The Nation

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan Ryan has cited austerity research that was fundamentally flawed. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin.)

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. (Courtesy of FBI.)

Lots and lots of questions remain to be answered about whether or not the Tsarnaev brothers acted alone, were part of some international conspiracy involving Al Qaeda and its allies, or were simply inspired or radicalized by some errant imam. So far, it appears that they acted “alone.” But the question of the “Chechen connection”—or, the “Dagestan connection”—lingers.

Richie Havens was one of the first performers I saw play live back in my pre-teen years when my father took me to see him at the Hudson Valley’s legendary Opus 40. Most famous for stepping in to open up the Woodstock concert, the Brooklyn-born Havens died yesterday of a heart attack at the far too-young age of 72.

Beyond his Woodstock status—he’d originally been scheduled to play fifth but was bumped up because of other acts’ travel delays—and a long, successful musical career interpreting songs as well as writing his own, Havens was a determined progressive who took every opportunity to use his music to help improve peoples lives.

A stalwart ally of the environmental movement, Havens devoted considerable energy to educating young people about the critical urgency of environmental activism. In 1975, he founded the Northwind Undersea Institute, an oceanographic children’s museum on City Island in the Bronx. In the early 1980s, he created the Natural Guard, an environmental organization for children. He did too many benefit concerts to count on behalf of environmental, antiwar, civil rights and anti-nuclear causes.

Sex workers and advocates at We Can End AIDS March, July 2012, in Washington, DC. Photo by Melissa Gira Grant.

On the steps of the Supreme Court yesterday morning, shortly before arguments began on the constitutionality of compelling aid recipients to oppose prostitution, a dozen or so students in marigold hooded sweatshirts won the color-coordinated insignia game. Outside a photo op or two, the small group of activists with red umbrellas—which signal support for sex workers’ rights—left them folded at their feet. Sex workers, it appeared, would be as nearly invisible outside the Court as they would be in the arguments made within.