The Nation June 3, 2013

Mental Illness: Lighter and Darker
 Brooklyn, N.Y.
 Miriam Markowitz, in “Madness in the Method” [April 22], on the TV series Homeland, speaks with false authority about mental illness and risks perpetuating dangerous stereotypes. She positions herself as an informed liberal who cares about past fights for civil rights and religious and sexual freedoms, but then she writes, “Profoundly different from race, sexual orientation, gender or creed, the stigma surrounding mental illness contains a dark unknown that is real rather than socially constructed. Some (and by no means all) mental disorders, no matter how much light they may generate, contain voids darker than a terrorist’s hidey-hole. Manic flights, voices, paranoia, suicide—these are not just the outside pressures of a treacherous social landscape. They are contained within the self, and the traditional…

Almost forty years ago, in the shadow of the Watergate scandal, Americans were shocked to discover that the
Internal Revenue Service maintained a “master list” of people and organizations it targeted for special scrutiny—a list dominated, The New York Times reported at the time, “by liberals, radicals, antiwar activists and blacks.” Senator Frank Church’s intelligence committee investigation would eventually determine that the IRS had been used during different administrations against both the left and the right. It urged sweeping reforms to address the fact that “men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty.” 
 Now there are new allegations of political manipulation, amid revelations that the IRS clumsily targeted for 
stricter scrutiny groups that included the words “tea party” and “patriot” in…

When New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was asked in mid-May about his political bona fides, he replied, “I’m a damn good Republican and a good conservative Republican.” Believe what he says—especially the “conservative” part. 
 Sure, Christie goes out of his way to say nice things about President Obama, who worked closely with the governor to provide immediate and essential support to New Jersey communities battered by Superstorm Sandy. And yes, Christie’s been willing to call out some of the most absurd excesses of his fellow Republicans. But these gestures are about style, not policy. The first-term governor has been meticulous about positioning his fall re-election campaign as a “bipartisan” effort. Christie knows that New Jersey, which gave Obama 58 percent of the vote last November and sends two Democrats…

THE HUMAN COST OF DC GRIDLOCK: 
As the Senate Judiciary Committee considers some 300 amendments challenging the nearly 900-page immigration bill crafted by the Gang of Eight, the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants may continue full force. Advocates are renewing their call on President Obama to issue an executive order suspending deportations of people who would gain status in the bill’s final version later this year.
 The detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants often gets lost in the numbers rather than highlighted as individual stories—and some advocates say that’s part of the problem. Pablo Alvarado, who heads the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), says that when immigration is debated at the Capitol, it gets divorced from what’s happening to communities on the ground. “Suspended deportations would ground the…

When I was a kid, my family loved watching science fiction films and television shows. Some of them, from Star Trek to Soylent Green, featured a multiracial band of humans, plus various sentient life forms. But in other features—let’s say the awesomely campy Logan’s Run—
everyone (or nearly) in the future was white. My family
suspended disbelief for the duration of the movie. Then,
depending on our mood, we either laughed at or lamented the idea that anyone thought the future would be monochrome, except for the pantsuits.
 Today I feel like I’m watching that movie all over again. This time, it’s called The Future of Journalism, and we can’t afford to suspend our disbelief. CNN recently published a promotional graphic saying, “Allow Us To Reintroduce Ourselves.” It featured thirteen on-air personalities. No…

Recently I was at the State House in Annapolis when Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley made history, erasing a centuries-old practice with the stroke of a pen. On May 2, O’Malley signed a law repealing the death penalty, making it the eighteenth state to abolish capital punishment as well as the sixth state in six years—after New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Illinois and Connecticut.
 Standing with me were two men with a very personal stake in the governor’s actions: Kirk Bloodsworth and Shujaa Graham, both of whom had been exonerated. They are just two of the 142 death row prisoners over the past forty years who have been released because they were innocent: Graham was number twenty, and Bloodsworth was number forty-eight. Along with organizers and lawmakers, many of these…