Innholdsfortegnelse for May 27, 2013 i The Nation

While We Wait for the Post-Patriarchy… TheNation.com suffered a near meltdown from the firestorm of comments that erupted over Deborah Copaken Kogan’s “My So-Called Post-Feminist Lit Life” [April 29]. A few samples from the hundreds of offerings: “Amazing article. Brava.” “Brilliant and infuriating!” “I’ll be post-feminist in the post-patriarchy. Wooooooooooo!!” “After millenniums of patriarchy the world isn’t going to change in just a few decades.… Give it a couple of hundred years.” “It seems we are as post-feminist as we are post-racist.” “You have earned my respect—as a writer, a feminist, a person. This piece is fantastic and moving, and your brutal honesty deserves applause.” “It bears pointing out that anytime a woman dares to have sex and complain about sexism, it strikes the biggest nerve.” “I hope you win…

FOURTH AMENDMENT: NOT DEAD YET For more than 200 years, the Fourth Amendment has promised that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” Unfortunately, the same members of Congress who take an oath to uphold this right frequently forget it when dealing with questions of online privacy. So they have to be prodded by activists­—which is precisely what happened when the House took up the so-called Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. Described by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as “Digital Big Brother,” CISPA was designed to bypass existing constitutional protections, enabling media corporations to spy on personal communications and to pass along sensitive user data to the government. According to the Sunlight…

It is a fitting irony that in the same week that the British government agreed to negotiate compensation for the torture of thousands of Kenyans under colonialism, a right-wing party devoted to returning the nation to its former glory would emerge as the major victor in local elections. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) won 147 council seats in recent midterm elections, coming in third in the national popular vote and perilously close to defeating the ruling Conservatives. It is a party in favor of a monocultural Britain and against immigration, multiculturalism and membership in the European Union. To demand that Britain be Great again, as UKIP leader Nigel Farage does, willfully disregards how that greatness came about and who paid for it. As the nineteenth-century French philosopher Ernest Renan…

At Stanford University in 2012, a young literature scholar named Natalie Phillips oversaw a big project: a new way of studying the nineteenth-century novelist Jane Austen. No surprise there—Austen, a superstar of English literature and the inspiration for an endless array of Hollywood and BBC productions based on her work, has been the subject of thousands of scholarly papers. 
 But the Stanford study was different. Phillips used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to track the blood flow of readers’ brains when they read Mansfield Park. The subjects—mostly graduate students—were asked to skim an excerpt and then read it closely. The results were part of a study on reading and distraction.
 The “neuro novel” story was quickly picked up by the mainstream media, from NPR to The New…

Once upon a time, a few bubbles ago, pop stars regularly shifted a million units opening week. This was before the industry contracted by half. Who now can remember such splendors? This platinum age was scarcely more than a decade back. Its peak was gilded and precipitous: the five biggest debuts in the history of the music business cluster in an eighteen-month period, four of them within seven months of 2000. ’N Sync, Britney Spears, Eminem, the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync again. Call it teenpop, but for Marshall Mathers. Blue-eyed hip-hop, then. It was the most popular music the world has ever known.
 As a matter of cultural memory, we seem divided from that moment by the fall of the Twin Towers. In truth, it ends with the tech bust.…

The reported use of chemical weapons by Syria’s Assad
regime has not made much difference in that tormented
country. Tens of thousands have been killed in the brutal
fighting so far, and the violence continues with no end in sight. 
 The chemical weapons allegations have, however, had a dramatic effect in the United States. Last August, the president warned that the use or movement of large quantities of such weapons would be a “game changer” with “enormous consequences,” marking a “red line” that must not be crossed. Ultimatums rarely make for artful diplomacy; in this case, it gave an opening to the neocon hawks. The same armchair warriors who relied on phony WMD claims to drive us into Iraq—
William Kristol, Robert Kagan and
others—started pounding the war drums again. They did so even…

A photograph haunts my waking hours. In it a man is curled embracing a woman. His eyes are closed, his head against her chest. Her back is arched, right arm resting on his left, elbow finding a niche in the crook of his arm. From the pose alone, it is as though he had reached for her in his sleep; as though her wrist, bent down against his brow, might bend again, directing her hand to stroke his hair, his face, his bowing back; as though she and he together had paused to feel the beating of their hearts.
 The Kama Sutra must have a name for their embrace, for it is beautiful and common. But catastrophe and not love is the subject of this scene, for these two are…

On a clear and seasonably cold Sunday morning in March, I made my way through the streets of an old neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, and entered a large, converted brick building from some other century. Inside, in a cavernous room with worn floors and south-facing windows lit by the sun, a group of seventy or more young climate activists—mostly college students and recent graduates from the Boston area, along with a few veterans of the Occupy and global justice movements—were gathering for a full day and night of final preparations before carrying out a dramatic peaceful protest against the Keystone XL pipeline. The company building the pipeline, TransCanada Corporation, has its US Northeast office down the road in Westborough, and there, the next morning, twenty-five of these activists—accompanied by more…

On November 6, 2012, as progressive voters cheered the re-election of Barack Obama, activists in Los Angeles also celebrated a lesser-known victory: the defeat of Mea-
sure J, a ballot initiative that would have directed $90 billion in taxpayer funds to local rail and highway projects, and would also have led to crippling fare increases and service cuts for the city’s bus riders. For twenty years, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Bus Riders Union have been locked in a transit war, with the MTA pouring cash into costly rail projects at the same time that it cut bus service and raised fares. But rail not only generated far fewer riders than a first-class bus system would; it also had massive cost overruns that the MTA solved by…

A hardy band of educators and parents have been complaining for years about the test-driven mentality of No Child Left Behind, which makes students’ prospects and teachers’ futures hinge on the outcome of high-stakes exams. Until now, decision-makers haven’t been listening, but the cheating scandal in Atlanta—where thirty-five teachers and administrators, including the former superintendent, have been implicated in a scheme to change students’ test scores—has emboldened the rebels to turn their complaints into action.
 Signs of this rebellion are visible nationwide. In Texas, the birthplace of the testing movement, lawmakers passed legislation in April that reduced, from fifteen to five, the number of tests required for graduation. University of Texas professor Carolyn Heinrich concludes that “the reason that proponents of the current flawed system do not cite any credible…

Ever since the news leaked that Charles and David Koch are among the leading bidders for the Tribune Company’s eight daily newspapers, media panties have been bunching up all over. Despite the fact that paid circulation for the print edition of its flagship, the Los Angeles Times, has fallen by more than half in just the last seven years—even worse than the catastrophic national average of 
41.6 percent for major dailies since 2005—the LA Times remains America’s fourth-largest daily newspaper and third-largest Sunday edition. The Chicago Tribune comes in at number ten. Both are included in the package, along with the Orlando Sentinel and Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel (both in the battleground state of Florida) and possibly Hoy, America’s second-largest Spanish-language daily print publication.
 This sounds scary, I know. But…

Introduction by Joseph Romm 
 Dr. James Hansen is being honored today in part because he told Congress: “The global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.”
 The courageous part isn’t what he said, it’s when he said it—twenty-five years ago, during the sweltering summer of 1988. It was the first high-profile public statement by a US government scientist alerting the country to this grave threat.
 Jim embodies the Ridenhour Courage Prize. When he was still NASA’s top climate scientist, he blew the whistle on government efforts to silence him—and others—on climate change. Jim is a modern-day Paul Revere…if Paul Revere’s midnight ride had taken place in 1750 and the message was, “The British are…

In the last half-century of American politics, conservatism has hardened around the defense of economic privilege and rule. Whether it’s the libertarianism of the GOP or the neoliberalism of the Democrats, that defense has enabled an upward redistribution of rights and a downward redistribution of duties. The 1 percent possesses more than wealth and political influence; it wields direct and personal power over men and women. Capital governs labor, telling workers what to say, how to vote and when to pee. It has all the substance of noblesse and none of the style of oblige. That many of its most vocal defenders believe Barack Obama to be their mortal enemy—a socialist, no less—is a testament less to the reality about which they speak than to the resonance of the vocabulary…