Nation Topics - Brazil | The Nation

Peter Kornbluh on Obama and Cuba, Salamishah Tillet on boycotting marriage, George Zornick on Eric Griego v. Wall Street crooks, plus a new project on poverty by Barbara Ehrenreich and the Institute for Policy Studies.

Residents in four New York City districts had the chance to allocate funding for community improvement themselves. Can participatory budgeting make American democracy less lonely?

Costly technologies have opened up new sources in the Western Hemisphere—but they pose immense environmental dangers.

The coming big storms facing our planet can only be tackled by strong governments.

State Department employee Peter Van Buren was sent to Iraq to help rebuild it. The result was an exercise in Murphy's Law.

The proverbial bogeymen of our world—Osama, Saddam, Gaddafi, Ahmadinejad—are clearly meant to act like so many mini-black holes absorbing all our fears.  But they won’t save the West from its decline, or the former sole superpower from its comeuppance.

It's past time for a speedy withdrawal of all UN soldiers from Haiti.

Forty years after food activism took off around the globe, corporatism is stronger than ever.  But so is the grassroots push for control over our work, land, and seeds.

Robin Blackburn's The American Crucible treats modern slavery as an international institution with national histories.

It took opportunistic politicians and ridiculous, shameful language on religious exemptions, but gay and lesbian New Yorkers can finally tie the knot.