The Nation

A home mortgage office in Springfield, Illinois. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

You can’t talk about poverty without talking about the practices of the big banks, including their continuing refusal to stem the foreclosure crisis through mortgage principal reductions.

A shot from inside La Ruta. (Credit: Lia Chang)

I got lost outside of New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine this past weekend, eager to attend The Working Theater’s La Ruta—a play created in collaboration with the Magnum Foundation that dramatizes the plight of border crossers and their smugglers on a cargo truck headed from Mexico to the United States. Laminated signs outside the church pointed to a dimly lit driveway, where a woman pointed a flashlight on me, making it impossible for me to see ahead. Audience members were crammed into a tent where Raula, a smuggler played by Sheila Tapia, quickly unsettles whatever comfort you might find. Raula previews some of the potential dangers as the audience learns that we, too, are migrants on this road—but reminds us that everything on this trip happens on a need to know basis.

Jason Collins on the cover of Sports Illustrated. (Credit: SI.com)

Hearing the news made me feel like I’d accidentally walked into a wind tunnel. For as long as I had written about this issue and as many times as I had said in recent years that “this will happen in a matter of months if not weeks,” it still hit me like a triple-shot of espresso cut with a teaspoon of Adderall. Thanks to the courage of 34-year-old NBA veteran Jason Collins, we can no longer repeat endlessly that no active male athlete in North America has ever come out of the closet. Instead we’re now able to say that we were there when our most influential cultural citadel of homophobia—the men’s locker room—was forever breached and finally received a rainbow makeover on its unforgiving grey walls. But we didn’t only get the act of coming out. We also got, courtesy of Mr. Collins and Sports Illustrated writer Franz Lidz, about as beautiful a coming-out statement as has ever been put to paper.

Early voting in Ohio, November 5, 2012. (AP Photo/Mark Duncan)

As the 2012 election approached, Republican governors and legislators in battleground states across the country rushed to enact restrictive Voter ID laws, to eliminate election-day registration and to limit early voting. Those were just some of the initiatives that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People identified as “an onslaught of restrictive measures across the country designed to stem electoral strength among communities of color.”