The Nation June 10-17, 2013

Lynched and Abandoned Peterborough, N.H. I was startled that in her otherwise heartfelt and astute reflection on the case of the Central Park Five [“Diary of a Mad Law Professor,” May 6], Patricia Williams neglected to mention Joan Didion’s exhaustive 1990 New York Review of Books essay on the crime, the trial, the city. From the “abstraction” of the victim to the “swirl of collateral news,” Didion dissected the improbabilities of the commentary and the case. Interestingly, in subsequent discussions of this case, Didion is rarely mentioned. Is this because she is not, to use Williams’s formulation for neglected skeptics, “poor and black and relentlessly mocked in the media as deluded apologists”? C.K. DORESKI 
 _________________________ Amherst, Mass.
 Patricia Williams wonders in “Lessons From the Central Park Five” if the…

When Democrats nominated Barack Obama and Joseph Biden in 2008, there was relief that—after eight years of Bush/Cheney abuses—a major party was running, for the first time in our history, a pair of constitutional law instructors for president and vice president. With the Obama/Biden victory, many assumed that surely the new administration would respect the First Amendment, including the essential democratic role of a free press.
 Not so. Bush and Cheney set a bad example, but Obama and Biden have compounded the damage. Truth-telling has suffered an all-out assault—sometimes literally, as in the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been detained in appalling conditions and now faces extreme charges that should be dropped. 
 The current administration knows better, but it has not done better. During Obama’s 2008 campaign,…

The excerpts below are from our StudentNation blog, which highlights the voices of high school and college activists. Read the full text and much more at TheNation.com/students. 
 * * * What You Should Know About the Philadelphia Student Walkout
 by JAMES CERSONSKY
 When schools are shut down, students risk crossing myriad social boundaries—including gang lines—to survive in their new environments. Through the Campaign for Nonviolent Schools, Philadelphia students are pushing to have a voice in school safety policy. After a series of actions last summer, the campaign won a new, less punitive discipline system and protections in the school’s dress code for gender nonconformity. More recently, students successfully advocated for pilot restorative justice programs in ten schools. This month’s mass actions aren’t some hormonal release, but flashpoints from years…

On a Friday afternoon in May, a lawyer for the Associated Press received a letter from the Justice Department informing the news agency that, unbeknownst to it, the DoJ had obtained two months’ worth of phone records for twenty AP phone lines—including the personal and office lines of five reporters and an editor—at several AP bureaus. The records were obtained without the approval of a court, and without advance notice to the AP or the affected journalists. 
 The press is, as expected, up in arms, as are members of Congress from both parties. But it’s far from clear that the DoJ did anything wrong. Because the subpoena was issued in an ongoing criminal investigation, there is only limited public information about why the prosecutor made such a sweeping request.…

REMEMBERING CYNTHIA BROWN: Cynthia Brown died peacefully in her Manhattan apartment on May 12, following a fierce two-year battle with cancer. She wrote her first story for The Nation in 1979, when as a brilliant 26-year-old journalist covering Latin America she reported on the irreparable damage done to Nicaragua by the Somoza regime. Cynthia led the way for a generation of independent journalists and filmmakers—
including Susan Meiselas, Anne Nelson, Julia Preston and Pamela Yates, among others—who approached the coverage of events in this hemisphere through the lens of human rights. Their reporting departed strikingly from the normative framing of the Cold War years, in which the inability to see past the threat of communism—as well as to recognize the legitimate aspirations of regional populations to self-determination and democracy—repeatedly led the…

We mark the one-month anniversary of the horrific Rana Plaza disaster, the collapse of an eight-story building in a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,110 garment workers. Rana Plaza has proved to be a watershed moment, galvanizing a global call to action to clean up the fashion industry. But it has also revealed a major roadblock to reform: fashion brands aren’t held responsible for what happens in the factories that make their products, and American clothiers are merely giving lip service to tougher standards.
 Here’s where we are: more than a dozen major European fashion brands—including H&M, Tesco, Primark, Benetton and Mango—have signed on to Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, a legally binding, landmark agreement that requires brands to make their suppliers in Bangladesh…