Innehållsförteckning för February 8, 2016 från The Nation

@thenation.com Justice for Laquan—and Ch Thank you for your editorial regarding Rahm Emanuel’s dishonest and incompetent cover-up of the murder of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer [“Rahm Must Go,” Jan. 4]. I am also glad to see you calling for his resignation. This, along with the fact that a majority of Chicagoans favor his removal, tells me democracy is working. When Rahm goes, I will celebrate. Americans deserve better. HUGH R. HAYS SOLDOTNA, ALASK Honoring the Antiwar Left Thank you for honoring the documentary We Are Many [“The Progressive Honor Roll 2015,” Jan. 4]. I have asked our local progressive cinema to show it. Here in Rhode Island, East Bay Citizens for Peace still holds monthly antiwar vigils in Bristol. Founding members tell me they were mocked and…

According to Andrew Tyndall of the Tyndall Report, which tracks the flagship news shows on the three major broadcast networks—ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News—every week, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign received 327 minutes of stand-alone coverage in 2015, while Bernie Sanders’s campaign received a mere 20 minutes among those three newscasts. That’s a 16-to-1 ratio, despite the fact, as Media Matters has pointed out, that Trump and Sanders are polling at similar levels in their respective parties. For comparison, the three nightly news shows devoted more time to the British royal family (32 minutes), the holiday season (82 minutes), and the New England Patriots’ “Deflate- gate” scandal (145 minutes). Indeed, Trump alone received more coverage by the Big Three newscasts than the entire Democratic primary contest.…

Tavis Smiley is the host and managing editor of Tavis Smiley on PBS and the author of Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year, which has just been published in paperback. On The Nation’s podcast, Stop Making Sense, we discussed King’s radicalism and how the civil-rights leader coped with depression. This interview has been edited and condensed. —Jon Wiener Jon Weiner: After King’s speech at New York City’s Riverside Church in April 1967, where he came out against the war in Vietnam and called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” The New York Times attacked the speech as “disastrous, wasteful and self-defeating”; The Washington Post said King had done “a grave injury to…his natural allies [and] even…

After the civil war, when the peace had been won and Reconstruction had begun, The Nation sent a writer through the South to report on the fledgling democracy. Both the heirs of William Lloyd Garrison and the new black citizens of Dixie understood that winning the South could mean a new America. Fifty years ago, when the South stood in the throes of a Second Reconstruction, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. filed reports on the civil-rights movement for this publication. King sought not only to document the South as it was, but to envision the nation as it should be. “Throughout our history, the moral decision has always been the correct decision,” he insisted. And the struggle for that moral decision, King added, was being waged in the South. Fifty…

We amateurs commonly speak of “taking a picture.” Those who practice photography more seriously used to grumble, “I don’t take pictures—I make them.” Point taken, but circa 1980, artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine started talking about, and doing, what they called “appropriation.” Influenced by the conceptual art of the preceding decade, and haunted by the sense that pictures make us more than we do them, they tried out a second-order photography, making pictures by, literally, taking them from consciously artistic sources (Levine’s works “after” Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange) or purely commercial ones (Prince’s Marlboro Men). Theirs were images of images, photographs in quotation marks. Meanwhile, as if to prove the priority of images over real life, Cindy Sherman was populating her “Untitled Film Stills” with images of…

Hawks kettling on the thermals high above the Appalachians on their way south—it looks like thought, the mind floating by way of association, veering and floating, circling back to the impinging weight of a remembered event or nonevent of—as what led here in the first place— mind, the movement of the mind outweighing any material force or falling which is the origin of force—where there’s gravity that is—a falling toward what ultimately no one knows of, human thinking reaching only so far past what can be seen by way of scientific instruments such as solar wind out of the sun’s atmosphere then into Earth’s appearing in the form of changes in the weather or a loss of electrical power —thus entering a house, a room, the space freeing the mind…

Ayear ago, concerned that ordinary citizens would be locked out of the presidential nominating process, The Nation argued that a vigorously contested primary would be good for the candidates, for the Democratic Party, and for democracy. Two months later, Senator Bernie Sanders formally launched a campaign that has already transformed the politics of the 2016 presidential race. Galvanized by his demands for economic and social justice, hundreds of thousands of Americans have packed his rallies, and over 1 million small donors have helped his campaign shatter fund-raising records while breaking the stranglehold of corporate money. Sanders’s clarion call for fundamental reform—single-payer healthcare, tuition-free college, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, the breaking up of the big banks, ensuring that the rich pay their fair share of taxes—has inspired working people across the…

While the US-Iran nuclear deal has been rightly celebrated for its contributions to lessening the tensions between the two countries (see Phyllis Bennis’s comment elsewhere in this section), it has been less recognized for another gift to American citizens: delicious pistachios. The lifting of economic sanctions will result in the introduction of certain Iranian products to American markets, including the country’s famed pistachios, as well as its caviar and Persian rugs. Bloomberg Business writer Javier Blas points out that while Iran is only the seventh-largest producer of crude oil in the world, it competes with the United States for the title of world’s largest pistachio grower. “Iran,” Blas notes, “has far more clout in the market for cocktail nibbles than it does in crude trading.” This is good news for…

Trigger warnings, safe spaces, micro-aggressions—in 2015, pundits, politicians, and other serious people had a lot of fun bemoaning academia as a liberal la-la land where hands are held and minds are coddled. I’m rather old-school when it comes to free expression. I didn’t go for author and Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis’s notorious essay cheering professor-student affairs, but surely it was overkill for grad students to bring charges against her under Title IX forhaving a “chilling effect” on student victims’ willingness to come forward. Wouldn’t writing a letter to the editor have sufficed? As for dropping Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the Literature Humanities core class at Columbia after students demanded trigger warnings about its accounts of rape: Wasn’t it bad enough that Ovid was shipped off to Romania? Must his beautiful poems…

Shortly after hillary clinton took the microphone to deliver a speech on immigration to a packed Brooklyn ballroom in December, the interruptions started. Activists calling attention to hunger-striking detainees silently unfurled a banner. More vocal protesters criticized Clinton for saying last year that asylum-seeking child migrants should be “sent back” to Central America. Clinton simply raised her voice and spoke more forcefully. But after the silent banner and before the heckling, she also paused to recognize Lorella Praeli, her new director of Latino outreach. Clinton spoke at length about Praeli, offering a profile heavier on biographical details than on professional credentials. (Born in Peru, Praeli came to the United States for medical care at age 10 and became politically active after learning in high school that she was undocumented.) She…

On a cold, wet day in January 2008, Robert Batchelor decided to take a peek at a map in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, an old and venerable collection founded in 1602 and filled with arcane treasures. Anyone who has ever used the library may recall the oath that all readers are required to take (formerly in Latin, but nowadays in English, I think) not to remove, deface, or injure any of the library’s books, let alone bring in any fire or kindle one—a great temptation in a library originally devoid of any artificial heating source, especially for a generation that had just discovered the lure of Virginia tobacco. Batchelor, a historian of Britain and Asia, was about to fly back to the United States, where he teaches at Georgia Southern University,…

EVEN BEFORE IT WAS PUBLISHED A FEW months ago, Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (Random House; $28) was the No. 1 bestseller in Amazon’s “Magical Realism” category. The term suggests an inevitable analogy with Gabriel García Márquez, and there has always been a tendency to link the two writers—Márquez the founder figure, Rushdie the greatest of his imitators. But the analogy is a false one, as Rushdie’s new novel makes especially clear, and it’s useful to articulate the difference. Aaron Thier’s second novel, Mr. Eternity, will be published in August. In Márquez’s fiction, magic is part of reality, and the characters do not distinguish between the real and the magical, because that distinction doesn’t exist. In Rushdie’s work, magic and reality are problematically confounded, and the…

0% Amount of tuition that students at public universities would pay under Bernie Sanders’s plan 6.2% Amount of the capital-gains tax that Sanders would impose on people earning more than $250,000 per year 12 Weeks of paid medical and family leave that the government would provide for workers under Sanders’s plan 2M Number of small-donor contributions received by the Sanders campaign as of December 2015 “Bernie is speaking to a yearning that is deep and real. And he has credibility on it.” Vice President Joe Biden, referring to Sanders’s focus on economic inequality…

On January 16, Iran released four US citizens from prison in exchange for the release of seven Iranians who were accused or convicted of sanctions violations. This prisoner swap was possible because the nuclear deal has made the privileging of diplomacy over threats and war a key component of US-Iranian relations. The same is true of the quick release of two US Navy patrol boats and 10 sailors who strayed into—or perhaps deliberately entered—Iran’s territorial waters a week earlier. The prisoner exchange was announced just as US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif began discussions in Vienna on implementation of the nuclear deal. Following the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, that Iran had fulfilled its obligations under the…

With this issue, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II picks up where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. left off exactly 50 years ago, when he filed the last of his six annual Nation dispatches from the front lines of the civil-rights movement. In his first report, “Equality Now,” published this week in 1961, King commented that the administration of the new president, John F. Kennedy, had “the opportunity to be the first in one hundred years of American history to adopt a radically new approach to the question of civil rights…. The day is past for tolerating vicious and inhuman opposition on a subject which determines the lives of 20,000,000 Americans.” Should the country fail to progress toward racial equality, King warned, “an awakening world will conclude that we…

THE CRIPPLING AND PERVASIVE DEFECTS IN US national-security policy—costly exertions that, time and again, fail to yield the promised results—are patently obvious, consistently bemoaned, and yet effectively tolerated. To say that the apparatus principally responsible for implementing those policies is an underperforming behemoth qualifies as a considerable understatement. The kindest verdict one can offer regarding the Pentagon is that it marginally outperforms its first cousin, the Department of Veterans Affairs. The next president will enter office in January 2017 vowing to correct those defects. The likelihood that he or she will succeed in doing so is nil. The reasons why are legion, but prominent among them is the fact that those who ascend to the top of the national-security apparatus invariably arrive in the Pentagon as unwitting agents of the…