The Nation

In an inspiring burst of action, congressional committees grilled the heads of federal agencies in charge of Head Start, Meals on Wheels, housing assistance and Medicare, and demanded answers: “Why haven’t you informed us that the automatic sequester cuts we voted for are forcing poor kids out of preschool, starving the elderly, creating more homeless families and denying treatment to cancer patients? One Congressman fulminated, “This was a surprise to the Congress, to the world!”

And so, in a last-minute, bipartisan deal Thursday night, senators voted unanimously for a “fix,” and the House approved it today. While the fix won’t alleviate all the sequester’s damage, it will mend the worst holes in the safety net. These Congress members simply weren’t going to fly home for the weekend without doing their best to assure that not one more child go hungry or one more family homeless.

My new Nation column is called “The Reluctant Fundamentalist (and the Journalist Spy)” and it’s about the conflicts raised by Mira Nair’s challenging new film.

And here’s a second column I did for the Nation website on Maureen Dowd’s various crimes against common sense and gun control.

Oh, and I gave a talk at to Cornell’s Mario Enaudi Center for International Studies on the topic of “On the Search for a Liberal Foreign Policy” on Monday afternoon. It’s written up here and you can watch it on video, here.

Zach Braff (right) and Donald Faison in a $2 million Kickstarter video. (Credit: Kickstarter.com)

Crowdfunding is becoming more and more a fact of life in America. A Kickstarter for Zach Braff’s latest cinematic effort appeared this week, and it did not kick up quite the excitement that the Veronica Mars film did a little while ago. Braff, as a celebrity and/or creator, simply doesn’t command the kind of worshipful fandom the show did, nor the sense of injustice that a premature cancellation of a good show can bring. Yet, as of this writing, Braff has amassed $1.7 million for his Wish I Was Here. And counting.

One of the great tales of Hollywood “censorship” remains little known today, more than sixty-seven years after it transpired. And who was right at the center of it? None other than President Harry S. Truman. He even got rid of the actor playing him in the MGM movie. For good measure, protests by Eleanor Roosevelt led to the firing of the actor portraying her late husband.

The 1947 MGM film The Beginning or the End deserves special review, however, as the film emerged, after many revisions, as a Hollywood version of America’s official nuclear narrative: The bomb was absolutely necessary to end the war and save American lives, and we needed to build new and bigger weapons to protect us from the Soviets. And so the nuclear arms race began.

My fascination with the making and unmaking of the MGM film took me to the Truman Library, where I was the first to consult key documents. The story of the derailing of the movie, Truman and why it was important is told in my new book, just out this week, Hollywood Bomb: Harry S. Truman and the Unmaking of ‘The Most Important Movie’ Ever Made.