Innehållsförteckning för September 26-October 3, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Strength in Weekness Eric Alterman’s gloomy analysis of the newspaper industry’s current problems is on target, except for one major flaw: He includes only daily publications under the heading of “the newspaper industry” [“Paper Rout,” July 18/25]. But that’s no more than 1,500 dailies, of all sizes, and accounts for only about 45 percent of US newspapers’ total circulation of some 87.5 million. The daily-newspaper industry is indeed in trouble, with steady declines in both circulation and the number of individual publications. But considering only daily publications ignores the 6,000-plus less-frequent US papers, most of which are weeklies. Their focus differs vastly from the dailies’ focus, and their economic outlook and circulation are healthier, because they’re the only consistent source of coverage for their communities. Dailies focus on major…

 Dear Liza, I’m a queer woman who believes in queerness both as a radical politics and as a sexuality. On the one hand, I was excited to watch the rise of Bernie Sanders, and the way the popularity of his campaign shifted public debate around capitalist resistance. But on the other hand, it’s made finding people to have sex with sort of tricky. I often find now that potential mates, whether in person or online, will front views significantly more radical than their actual beliefs. And of course, in the sack, you eventually figure out what those true beliefs are, since you can’t just yell radical epithets at each other (at least not for very long). One woman, for example, was all about smashing the corporate-media state—but couldn’t stand the…

Every so often, journalism can shine a much-needed light on the abuse of power by public officials and become a potent force for social change—as happened in Florida last month. In The Nation’s September 12/19 issue, Jessica Pishko exposed Angela Corey, state attorney for Florida’s Fourth Judicial Circuit, as one of the cruelest prosecutors in America. For seven years, Corey sent hundreds of children to prison, asked for the death penalty in dozens of cases (even as the use of capital punishment waned in other districts), and still failed to convict George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s killer. Finally, on August 30, an army of activists, churchgoers, and rabble-rousers brought Corey’s toxic tenure to an end. For the first time in the history of Jacksonville, an incumbent state attorney lost the election.…

EVERYONE ELSE IS TALKING ABOUT DONALD TRUMP AND the mess that has been made of American politics, about deepening divisions and the ugliness that the 2016 election has exposed. Not Russ Feingold. He’s talking about making it easier to access the Internet. But he’s not doing so in the way that politicians usually do—adding another vague promise to a laundry list of proposals that they hope will touch just enough hot buttons to get them elected. Feingold is going into detail about a digital disconnect that puts some Americans on an information superhighway and others on the equivalent of a digital dirt road. When high-speed Internet isn’t universally available, says the former senator from Wisconsin, high-school students have to sit at night in parking lots outside small-town libraries and schools,…

 MATT BARRY TEACHES HISTORY AND ECONOMICS TO ELEVENTH-and twelfth graders at Live Oak High School, a public school in a suburb of San Jose, California. At 32, he’s in his ninth year on the job, teaching 35 students in each class. But Barry also has a second life that’s becoming increasingly common for American schoolteachers: He spends his after-school hours and weekends as an Uber driver in order to earn extra money. Barry and his wife, Nicole, are both teachers, and each earns $69,000 per year, which should place them solidly within the middle class. If Silicon Valley hadn’t sprawled around them, that’s where they would be. But the explosion in wealth that has accompanied the tech boom has sent housing costs well beyond the reach of longtime working- and…

 When Helen Gurley Brown died in 2012 at age 90—and was cremated in a Pucci dress—she had spent her career giving voice to desires previously off-limits in public. She had transformed Cosmopolitan from a dying general-interest magazine into a widely read monthly celebrating women’s pursuit of sex; for three decades, and during successive feminist waves, the magazine dominated the market for women’s publications. She had published thousands of articles about overcoming hang-ups and achieving orgasms in prose she made “baby simple” with words like “pippy-poo.” For the women who read her regularly, her work offered necessary encouragement. “There are a lot of women out there who need help and they are $100 and 50 miles away from a psychiatrist, and what we are trying to do is absolve them of…

 It’s easy to forget—especially in light of Washington’s support for what many are calling the “soft” coup in Brazil, which has led to the ouster of President Dilma Rousseff and the end of 13 years of Workers’ Party (PT) governance—that international financial institutions welcomed the PT’s rise to power in 2002. In the shadow of Asia’s 1997 financial crisis and Argentina’s 2001 economic meltdown, the managers of post–Cold War globalization were fearful of, as World Bank president James Wolfensohn put it, “social explosions.” In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez had begun his populist rattlings, while the rest of South America began to elect one leftist president after another. In Seattle, workers and environmentalists had recently teamed up to protest iniquitous trade treaties. Reform, neoliberals admitted, was necessary. The PT’s first president, Luiz…

Texas has seen brighter days when it comes to women and women’s health. Ann Richards, the state’s second female governor and last Democratic one, served from 1991 to ’95. She was an ardent feminist who worked on Sarah Weddington’s first campaign for the Texas Legislature back in the early ’70s. Weddington is the attorney who successfully argued Roe v. Wade. Together, they would go on to establish the Foundation for Women’s Resources. In Texas politics, “Ann was the central figure around whom we revolved,” Weddington recalled. Richards was proudly pro-choice throughout her career, recognizing that reproductive autonomy was essential to women’s participation in public life (though she also admitted that domesticity “just bored the living hell out of me”). Richards appointed more women to positions in state government than any…

 I was wending my way through the parking lot of a big-box store not long ago. A large, smoke-belching, unmuffled truck with the kind of mammoth tires one sees at demolition derbies hurtled into the lot and careened into a parking space some yards away. The sides of the truck were plastered with enormous political advertisements. “Make America Great Again,” the Trump banners read. (As the cloth furled and snapped and fluttered in the wind, however, it was “RUMP” and “RUM” whose guidance promised a return to gloryland.) The whole effect was bigger and more eye-catching than a float in a parade. The sight of it! The sound! Whether in approval or disapprobation, the entire geography of the parking lot reacted as one. Heads swiveled, eyes widened, mouths gaped. The…

 PATTY DWYER IS A RESPIRATORY THERApist and a mom from the suburbs of Long Island. Her parents migrated there from New York City amid the panicked white flight of the mid-20th century. For most of her life, Patty has lived what she understands to be the American dream: a good career, a family, a house in a leafy suburb with neighbors she knows and understands. In 2008, she voted for Barack Obama; she thought a mixed-race man would be uniquely positioned to usher in a postracial America. She was optimistic. But that was then. Patty’s had a tough run ever since. Her son has struggled with addiction, and she knows too many families who have been touched by Long Island’s surging heroin epidemic. Meanwhile, her job has become less secure…

Nub’s pendular politics took our wind away. Sough was all sigh, exasperation. We’d sat on a beach biting hard apples during an earlier go-round. Nothing we knew amounted to much… Only this or that os- cillatory witness, a topography of grief re-gret rolled out under our feet. I thought of Net- sanet’s low-hanging hips and the honey-based perfume her night garments had given off, Lineaments of When the book Sophia wrote us into again and again, the word we thought meant injury meant winding we found out… I wanted whatever might last to last, knowing noth- ing would, the words’ ersatz eternity as close as we’d ever come, the words’ conjoint rehearsal, each the other’s fecund recess. I wanted not to be yelling what was wrong but I was. “Mama…

DC BY THE NUMBERS 3 Number of felonies the US Department of Justice has charged Edward Snowden with under the Espionage Act 30 Number of years Snowden faces in prison if convicted on all three 9 Number of times the Espionage Act has been used to charge, indict, or convict a federal employee since the Pentagon Papers were leaked 7 Number of times the Espionage Act has been used by the Obama administration “We will not be able to keep our people safe.” President Barack Obama, on the dangers of citizens disclosing classified information —Molly Stier  President Obama will grant his last pardons by January 20, 2017, his final day in office. With that in mind, and with Oliver Stone’s Edward Snowden biopic slated for release this fall, I sat…

 Texans like to boast that their state is oversized on everything from job creation to cowboy hats, but its latest big news is nothing to be proud of. According to a just-released report from the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology, maternal mortality doubled in the state from 2011 to 2014. Unbelievably, Texas now has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. The United States as a whole is pretty shameful on that score, to be sure, with a rate that places it between Qatar and Bahrain. Moreover, the national rate has been rising in recent years—California is the only state that has managed to significantly lower maternal mortality. Even so, Texas is way out of line. What gives? Opinion writers have been quick to point the finger at…

 Fred Block and Frances Fox Piven recently argued on TheNation.com that the basic-income guarantee is “not just another reform; it is a proposal that makes us think about what it is we are here on earth to do.” The esteemed psychologist Erich Fromm made the same point in these pages 51 years ago: “A guaranteed income would not only establish freedom as a reality rather than a slogan. It would also establish a principle deeply rooted in Western religious and humanist traditions: man has the right to live, regardless! This right to live—to have food, shelter, medical care, education, etc.—is an intrinsic human right that cannot be restricted by any condition, not even the one that the individual must be socially ‘useful.’” More attention could then be given to…