7 GOP Governors Who May Lose Re-Election 7 GOP Governors Who May Lose Re-Election
Their extremist policies have made them so vulnerable that corporate America is scrambling to save them.
Oct 1, 2014 / John Nichols
Minority Report Minority Report
Sometimes it feels like we’re living in an era in which information has finally become “free”—unlimited media access, twenty-four-hour wellness tracking, endless dating possibilities. But there’s nothing inherently progressive about Big Data. A new report shows that when Big Data creeps into our workplaces and our financial lives, it may simply create new ways of reinforcing old racial and economic injustices. The report, “Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future,” by the think tank Robinson + Yu, notes that technological advances, the declining cost of data storage, and the intensified surveillance climate of post-9/11 America have spurred massive data collection. This accumulation of private information by corporations and government has created troubling new issues in the areas of labor rights, privacy and ethics. Consider the influence of Big Data on hiring practices. Hiring algorithms are often seen as an “objective,” meritocratic assessment, free of irrational prejudice or biases. But the report warns that because “[d]igital indicators of race, religion, or sexual preference can easily be observed or inferred online,” the mining of social media and Google-search data can reinforce systemic discrimination. The result may be a perpetuation of an unjust status quo: disproportionately white, upper-class, elite-educated and culturally homogeneous. Sloppy résumé scans end up excluding people based on superficial criteria—where they live, for example, a metric bound to reflect already-existing housing discrimination. Big Data manipulation allows these subtle individual slights to be expanded to new orders of magnitude with monstrous efficiency. Since the algorithm reflects social patterns, researcher David Robinson tells The Nation, “any time someone is the victim of old-fashioned human discrimination, that discrimination is likely to be reflected in some of the data points that these new algorithms measure. Culturally speaking, there is a real tendency to defer to decisions that come from computers—which means if we’re not careful, it is reasonable to expect that computers will sanitize biased inputs into neutral-seeming outputs.” Read Next: David Auerbach on data profiling and microtargeting
Oct 1, 2014 / Michelle Chen
Comix Nation Comix Nation
Oct 1, 2014 / Matt Bors
Snapshot: The Umbrella Revolution Snapshot: The Umbrella Revolution
Pro-democracy protesters have taken to the streets of Hong Kong to demand the right to elect their city’s leader without interference from Beijing. The symbol of their revolution—the umbrella—protects the demonstrators in the semi-autonomous region from inclement weather, as well as pepper spray used by riot police.
Oct 1, 2014 / Vincent Yu
The Movement for Climate Justice Has Arrived The Movement for Climate Justice Has Arrived
Will world leaders listen?
Sep 24, 2014 / The Editors
Our Public Education System Needs Transformation, Not ‘Reform’ Our Public Education System Needs Transformation, Not ‘Reform’
A growing, diverse movement is rejecting market-oriented reforms in favor of education justice.
Sep 24, 2014 / The Editors
The NFL Fumbles The NFL Fumbles
A wave of domestic-violence scandals rocks the league.
Sep 24, 2014 / Dave Zirin
Why Prisons Thrive Even When Budgets Shrink Why Prisons Thrive Even When Budgets Shrink
Who says government can’t do anything?
Sep 24, 2014 / Mike Konczal and Bryce Covert
‘Nation’ Prizewinners ‘Nation’ Prizewinners
Nation editors and contributors have been sweeping up the awards lately. Editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel won the 2014 Norman Mailer Prize for Magazine Publishing. The Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, which sponsors the award, said, “Your work with The Nation has taken what was an important voice in the contemporary discourse and turned it into an indispensable one.” Vanden Heuvel also received an Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal Award, given to those who have made “a significant contribution to society in the arts, education, citizenship, philanthropy, community services, and other humanitarian concerns….” And vanden Heuvel and The Nation won the 2014 Champion in Activism Award from the Center for Community Change. Other winners include contributing writer Kai Wright, who received the 2014 Salute to Excellence award for investigative reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists for his November 2013 article “Boxed In: How a Criminal Record Keeps You Unemployed for Life”; as well as Gabriel Thompson and Mariya Strauss, who received the 2014 Clarion Award from the Association for Women in Communications for their 2013 articles on child labor in the tobacco fields, “Leaves of Poison” and “Dying on the Farm.” The Nation also won a feature-writing award from the Society of the Silurians for our May 2013 special issue, “Bloomberg’s New York: The Gilded City.” Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50! We received two monthly awards this year from the Sidney Hillman Foundation: contributor Moshe Marvit won the March Sidney Award for “The Wages of Crowdwork,” his article on digital pieceworkers; and editor at large Christopher Hayes won the May Sidney Award for “The New Abolitionism,” on climate change. Nick Turse won an Izzy Award for “outstanding achievement in independent media” for his coverage of civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan, including this magazine’s October 2013 special report “America’s Afghan Victims,” which he co-edited with Robert Dreyfuss. Our art critic, Barry Schwabsky, won the 2013 Best Criticism award from the US chapter of the International Association of Art Critics for his book Words for Art: Criticism, History, Theory, Practice, a collection of essays that draws heavily from his Nation columns. And our blogger Mychal Denzel Smith was a finalist in the 2014 Salute to Excellence Awards for Digital Media from the National Association of Black Journalists. We’re also pleased to introduce the new feature “Five Books,” in which brilliant minds of the left recommend new or important books that have shaped their thinking.
Sep 24, 2014 / The Editors
The Loneliest Pundits The Loneliest Pundits
The war whoops of the pundit class helped propel the nation into yet another doomed military adventure in the Middle East. Ghastly beheadings by a newly discovered enemy were the frightening flashpoint. The president ordered bombers aloft, and US munitions were once again pounding battlefields in Iraq—and, at the time of this writing, in Syria. The president promised to “degrade and destroy” ISIS. Here we go again, I thought. This is how modern America goes to war. When the superpower Goliath is challenged by sudden savagery, it has no choice but to respond with brute force. Or so we are told. Otherwise, America would no longer be a convincing Goliath. Citizens and members of the uniformed military are tired of war, but both in a sense are prisoners of the media-hyped hysteria that is the usual political reflex. Shoot first, ask questions later. While some commentators, like David Ignatius, have raised good questions about how this war will be fought, such questions do not address the larger question facing American warmaking. Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50! Among leading columnists, I have seen only two who are framing the American dilemma in a more straightforward way. Columnist Eugene Robinson is a lonely voice at The Washington Post arguing for a fundamental shift. He has no touchy-feely illusions about holding hands with jihadists. But he knows repression by military force ensures the cultural collision will get worse. “Political Islam cannot be bombed away,” Robinson wrote. “If it is not somehow allowed constructive expression, it will make itself heard, and felt, in more tragic ways.” Robinson is a liberal. The other columnist exploring similar terrain is Ross Douthat of The New York Times, a conservative. Douthat suggested a hybrid strategy of containment and attrition that avoids a larger war in Syria and backs away from the illusion that ground war leads to nation-building. “It does not traffic, in other words, in the fond illusions that we took with us into Iraq in 2003, and that hard experience should have disabused us of by now,” he wrote. “But some illusions are apparently just too powerful for America to shake.” Read Next: Peter Van Buren on the impossibility of victory in Iraq
Sep 24, 2014 / William Greider