Innehållsförteckning för August 29-September 5, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Each One Teach One George Joseph’s article “Teach for America Goes Global” [July 18/25] takes Teach for India to task. In the past eight years, TFI has taken small steps for children in India, and there is a long way to go. In a country where 76 percent of our children don’t graduate from school; where 52 percent of the children in fifth grade can’t read a second-grade text; where our government says “it will not be an exaggeration to say that our education system is in disarray,” those of us doing this work often feel overwhelmed. While we try our best, each day we wake up knowing that there is both more to do and that we can do it better. We are grateful to The Nation for…

One commonly asked question about this moment in black-led organizing—what some broadly refer to as the Black Lives Matter movement—is what its participants want. What are BLM’s goals, and why, some critics ask, is the movement so reactive, so vocal and visible, only in response to police violence against black people? Now, anyone with such questions can refer to “A Vision for Black Lives,” which lays out six demands and 40 corresponding policy recommendations to paint a picture of what today’s black activists are fighting for. The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 50 organizations representing black people nationwide, made the policy platform and accompanying website public on August 1. Among the demands are calls for “an end to the criminalization, incarceration, and killing of our people”…

Ladies, if you’re ever the victim of sexual harassment or rape, try to make sure you have plenty of company. It’s not so hard to dismiss the claims of one woman—we all know the country is full of scheming females who will say anything to get attention, money, or revenge. This is true whether the woman is a hotel housekeeper, a university administrator like Andrea Constand—the first of Bill Cosby’s victims to go public—or a famous TV personality, like former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson. When the news broke in mid-July that Carlson was suing her ex-boss, Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment, her former colleagues didn’t exactly rally around her cause. Greta Van Susteren told People that the charges didn’t have “a ring of truth”—after all, Van Susteren said, Ailes…

The French writer Georges Perec was drawn to self-imposed challenges. He wrote one short novel without ever using the letter E, and another in which E is the only vowel used. With Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, he belonged to the literary cohort known as Oulipo, an acronym for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (“Workshop of Potential Literature”), whose members shared the belief that formal constraints could have a liberating effect. As Perec put it, “I set myself rules in order to be totally free.” Setting strict rules governing time and place in his novel Life, A User’s Manual (1978), he produced a work that is simultaneously capacious and intimate, forthcoming and wily. By Perec’s own count, the novel tells no fewer than 107 tales, among them “The Tale of Four…

Tekendra Parmar is a writer who covers technology, the humanities, and human rights. OVER 20 YEARS AGO, JOHN PERRY Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist and a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was stranded among wonks and pols at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos. After hearing presentations by world leaders pretending to understand the nascent technology of the Internet, he decided to write a manifesto stating some of the core principles of cyber-libertarianism. “Governments of the Industrial World,” it read, “you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Barlow e-mailed the text…

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that states with the longest histories of voter discrimination no longer had to seek approval from the federal government for changes to their election procedures. A month after that decision, North Carolina—where 40 counties had previously been subject to that requirement—passed the country’s most sweeping voting restrictions. The state implemented an onerous photo-ID requirement, cut a week of early voting, and eliminated same-day voter registration, out-of-precinct voting, and pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds. On July 29 of this year, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit invalidated these restrictions, saying that they “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The court found that the state GOP had intentionally discriminated against people…

Dear Liza, I recently moved to Portland, Oregon. I am black, my husband is white, and we have a kid in elementary school. Since the summer of 2014, I have been heartsick—like so many people—over the stream of reports on black people being murdered at the hands of the police. I haven’t been much of an activist since college, when I participated in the 1980s divestment movement. But I feel compelled to channel my fury and despair into activism now. Recently, I was able to join a local chapter of Black Lives Matter. I have been deeply moved by the wisdom and self-awareness of these young activists. I want to put up a Black Lives Matter sign in front of my house as a gesture of support for that movement.…

In her essay this week on Kanye West, Angela Flournoy compares the hip-hop artist to another gifted self-promoter: Norman Mailer. “In other times,” wrote Gore Vidal in his 1960 Nation review of Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, “it would have been fatal for an artist not yet full grown to show us his sores and wounds, his real and his illusory strength. Until very recently the artist was a magician who did his magic in public view but kept himself and his effects a matter of mystery.” But Mailer flouted that tradition: “He is giving us now the storms and the uncertainties, private and public, which he has undergone. He has armed the enemy and not entirely pleased his allies.” Even so, Vidal continued, “I am fairly certain that Mailer will…

“Security was the number-one factor for me in choosinga school,” explained one of the mothers I met late last winter at a Montessori preschool in an affluent suburb of Salt Lake City. A quality-control expert at a dietary-supplement company, the woman said she vividly remembers the jolt of horror she felt when she first learned of the Columbine massacre in 1999. So when the time came to send her child to preschool, she selected one that markets itself not only as creative, caring, and nurturing, but also as particularly security-conscious. To get the front door of the school to open, visitors had to be positively ID’d by a fingerprint-recognition system. In the foyer, a bank of monitors showed a live feed of the activity in every classroom. After drop-off, many…

44 TO 1 Odds of being denied bail for a black versus a white defendant 23 Average number of days spent in jail by low-income people because they couldn’t afford bail 75¢ Amount earned by formerly incarcerated black men for every dollar made by white men released from prison $7.1K Total median wealth of black households in 2011—more than 15 times less than the median wealth of white households ($111,146) “Black humanity and dignity requires black political will and power.” Black Lives Matter vision statement, composed by a coalition of over 50 black-led organizations…

Even as Fox News finds itself increasingly mired in an outpouring of sexual-harassment charges against former CEO Roger Ailes, workplace harassment continues—and as Katha Pollitt notes at right, it is not confined to right-wing institutions like Fox. 28K Charges alleging harassment received by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in FY2015 45% Complaints that allege harassment on the basis of sex 25% American women who say they’ve been sexually harassed in the workplace, when the survey doesn’t define sexual harassment 40% Women who say they’ve been sexually harassed when the survey describes specific behaviors “We are deeply troubled by what we have seen during our tenure on the Commission.” Cochairs of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, describing the ongoing harassment they’ve seen reported during their term…

He looked dangerous. He looked like a suspect. He looked like he was reaching for a weapon. The officer feared for his life. This familiar litany was recited on the news more than once in this vexed summer—a time weighted with foreboding, anxiety, and grief. We are all afraid of something: terrorism, random outlaws with PTSD, ominous political forces. As a result, gun sales have soared. Paradoxically, rising gun sales mean that it’s increasingly reasonable to suspect that someone pulled over by police to the side of the road will have one. Writes Ted Shaw, director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina, “in a society that worships gun culture and advocates the right to carry weapons, it cannot be that the fact that an…

Nashville “The republicans i talk to don’t feelany more represented by their party than the Sanders Democrats,” says Corbin Trent. It’s a steamy night a few weeks after the California primary, in a hall belonging to Local 737 of the United Auto Workers. Bernie Sanders hasn’t yet endorsed Hillary Clinton, but even his most die-hard supporters know he isn’t going to be president. Trent, the founder of Tennessee for Bernie, is talking about the widening gap between Americans and the people who are supposed to represent us in Washington. “We have a Congress made up mostly of millionaires who spend all their time talking to each other,” he says. “Our country is becoming an oligarchy.” When Trent finishes, Zack Exley stands up. The people in the room are all Bernie…