Journalism

It’s not often that a literary theorist lands on page one of the New York Times. The August 13 story about Avital Ronell, who the Times described as “one of the very few philosopher-stars of this world,” was shocking: NYU was suspending her without pay for a year after finding her responsible for sexual harassment of a male grad student, Nimrod Reitman. He complained that for three years she had sent him unwanted emails referring to him as “my most adored one,” “Sweet cuddly Baby,” “cock-er spaniel,” and “my astounding and beautiful Nimrod” — and insisted that he reply in kind.
. . . continued at the LA Review of Books, HERE   8-20-18

Bruce Cumings: “There’s a silver lining in having Trump as president: he is untethered to anybody, especially the Washington establishment, and in a curious way he may be able to make a lot of progress when all those other folks would raise all kinds of problems and insist on a laundry list of all the things North Korea has to do to please us. We seem to be in a different realm now.”
. . . read at TheNation.com HERE  6/14/2018

Refugees are different from immigrants. Refugees are unwanted where they come from. They’re unwanted where they go to. They’re a different legal category. They’re a different category of feeling in terms of how the refugees experience themselves. If you call yourself an immigrant here, you fit. People will want to hear your heartwarming story about getting to this country. If you say you’re a refugee, that’s the quickest way to kill a conversation, because people can’t relate to that.. . .
… continued at TheNation.com, HERE  6/11/18

“The first two words you hear 90 percent of the time from the panelists on cable news are the most lethal words in the language today: “I think.” I don’t care what somebody thinks. I want to know what they know.  So you have this layer of instant gratification, instant news, and this incessant race to produce stories. There’s no checking. It’s just bam, bam, bam. That’s because Trump, whether you like him or not, is catnip for the cable ratings, and catnip for The New York Times.”
continued at TheNation.com, HERE  6/8/2018

The “extreme vetting” that Trump called for on the campaign trail has already been in place for years. Less than 1 percent of refugees around the world are resettled to a third country like the United States. The process begins with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which screens refugees and identifies a very small number of the most vulnerable cases to be considered for resettlement. They then pass those cases on to the US government, where some eight different government agencies participate in layers of interviews, medical screenings, background checks, and matching of biometric data with security databases. . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE  6/1/18

Rachel Kushner: I committed myself to understanding the structural conditions of prison—not so much as a novelist, but as a person and citizen of California and someone who was interested in the way that the society is layered and structured. I wanted to know why some people end up inducted into the criminal-justice system, and others are not touched by it in any way. . . . ”
continued at TheNation.com, HERE  5/23/2018

Every day, Trump makes the world less safe. Monday was a big one.
The Americans moved their embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the Israel Defense Forces killed at least 60 Palestinian protesters. That’s the very bland version of the news. . . .
. . . Continued at TheNation.com, HERE  5/18/18

Read at TheNation.com, HERE
Michael Klare:  I don’t think there’s really a happy outcome from this. I don’t see some way in which Europe can rescue the Iran nuclear deal at this point. Trump says that he wants new negotiations with the Iranians for a totally new deal. I don’t think that’s in the cards at all. We’re going to see very tough sanctions on Iran. And I don’t think the Europeans will be able to protect their companies from the effects of U.S. sanctions, so they will have to quit trading with Iran. And if the Iranians move to restart their nuclear enrichment program, the next step is war. . . .

A North Korean representative came to Washington in 2000 and signed an agreement with President Clinton that neither North Korea nor the United States would have hostile intent toward the other. This diplomatic agreement is very much like what North Korea appears to want again in 2018. However the Bush people acted as if it had never been signed, never even been written. . .
continued at TheNation.com, HERE  5/3/18

Read HERE
California and Texas, the two biggest states, are both 39 percent Latino. Hillary Clinton got 62 percent of the vote in California, and 43 percent in Texas. In California, Democrats hold all the statewide offices. In Texas it’s been the opposite for a long time. Obviously demography doesn’t explain the difference between the two states. How do you explain the political differences?  I asked Pulitzer-prize winner Lawrence Wright–he lives in Austin.  TheNation.com 4-27-18