Journalism

The actor and playwright talks about performing in her home town of Baltimore after the police killed Freddie Gray–dramatizing the school-to-prison pipeline–and organizing theater audiences in the process.
Continued at TheNation.com HERE

Tavis Smiley talks about Martin Luther King’s final year—the year that began with his speech condemning the war in Vietnam, where he called the US “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”  That year ended, of course, with the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis.
At TheNation.com, HERE

A caravan of four Stanford football buses roars down Pico Boulevard with a police escort — in town for the Rose Bowl. I stand at the corner with a delivery guy from the Domino’s Pizza down the block — he’s an older Latino man.

He asks, “Is it Obama?” . . .

Continue reading  at LA Review of Books HERE

If possessing two AR-15s and 2,500 rounds of ammo makes you a terror suspect, then we need to investigate several million Americans, most of whom are older white men — and Republicans.
The story at TheNation.com, HERE

An “epic recipe fail”: Grape salad for Thanksgiving?  In Minnesota?  How could the New York Times get it so wrong?
the full story at the LA Review of Books, HERE

Q. You grew up in the fifties in Chicago in a world you call “Negroland.” What was “Negroland”?
Margo Jefferson: Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty. Children in Negroland were warned that few Negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to indigence, deference, and subservience.
–“10 Questions for Margo Jefferson,” continued at TheNation.com, HERE.

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BILL McKIBBEN says the progress on solar power has given him what he calls “a fairly rare emotion: hope.” Bill is one of our heroes –a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement. He also spearheaded the resistance to the Keystone pipeline, going to jail in the process, and launched the fossil fuel divestment movement. He wrote about solar power for the New Yorker, HERE.

Once again, we’re not done with the sixties: TODD GITLIN says Bernie Sanders’s start in the sixties explains how he got where he is today. Todd teaches journalism and sociology at Columbia; he wrote the classic history The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. He wrote about Bernie’s roots in the sixties for The New York Times, HERE.

Also: Gay marriage won by arguing for equality. Should abortion rights be making an equality argument? KATHA POLLITT, columnist for The Nation, talks about opposition to women’s equality as a key issue of our time. She wrote about the equality argument for abortion HERE.

Instead of prosecuting Edward Snowden under the Espionage Act, Congress and the president should be saying Thank you.  Without him, Congress would never have ended the NSA’s bulk phone data collection.  I
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

My wife gave me Time Warner Cable as a retirement present so I could spend my golden years watching the Boys in Blue on TV. This makes me a lucky guy because 70% of Southern California doesn’t get to watch the Dodgers on TV, at least until Charter Communications fulfills its promises. But nothing about it has been easy.
. . . continued at the L A Times op-ed page HERE

Do the police have a privacy right to withhold video shot by in-car cameras or body cams? Do public officials, acting in their public capacity, have a right to prevent the public from reviewing video evidence of their conduct? You’d think the answer was obviously “no.” When the police kill somebody, it’s not “private.”  . . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE