every state and in 38 countries 35% Percentage of young people who planned to join the March for Our Lives protests, either in person or on social media, according to a USA Today/Ipsos Poll 17 Number of school shootings in the US so far this year in which a person was injured or killed…

On March 22, the city government in Seoul, the South Korean capital, announced that it will shut down all employee computers every Friday at 8 PM, beginning on March 30. The new initiative aims to combat the culture of working overtime in South Korea, where government workers log nearly 1,000 more hours per year than their counterparts in other developed economies. Given these long hours, it’s not surprising that South Koreans are also among the world’s most sleep-deprived populations. The new law, which will roll back Friday hours to 7 PM by May, comes on the heels of a vote by the National Assembly to reduce the maximum number of work hours per week from 68 to 52, suggesting a new momentum to address the physical and psychological toll inflicted…

Twenty. That’s the number of rounds Sacramento police officers fired at 22-year-old Stephon Clark, killing the father of two as he stood in his grandmother’s backyard on Sunday, March 18. Clark is now one of 244 Americans shot and killed by police in 2018. Two officers were responding to a report of vandalism—someone smashing car windows with a “tool bar”—and police helicopters zoomed in on Clark holding “an object.” After he was gunned down, however, the police found only a cell phone. Investigators interviewed his grandmother for hours before she peeked out her window and saw his body splayed on the ground. “I told the officers, ‘You guys are murderers. Murderers,’” Sequita Thompson cried. “You took him away from his kids.” Three days after the shooting, Sacramento police released two…

THINGS DIDN’T END WELL BETWEEN GEORGE Carlo and Tom Wheeler; the last time the two met face-to-face, Wheeler had security guards escort Carlo off the premises. As president of the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA), Wheeler was the wireless industry’s point man in Washington. Carlo was the scientist handpicked by Wheeler to defuse a public-relations crisis that threatened to strangle his infant industry in its crib. This was back in 1993, when there were only six cell-phone subscriptions for every 100 adults in the United States. But industry executives were looking forward to a booming future. Remarkably, cell phones had been allowed onto the US consumer market a decade earlier without any government safety testing. Now, some customers and industry workers were being diagnosed with cancer. In January 1993,…

In the beginning, I was neither image nor identity. Time was a quickening; I was my own dark-watered well. There was no hankering there, just another native world and its wishes. Who is Memory? Why does she matter to History? Their far-off laughter uncurled me—I stretched out to hear more closely. In the beginning, I was born a man-girl with teeth for toes and a headful of hair hiding the nubs of horns. This was before ally or self-portrait, prodigal performer or forgotten prop. Soon, I was collecting sounds I mimicked at my elders’ commands to avoid my own noise. I found myself hiding in a closet beside bags of clothes only the dead would wear. That wasn’t the first time I spooned myself. Yes, there were large and small…

If you can speak of Armando Iannucci’s HBO series Veep and his 2009 movie In the Loop as following a formula in the midst of their flirtations with anarchy—their situations engineered to spin out of control, taking the improvisational performances with them—then you might say that he practices the old knaves-and-fools dialectic: portraying political animals as either skilled, self-involved brutes or bumbling, self-involved imbeciles, but mutually dependent and, in both cases, terrifyingly foul-mouthed. To provide enabling space for this bad behavior, Iannucci also interposes a smattering of middle terms: characters who are reasonably competent and responsible (like you, in other words) but fallible enough to compromise themselves or be fouled up by idiots—and also terrifyingly foul-mouthed. Having put this formula to work with present-day situations and fictitious characters in his…

With his choice of John Bolton as national security adviser, Donald Trump has put the finishing touches on a war cabinet, having nominated the bellicose Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and Gina Haspel, who ran a torture site under George W. Bush, as CIA director. With Bolton’s appointment, the presidential candidate who vowed to get us out of “stupid” wars is now loading up for more. And with Congress having all but surrendered its national-security responsibilities, the United States—already mired in grinding conflicts from the Middle East to South Asia—seems on the verge of more armed adventurism. Bolton is an unrepentant militarist who by all accounts is smart, sharp-elbowed, and relentless in peddling his fanatical views. Under Bush, he helped cook the intelligence to make the case for the…

It shouldn’t be shocking that teachers across the country are so fed up that they’re ready to strike. West Virginia teachers made history when they went on strike for nine days, shuttering schools from February 22 to March 6 over their dismal pay and shoddy benefits. Teachers in the state do not have a legal right to strike or to collectively bargain; still, they walked off the job to demand better compensation and walked back into their classrooms with a 5 percent raise. The unrest, however, is not over. Teachers in Oklahoma have promised to strike beginning April 2 if their Legislature doesn’t give them a raise and increase money for schools. Striking is also illegal for Oklahoma’s teachers, but school superintendents have indicated they’ll shut down the schools to…

The day before Hurricane Harvey ripped through Houston last August, the US Army Corps of Engineers predicted in an internal memo that the storm would flood neighborhoods on the western edge of Barker Reservoir. This forecast wasn’t made public until two days into the hurricane, when many homes were already underwater. The Army Corps had long predicted this scenario, according to reports obtained through a pending class-action lawsuit. In 1962, the Corps first calculated that a storm would inundate thousands of acres bordering the reservoir. But as Houston continued to expand, developers built on the land anyway. In 1986, the Corps again acknowledged, in private, that the reservoir’s maximum flood area extended into residential communities. The plaintiffs in the pending suit in the DC Court of Federal Claims are seeking…

When I left the United States for the United Kingdom in 2015, with Black Lives Matter at its height and my book on child victims of gun violence recently completed, some assumed that it was the racism that had pushed me away. But, as I would point out, if it was aggressive policing and racial disadvantage I was seeking to avoid, I would not be heading back to London. When the UK voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, many Brits then asked if I regretted leaving the States for the xenophobia and isolationism of Brexit Britain. But if it was xenophobia and isolationism I wanted to run away from, I’d point out, I wouldn’t be running toward America. When the United States elected Donald Trump five months…

“If there’s no law, nobody will come forward and so there’s no data. It’s a way to erase someone’s experience.”—Amber Crotty, Navajo Nation councilwoman WHEN AMBER KANAZBAH Crotty first went to work for the Navajo Nation, she was full of hope. She was passionate about education and health care, and wanted to help break the cycle of poverty that bound many Navajo families. Crotty hails from a long line of feisty women who, she says, “come from the land,” a reference to the arid ocher soil of the Navajo Nation and another way of saying: Her people are tough. Crotty studied American Indian law and history at the University of California, Los Angeles; she returned to Navajo and, with two young daughters at home, went to work as a legislative…

ACROSS 1 Buddy, heading west with newlywed, takes in German university town (9) 6 Mailer avoiding northern holiday celebration (5) 9 Sporting event where you’d see boats tear wildly around rod (7) 10 Good grade the night before, securing Yale student’s credit (7) 11 Interchanges tragic ending with what might happen during a breakup (12) 14 Principles of an alien minyan? (6) 15 Creator of 24 in 7 (8) 17 Quit 24 in 8 (8) 19 Shiny and grand, from a bygone era (6) 21 Assuming liability for a footnote? (12) 25 Discussed reason at critical island beach in the Pacific (7) 26 Dog limits onset of dot-com crash (7) 27 Ugly green type (5) 28 Huge crowd you once encountered at defunct Las Vegas casino (9) DOWN 1 Lampoon…

Facebook is getting the pounding it deserves for its shocking carelessness in allowing the antidemocratic, lying sleazebags at Cambridge Analytica to harvest the data of some 50 million users. Plenty of my friends are fleeing Facebook in utterly justified outrage. They’re joining a growing #DeleteFacebook campaign—and those tardy we’ve-already-fixed-it apologies from Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have only rubbed salt in the wound. Still, I’m not joining the exodus—at least not yet. I still find Facebook a valuable and important self-publishing and communications platform. For all its flaws, it remains a vital tool for political activism—just look, for instance, at how important Facebook and other social media were in organizing the West Virginia teachers’ strike, or the wave of student mobilization after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School…

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, inspired an important debate with his recent report “The Inclusive Populism of Robert F. Kennedy.” In The New York Times, he argues that Kennedy’s 82-day 1968 presidential campaign provides a model for liberals who seek to recapture the allegiance of white, working-class voters and “forge a powerful coalition” based on a “liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism.” The debate has two components: First, is this really what happened in 1968? And second, does the campaign really provide a road map a half-century later? Kahlenberg, like many before him, posits the contest as a battle between two manifestations of populism: the inclusive, liberal economic populism of RFK and the resentful, racially driven right-wing populism of George Wallace. While strongly…

Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat running for governor of Michigan, has asked a judge to rule on his eligibility to serve in the state’s highest office. Michigan’s Constitution stipulates that a gubernatorial candidate must be a “registered elector” in the state for four years before the general election. In 2003, El-Sayed registered to vote in Michigan. In 2014, he was living in New York, where he studied and later taught medicine at Columbia University. His voter registration in Michigan was never canceled, but a few legal experts still doubt his eligibility. Losing El-Sayed from the gubernatorial race—and on a technicality, given his 10-plus years voting in the state—would be a major blow to Michigan’s progressives. He is well to the left of the Democratic front-runner, Gretchen Whitmer. He wants to implement…