Innholdsfortegnelse for April 22, 2013 i The Nation

Woodward and Manning: Patriots
 Suquamish, Wash.
 Re “Bob Woodward’s Tantrum, Bradley Manning’s Torment” [March 25]: I find it disturbing that The Nation is trashing Woodward. When someone in the White House sends an e-mail to a journalist,
I expect he considers every word carefully. The phrase “You will live to regret…” is, to me, chilling. Rather than supporting a journalistic colleague, you accuse him of being thin-skinned, and you imply, with no evidence, that Woodward was more interested in the Sperling threat than in Manning’s situation. 
 Bernadette Foley
 Hudson, N.Y.
 Your mention of Bob Woodward’s tussle with the White House reminded me of how he became famous—by exposing the corruption of the Nixon White House. This was a courageous act by a whistleblower of the first order. I wonder if…

Secretary of State John Kerry has been
 arrested one time in his life, and as it happens, I was there—at least until my mom took me home to bed. 
 It was the spring of 1971, and Kerry was in his relatively brief stretch as the face of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The group announced plans to camp on the Battle Green in Lexington, the Boston suburb where I was then attending sixth grade. When town officials denied them permission, hundreds of residents showed up in support, and in the early morning hours the police took them all to the Public Works garage; they were fined $5 and released. My father, a mild-mannered business reporter, was among the arrestees, and that’s mostly what I remember—but also the clean-cut and…

The annual Drug & Alcohol Testing Industry Association (DATIA) conference, held in 2012 in San Antonio, Texas, looks like any other industry gathering. The 600 or so attendees sip their complimentary Starbucks coffee, munch on small plates of muffins and fresh fruit, and backslap old acquaintances as they file into a sprawling Marriott hotel conference hall. They will hear a keynote address by Robert DuPont, who served as drug policy director under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Nothing odd about any of this until you consider that the main subject of the conference is urine. 
 Seventy-seven years old, DuPont adopts the air of a sprightly televangelist as he outlines what he calls “the new battle lines” in the war on drugs, one that “begins with kids.” At the climax…

People say powerful corporations are the problem. 
 People say money in politics is the problem. 
 People say the corrupt two-party system is the problem. 
 People say Beltway lobbyists are the problem. 
 Yeah? So what? What are you going to do about it? 
 Write about it on your blog? 
 Sign an online petition? 
 Call your member of Congress? 
 Write a letter to the editor? 
 Read The Nation magazine? 
 Watch C-Span? (Sam Smith, in his classic book Why Bother?, wrote that “we view C-Span to remember what democracy was about.”) 
 Name your representatives in your state’s legislature—House and Senate. Don’t know their names? Join the club. In my snap survey of friends, relatives and even political junkies, more than 70 percent…

The World Until Yesterday What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? By Jared Diamond. Viking. 499 pp. $36. On the vast time scale of human evolution, it was just this morning that Jared Diamond was a trained physiologist writing calculation-laden papers on sodium transport in the gallbladder. That was 1962, to be precise; but in the lives of individuals and even societies, a half-century can make all the difference. Setting his sights well beyond gallbladderata, Diamond, who teaches geography at UCLA, has become that rare author read by academics in various disciplines and huge popular audiences. Guns, Germs, and Steel, his Pulitzer Prize–winning bestseller from 1997, sought to explain nothing less than Western global predominance over 13,000 years of history, arguing forcefully for the influence of geography on the development…

Nicosia
 In Cyprus’s divided capital, the early 
 symptoms of the familiar plague are plain. There’s the rash of For Rent and For Sale signs, scattered still but spreading; the numb, unnatural quiet; the melancholy of shop windows full of things no one will buy. On classy Makarios Avenue, Guess Jeans, Juicy Couture and Planet Organic survive from the cosmopolitan boom time, but the Nike outlet has closed. The pavement opposite is strewn with leaflets from ELAM, the Greek neo-Nazi movement’s small Cypriot franchise. The town center is packed with what one Cypriot called “crowds of indignant journalists” waiting for the sky to fall; in the vege­table market, a widow who lost her catering job six months ago sits hunched by a folding table piled with sesame bread. She got…

A VICTORY FOR PAID SICK LEAVE: The fight for paid sick leave is picking up steam. The latest—and sweetest—victory comes from New York City, where Democratic City Council Speaker and mayoral front-runner Christine Quinn has been refusing to bring a paid sick leave bill to a vote—for three straight years.
 Some thirty-nine of fifty-one council members—a clear majority—supported a bill that would have required businesses with more than five employees to offer five days of paid sick leave per year. Roughly three-quarters of New Yorkers (including 
60 percent of Republicans) said they would go even further and require employers to provide a full seven days. Yet Quinn, courting the city’s pro-business elite—and accepting $370,000 in campaign contributions from the bill’s opponents—held out, insisting she was protecting small business.
 And so,…

Failing to tackle corruption “could cause the collapse of the party and the fall of the state,” warned Hu Jintao, the outgoing general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, at the Eighteenth Party Congress in November 2012. By January, the newly appointed party chief, Xi Jinping, publicly pledged zero tolerance for corruption, vowing to prosecute both “tigers” and “flies”—i.e., top officials and lowly bureaucrats alike. 
 Both leaders were trying to temper public anger over the issue of corruption, which had led to massive demonstrations all over the country. Still, one wonders how sincere Xi is about tackling corruption. After all, Bloomberg News reported last June that the wealth of Xi’s extended family amounts to billions in minerals and real estate, including a stake in a rare-earth company that alone…

Is it fair to criticize an absurdist television drama as riveting as Homeland for its tenuous relationship to reality? There are reasons to demur. Even the crudest précis of the show’s premise and plot is enough to reveal that its creators do not mean to venture, for the most part, into the realm of the real. The series’ first and
 most obvious flight of fantasy—the existence and transformation of an American marine turned jihadi terrorist turned congressman turned penitent—is outlandish, but typical of television. But it is the story’s second thread, the travails and eventual triumph of the beautiful and brilliant CIA agent Carrie Mathison, which gives pause. Afflicted with a mental disorder that affects every aspect of her life—her powers of perception and persuasion; the details of her obsessions;…

In a communications landscape where every­thing is up for grabs, the most powerful—and self-serving—players are grabbing for everything. And decisions that
 President Obama and his next appointee to chair the Federal Communications Commission will make in the coming months could well decide whether new media robber barons will dominate the local, state and national discourse. 
 Rupert Murdoch has renewed his push to have the FCC scrap its thirty-eight-year-old media cross-ownership rule, which bars him from buying up the daily newspaper, the largest television and radio stations, and the top digital news and entertainment sites in major American cities. Murdoch wants to rule the roost in Los Angeles, where he already owns TV stations and is salivating at the prospect of combining them with the Los Angeles Times, the nation’s…

North Korea greeted 2013 with a bang
 (or several of them), not the dying whimper that Beltway officials and pundits had hoped for—and have been predicting ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall. In December, Pyongyang launched a long-range missile that, after many failures dating to 1998, got the country’s first satellite rotating around the earth. A couple of months later, North Korea detonated its third atomic bomb. Then, as the annual US–South Korean war games got going and a new president took office in Seoul, the North let loose a farrago of mind-bending rhetoric, bellowing that events were inching toward war, renouncing the Korean War armistice of 1953, and threatening to hit either the United States or South Korea with a pre-emptive nuclear attack. In between, Chicago Bulls…

“This is simply too much, too big, too powerful, too lacking in benefits for American consumers and citizens,” I said as I cast my no vote on the market-altering Comcast-NBCU merger in January 2011. Mine was the lone dissenting voice as the Federal Communications Commission approved the deal by a four-to-one vote. 
 I still remember the day when the top brass from Comcast and NBC-Universal came calling on me at the FCC. As I listened to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and his cohort, I began to understand the daunting breadth of the transaction they had devised to combine Comcast’s vast programming and broadband cable distribution networks with the assets of General Electric’s National Broadcasting Corporation and Universal Studios. This went breathtakingly beyond any deal that I had seen before.…

A Man of Misconceptions The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change. By John Glassie. Riverhead. 335 pp. $26.95.
 In 1680, a small procession of Jesuits ascended a winding path to the mountaintop shrine of Mentorella, some thirty miles east of Rome. They carried a box containing the heart of one of their brethren, Father Athanasius Kircher, and at their journey’s end they buried the reliquary at the foot of the shrine’s altar. The rest of Kircher’s body had been entombed in the crypt of Il Gesù, the most important Jesuit church in the Eternal City.
 For most of his seventy-eight years, Kircher had lived and worked at the Roman College, the principal seat of Jesuit learning, where he established himself as its greatest and most curious polymath…