Journalism

Ai Weiwei is the most famous political artist in the world and a tireless human-rights activist and critic of the Chinese government. Now he’s made his first feature-length documentary film, Human Flow, about the global refugee crisis.  We talked about it in Los Angeles recently.
continued at TheNation.com, HERE

A Q&A with Todd Gitlin, who says the 16-hour Ken Burns history of the Vietnam War is an extraordinary portrayal of the people who lived through the war—both Americans and Vietnamese.
Read at TheNation.com, HERE.

Elizabeth Holtzman, who served on the House Judiciary Committee that drafted the Watergate articles of impeachment, talks about Robert Mueller and his investigations of Donald Trump–and emphasizes that impeachable offenses do not have to also qualify as indictable criminal offenses.
Read HERE

A Q&A with The Nation’s Managing Editor, Roane Carey, who spent the week trapped in Houston — studying the history of 100-year floods, and developers’ fight against local groups seeking limits of development of prairie flood plains.
At TheNation.com, HERE

 Q&A with the dean of the law school at Berkeley, who explains why Trump’s move violates basic tenets of the separation of powers–and how the Supreme Court might review the pardon.
at TheNation.com: READ HERE

Jon Wiener: We heard for months about the hostility between Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. Now Jared has won the battle. But why was this battle being fought, in the first place?
Amy Wilentz: There’s an emptiness at the center of Donald Trump.  He doesn’t like policy, doesn’t want to read about policy, doesn’t want to think about policy. What he does is take advice. If you have then two warring factions who disagree on policy and also disagree on final goals, you’re going to have huge problems.
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

On August 24, 1967, fifty years ago today, Abbie Hoffman and a group of friends invaded the heart of American capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. They threw money from the visitors’ gallery onto the floor, and the brokers and traders there leapt into the air to grab the dollar bills floating down. Trading was interrupted, briefly. News coverage was massive. . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com, HERE

In Steve Bannon’s now-famous call to Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect the day before he was fired, Bannon described the white supremacists who had marched in Charlottesville as “losers” and “a collection of clowns.” Of course, those are the same sorts of people Bannon mobilized to vote for Trump, the most loyal part of his base. I asked Joshua Green about that . . .
. . . continued at TheNation.com HERE

JW: The Confederate statue that was ostensibly the focus of the events in Charlottesville was of Robert E. Lee, who surrendered at Appomattox in 1865. What can you tell us about this statue?
Eric Foner: The key thing to remember about this statue, and most of these statues, is that they have very little to do with the Civil War. This statute was erected in 1924, almost 70 years after the end of the Civil War. It was erected at height of Jim Crow, the height of the era of segregation, disenfranchisement, and lynching.
continued HERE

“Wallowing in Watergate” is a phrase that Nixon used after two months of brutal Senate Watergate hearings in July, 1973—the “what did he know and when did he know it” part of Watergate. With his typical faux-piety, Nixon said, “Let others wallow in Watergate, we are going to do our job.” That’s the sort of thing we’ve heard other presidents say when they’re under attack for scandal, including the current one.
… continued at TheNation.com, HERE