Journalism

JW:  In Citizenfour, you quote from your production diaries, “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I was wrong. They are becoming the story.” How did you decide to do it that way?
Laura Poitras: I wanted to present a narrative that had complexity and contradictions, and tell the audience about some of the contradictions I was feeling when I was filming: What’s the story about? What am I filming? What’s going on?
continued HERE

Jon Wiener: The Handmaid’s Tale is the first work of feminist dystopian fiction ever featured in a Super Bowl ad—congratulations!
Margaret Atwood: I think it’s the first work of fiction period that was ever featured in a Super Bowl ad.
… Continued HERE

 Jon Wiener: Some basic facts: How many people in the United States today call themselves Evangelical?
Frances Fitzgerald: I think it’s about 20 percent.
JW: And how many of the white evangelicals voted for Trump?
FF: 81 percent.
JW: Trump does not go to church. Do evangelicals care about that?
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

How Trump won, and why Clinton lost: a Q&SA with Tom Frank, who has been touring red states to talk about the new paperback edition of his book Listen, Liberal, or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? 
Two highlights: people hated Hillary Clinton — and they liked Bernie.
Continued HERE

Evangelicals and politics, before–and after–the election: Sarah Posner of The Nation Institute reports on Evangelical leaders’ opposition to Trump at the beginning of the primary season — and the deal they made with him in exchange for their endorsement:
first of all, his Supreme Court picks.
continued HERE

JW: A week after repeal-and-replace failed in the House, we’re trying to assess the damage to Trump and the opportunities for progressives. Seems to me this is a disaster for Trump, and a disaster for the Republican Party. Is it possible this is wrong?

Chris Hayes: No. I don’t think you’re wrong. What an unbelievable failure. I have never, in my political reporting career, seen something crash and burn quite like this. Sixty times they voted for repeal, while Obama was president, and now you cannot get a vote for this piece of, frankly, garbage legislation that no one liked—no one across the ideological spectrum.
…continued HERE

If you Google the question “Is Trump Like Nixon,” you get something like four million reults, mostly answering ‘yes.’
But we weren’t so sure about that, so we checked with Rick Perlstein–he wrote the book Nixonland.
READ our Q&A with Rick Perlstein HERE

#1 on the “Most Popular” list at TheNation.com
Robert Mercer is a little-known hedge-fund billionaire who, along with his daughter Rebekah, played a key role first in making Trump a candidate, and then in shaping his White House staff.
An interview with New Yorker writer Jane Mayer on her research into the darkest reaches of right-wing political funding: HERE

Read HERE
JW: We want to talk about the big picture. A revitalized feminist movement is changing things, despite what we see in the White House. How would you describe it?

Rebecca Solnit: There was an extraordinary set of years, 2012, 2013, 2014, where the rules really changed….finally women were in a position to say, “We’re not going to take this anymore. You can’t pretend it’s not happening.” And then to make some changes.

Read HERE
It’s going to be a long four years….for our own well-being over the long haul, I think we could all use a day without Trump, every week: one day on which we don’t read about him, watch him on TV, listen to him on the radio, or talk about him with friends; one day on which we don’t even think about that man. . . .