Will There Ever Be Justice for Syria’s Rape Survivors? Will There Ever Be Justice for Syria’s Rape Survivors?
We don’t know where sexualized violence falls in the terrible hierarchy of damage from this conflict, but we know it’s happening—and it’s important to gathe...
May 14, 2014 / Lauren Wolfe
Ras Baraka’s Victory in Newark Could Revitalize New Jersey Progressives Ras Baraka’s Victory in Newark Could Revitalize New Jersey Progressives
Christie, Booker and Democratic party bosses, along with the charter school movement, suffer a huge defeat.
May 14, 2014 / Bob and Barbara Dreyfuss
The Purple Network Opinion Duel: Is Enough Being Done to Halt Climate Change? The Purple Network Opinion Duel: Is Enough Being Done to Halt Climate Change?
The second in a series of debates between The Nation and National Review, moderated by Roll Call.
May 14, 2014 / The Nation
This Modern World This Modern World
May 13, 2014 / Tom Tomorrow
Snapshot: Scorched Earth Policy Snapshot: Scorched Earth Policy
A lone tree standing in what used to be a rainforest in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The country’s preparations for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics have furthered environmental damage, as Dave Zirin has reported in these pages. In a move that has outraged the citizenry, a stadium is being built in the Amazon.
May 13, 2014 / Bruno Domingos
Why Has ‘My Struggle’ Been Anointed a Literary Masterpiece? Why Has ‘My Struggle’ Been Anointed a Literary Masterpiece?
With its lack of art and absence of thought, the blockbuster Norwegian novel disappoints.
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / William Deresiewicz
Nobody Else Sounds Like Lydia Davis Nobody Else Sounds Like Lydia Davis
Because nobody else thinks like her.
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Alexandra Schwartz
What Was Democracy? What Was Democracy?
Democracy was once a comforting fiction. Has it become an uninhabitable one?
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk
Mugwump Mugwump
O beggar, bigwig, mugwump —W.H. Auden If you got to look it up, don’t use it. A pity since we’ve all known one, guy checking time cards, signing requisitions, woman working her way center stage of my worries. Every decision she weighs, I’m on the balance, the bigwig. Turns out, as from the mess of history because the Algonquians had no clue about Imperator and Centurion and seeing no way to excise dominion and ranks from the account, giving Caesar what’s Caesar’s so to speak, and Antiochus the Seleucid’s also, John Eliot, to let his catechumens into the kindling of the lord, his Praying Indians in Natick, Ponkapoag, Lowell, rendered the smug of sovereign, war-lord, arrayer in a single Wampanoag word, come down as Mugwump, dated but still chiefly American in its broad-brush picture of the nothings who oversaw our stints at register or sink, or the guy tightening the dirndl strap on barmaid or mid-level manager and CEO too. They’re fine, I figure, with our menial seasons, the bosses seeing us cross over—shrugs of resignation—v from knuckle down to knuckle under and since acquaintance with the eternal requires no minutiae, lives by mass or matins, Mugwump serves their kind right.
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sebastian Agudelo
How Tolerant Should We Be of Intolerance? How Tolerant Should We Be of Intolerance?
It’s one of the most ticklish questions of liberal philosophy.
May 13, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Cathy Gere