Journalism

Flying into Venice for a long-awaited vacation, the biggest thing we could see from the air was not the Piazza San Marco, or the Doge’s Palace, or the Basilica—the biggest thing in Venice was a cruise ship docked in the passenger port.
In town an hour later, we saw the posters, which said (in Italian, of course), “Defend the City—Take Back the Lagoon—Days of International Struggle Against the Big Ships—June 7-8-9.” We had arrived just in time. . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com: HERE.

In the New York Times Book Review, there was “a mediocrity, and a lack of passion, character and eccentricity, a lack of literary tone itself.”
50 years of the New York Review of Books: my Q&A with Robert Silvers at the LA Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/50-years-of-nyrb-an-interview-with-robert-silvers

We win: Southern California Edison announced Friday it will shut down the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant south of Los Angeles.
Permanently.
Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174714/we-win-san-onofre-nuclear-power-plant-will-be-shut-down#ixzz2VdIYeVQm

The world’s most famous artist has a new piece, exhibited here for the first time — it consists of six large scale-model dioramas illustrating different elements of his eighty-one-day imprisonment.
Read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/174711/ai-weiwei-political-art-venice-biennale#ixzz2VdHCmkeP

Alarmed about “the number of companies recruiting young people to work for nothing,” British tax officials are forcing nine companies to pay more than $300,000 in back wages to unpaid interns. . . .
…continued at TheNation.com, HERE and at The Nation HERE

Dartmouth College students who filed a federal complaint against the school for failing to report sexual assaults are themselves being charged by the school with violating the student code of conduct.  Their crime: “failing to follow college officials’ instructions” about participating at a protest. . . .
. . . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

It’s a classic David and Goliath story: one man with a computer against the world’s most powerful nation.  But the real David in the Wikileaks story, according to filmmaker Alex Gibney, is not Julian Assange — it’s Bradley Manning.  Q&A at TheNation.com, HERE.
Alex Gibney’s film “We Steal Secrets” The Story of Wikileaks” opens in LA and NYC on Friday May 24.

From the Center for the Study of Dirty Wars: my Q&A with JEREMY SCAHILL – he wrote about Obama’s secret wars in Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere in his new book DIRTY WARS: The World is a Battlefield. It entered the New York Times bestseller list at #5 last week.
At the LA Review of Books, HERE.

He’s probably the first person ever to lose his job because of his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation–but why did Harvard give him a Ph.D. in the first place?
“The Harvard PhD and the Hispanics’ IQ: How Jason Richwine’s Dissertation Got Him Fired by the Heritage Foundation.”  TheNation.com, May 11, 2013.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/174291/harvard-phd-and-hispanics-iq-how-jason-richwines-dissertation-got-him-fired-heritage-fou

WHEN GEORGE BUSH saw pictures of Auschwitz at Yad Vashem, Israel’s museum of the Holocaust, he said — with “tears in his eyes” — “we should have bombed it.”  Could he have read The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 by David Wyman? That’s the 1984 book that made the refusal to bomb Auschwitz the lasting symbol of FDR’s failure to help Jews in World War II Europe. . . .
Review of FDR and the Jews, at LA Review of Books, HERE.