Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration. The Atlantic, October 2015. “American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they’ve failed to reckon with history. Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report ‘The Negro Family’ tragically helped create this system, it’s time to reclaim his original intent.”
December 1, 2014
The Great Paper Caper. Someone swiped Justice Frankfurter’s papers. What else has gone missing?
Jill Lepore, The Great Paper Caper. Someone swiped Justice Frankfurter’s papers. What else has gone missing? The New Yorker, 1 December 2014. “The papers of Supreme Court Justices are not public records; they’re private property. The decision whether to make these documents available is entirely at the discretion of the Justices and their heirs and executors. They can shred them; they can burn them; they can use them as placemats. Texts vanish; e-mails are deleted. The Court has no policies or guidelines for secretaries and clerks about what to keep and what to throw away. Some Justices have destroyed virtually their entire documentary trail; others have made a point of tossing their conference notes. “Operation Frustrate the Historians,” Hugo Black’s children called it, as the sky filled with ashes the day they made their bonfire.”
November 20, 2013
Looking Away From Genocide
Gary Bass, Looking Away From Genocide. The New Yorker, 20 November 2013. “On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani Army launched a devastating military crackdown on restive Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan. While the slaughter in what would soon become an independent Bangladesh was underway, the C.I.A and State Department conservatively estimated that roughly two hundred thousand people had died (the official Bangladeshi death toll is three million)…. Pakistan was a Cold War ally of the United States, and Richard Nixon and his national-security advisor, Henry Kissinger, resolutely supported its military dictatorship; they refused to impose pressure on Pakistan’s generals to forestall further atrocities.”