The Nation

Scene from The Office episode “Promos.” (Tyler Golden/NBC)

The Office, which ends May 16, will take with it one of a precious few vaguely realistic depictions of working life off the air. Granted, the people who write about television haven’t been watching The Office for some time now. Partly that’s because Steve Carell left and partly because, I think, the longer we were in a recession, the less appealing an extended workday got. Either you’d lost your job, and the show reminded you, in slightly funnier form, of the life you’d once been leading. Or else, at a certain point, the drudgeries of the workplace had quit seeming all that funny.

Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff once concluded that economies stall when debt reaches 90 percent of GDP. A recent paper from Amherst College points out important holes in the Harvard paper's conclusions—and, in turn, the austerity playbook. "This study, on which so much of the austerity agenda, so much of our actual politics...so much of what they've based their argument on," Nation writer John Nichols says, "as the Harvard economists acknowledge, contains significant mistakes." Nichols joins KPFA radio (about 7 minutes into the show) to discuss the nuts, bolts and implications of the new findings.

—James Cersonsky

What does American trade policy have to do with the ongoing Bangladeshi factory fires? Read William Greider's analysis.

Bernie Madoff, pictured here after being placed under house arrest in 2008, is not the only one in the business of building pyramids. (Reuters/Shannon Stapleton)

Last year I published an article in The Baffler called “The Long Con” that demonstrated how practices we associate with snake-oil salesmen saturate the American right—not just in its ideological appeals but in the way right-wing politics corrals a fleecable multitude all in one place, which conservative publications literally rent out as a source of handy marks for con men. A lot of folks found this to be a revelation, a bittersweet pleasure for me. On the one hand, it’s a blessing to me to be able to teach people new things about the world around us. But on the other hand, it’s frustrating; I wish people already knew about this stuff. It reinforces a fact: America truly does harbor two separate and nearly incommensurate tribes, “Red” and “Blue,” if you will; how many of us Blue folks know that getting roped into coughing up hard-earned money you’ll never see again to Republican-affiliated “multilevel marketing” (MLM) companies—in hustles formerly known as “pyramid schemes”—is as common in Evangelical and Mormon culture as going to yoga class in our own?

On June 3, 2011, when two undercover cops performed a stop-and-frisk in Harlem on a teenager named Alvin, the 16-year-old recorded the audio of the entire encounter. On the recording, the police berate Alvin with racially charged language and threaten to arrest him “for being a f**king mutt.”

Appearing on ABC Nightline, filmmakers Erin Schneider and Ross Tuttle talk about hearing the audio and helping Alvin eventually go public with it in a short documentary they produced for TheNation.com.