Innholdsfortegnelse for May 20, 2013 i The Nation

Korea Seen Clearly
 New York City
 Bruce Cumings’s “Korean War Games” [April 22] debunks the endless, often mindless global media coverage on what is happening on the divided Korean peninsula. Alas, too much attention is given to North Korean “experts,” in and out of government, who rely on low-level intelligence and much second-guessing. Cumings’s piece is a strong corrective to this stream of mis- and disinformation.
 ROBERT CAMBRIA Former managing editor
 The Korean Review
 _________________________ The Poop on the Pipeline
 Washington, D.C.
 Re Bill McKibben’s “Kerry’s Keystone Decision” [April 22]: A new Public Citizen report debunks some of the main arguments made by supporters of Keystone XL and demonstrates that the pipeline would in fact increase gas prices and reduce US energy security. This study flies in the face of…

A JUST RESPONSE: A series of events set in motion a quarter-century ago in the Austin, Texas, suburbs ended dramatically on April 19, when former Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson, now a sitting district judge, was arrested for misconduct in the case of Michael Morton, a man sentenced to life for a crime he did not commit. Found guilty of killing his wife, Christine, in their home in 1986, Morton was finally freed from prison in 2011, after DNA taken from a bloody bandanna discovered near the scene was matched to another man, Mark Alan Norwood, who was convicted of her murder in March.
 Lawyers in Texas and with The Innocence Project fought long and hard for the
DNA testing. In the meantime, they also discovered that key pieces of…

Eden Foods—an organic food company that makes everything from soymilk to quinoa chili—is suing the Obama administration over the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that employee health plans include coverage for contraception. The suit, based on religious objections, alleges that birth control “almost always involve[s] immoral and unnatural practices.” Company CEO Michael Potter is deep in a PR nightmare, with angry vegans peppering Eden Foods’ Facebook page with criticisms of the lawsuit. It didn’t help that Potter told Salon’s Irin Carmon that he has “more interest in good quality long underwear than I have in birth control pills.”
 It may seem odd that anyone who peddles gluten-free pasta could possibly have a problem with contraception—Eden Foods’ previous political activism seems confined to supporting GMO labeling legislation—but perhaps it shouldn’t: claims about…

Pakistan on the Brink The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. By Ahmed Rashid. Penguin. 234 pp. Paper $16. It’s best not to dwell too much on Pakistan, or at least Ahmed Rashid’s description of it in Pakistan on the Brink, because the conclusions are so grim. Consider the variables: there are at least three civil wars being fought in the country, which has an arsenal of around 100 atomic weapons and is manufacturing more. Its military and intelligence services have cultivated religious extremists and terrorists as policy proxies for nearly sixty years, and have now lost control of some of them. The social capacities of the government’s civilian branches are minimal; its bureaucracies are largely unable or unwilling to do the economic planning and development necessary to meet the…

Unfair to Genius The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein. By Gary A. Rosen. Oxford. 307 pp. $27.95. Suppose you want to write a brand-new popular tune. A piano has only eighty-eight keys, and the span of the human voice is even narrower. Only a few rhythms and chord progressions reliably please the palate of the masses, and myriad tunes have already been written under these constraints and are protected by copyright. Is it possible to write a new one that doesn’t echo an old one?
 Is plagiarism inevitable in pop music? Thanks to combinatorics, the answer is certainly no for a song at full length. And the answer is probably still no if one focuses on just the heart of a song—whatever, legally speaking, that is. But…

“I will not eat until they restore my dignity.” That’s what Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel told his lawyer by phone from Guantánamo Bay. On April 14, Moqbel’s cry became a harrowing New York Times op-ed, his message mixing despair, defiance and warnings of impending death. “One man here weighs just 77 pounds,” Moqbel wrote. “Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.” 
 Days later, The Guardian published a letter from another hunger striker, Shaker Aamer, whose words cut to the heart of the protest. “As of today, I’ve spent more than 11 years in Guantánamo Bay,” he wrote. “To be precise, it’s been 4,084 long days and nights. I’ve never been charged with any crime.”
 Moqbel and Aamer are among the…

Imagine that the Guggenheim Museum decided to trash a Kandinsky because it clashed with the office décor. Or that the Metropolitan Museum of Art sent one of the Yves Saint Laurent dresses in its Costume Institute to Goodwill because hemlines are lower this season. Or that the New York Public Library decided that an unwieldy Audubon “double elephant” folio should go to the recycling pile because it’s too big for the shelf. 
 Luckily, you can’t. Such things do happen, perhaps, when remarkable works come by accident into the hands of people unaware of their value—but not when they belong to museums, whose mission it is to preserve important works and cultivate their greater appreciation. Yet something similar is about to happen on West 53rd Street, where the Museum of…

The mood was triumphant on the morning of July 21, 2010, when Barack Obama, not quite two years into his presidency, strode to a podium inside the Ronald Reagan Building, a few blocks from the White House. As he prepared to sign the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act—the sweeping legislative package designed to prevent another spectacular financial collapse—into law, the president first acknowledged the miracle of having a bill to sign at all. “Passing this…was no easy task,” he told the crowd of hundreds. “We had to overcome the furious lobbying of an array of powerful interest groups and a partisan minority determined to block change.” 
 Indeed, some 3,000 lobbyists had swarmed the Capitol in hopes of killing off pieces of the proposed bill—nearly six 
lobbyists…

If, rather than taking the elevator, you happened to walk up the stairs to the third floor to enter “Blues for Smoke,” the recent exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, you would have heard it before you had seen it: the joyful, roiling noise of John Coltrane’s music, incorporated into David Hammons’s installation Chasing the Blue Train (1989). And you might have later noticed that you’d begun viewing the show before you realized what you were looking at: the reflections flickering on the wall along the stairs and on the third-floor landing, their source the sheets of silver Mylar that form the main ingredient of Kira Lynn Harris’s installation Blues for Breuer (2013). Organized by Bennett Simpson, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles,…

In March 2011, I traveled undercover as a garment buyer to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to do research for my book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion.
I found the garment industry there to be very incestuous and opaque. I thought I’d arranged several garment factory tours, yet twice I ended up in the smoky offices of slick-looking, gold-ring-wearing “middlemen” who told me they owned a portfolio of factories. “Clients never want to see the factory,” they told me. One middleman tried to sell me H&M clothes that the brand had never picked up, the idea being that I could sell them illegally. “No thanks,” I told him. I left deeply cynical about this international racket to produce cheap, disposable clothes.
 In fact, I remember having the distinct feeling that it…

The movement demanding that public interest institutions divest their holdings from fossil fuels is on a serious roll. At last count, there were active divestment campaigns on 305 campuses and in more than 100 US cities and states. The demand has spread to Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Britain. And though officially launched just six months ago, the movement can already claim some provisional victories: four US colleges have announced their intention to divest their endowments from fossil fuel stocks and bonds, and in late April ten US cities made similar commitments, including San Francisco (Seattle came on board months ago). 
 There are still all kinds of details to work out to toughen up these pledges, but the speed with which this idea has spread makes it clear that…

London
 Jon Cruddas could have been a contender. In 2007, the MP from Dagenham in East London won the first round of the contest to become deputy leader of the Labour Party. Although he eventually lost to Harriet Harman, Cruddas’s call for Labour to reconnect with its grassroots and renew its core values, which he described as “hollowed out” after ten years in power, resonated powerfully within the party. Labour’s decisive defeat in May 2010, which ushered in a coalition between David Cameron’s Conservative Party and Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, also put an end to Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s political career—and to the vicious sniping between Brown loyalists and the followers of his predecessor, Tony Blair, that had long paralyzed the party. 
 Given this opening at the top, Cruddas’s…

On his travels, the eponymous narrator of The Enchanted Wanderer, a novella by Nikolai Leskov (1831–1895), witnesses a method of resolving disputes known among the Tartars as “flogging it out.” Two men strip to the waist, place their feet sole to sole and clasp their left hands. They are provided with “stout whips” and, at the signal of the referee, begin slowly and purposefully to lash each other, their eyes locked. In this case, the Tartars are competing over a mare so exquisite that they have already pledged their fortunes and daughters to have her. Naturally, our wanderer is intrigued. Strong and reckless and, as he himself puts it, a horse “conosoor” of almost supernatural talent, he is no stranger to gratuitous tortures. As a younger man, he whipped an…