Portside

• The Poor are Treated Like Criminals Everywhere, Even at the Grocery Store – Jeanine Grant Lister (Washington Post)
• Vatican Ends Controversial Investigation of US Nuns with Olive Branch – David Gibson (Religion News Service)
• Word to Your Mother (Tongue): Can Hip Hop Save Endangered Languages? – Chi Luu (JSTOR Daily)
• The Pen – Rebecca Onion (Slate)
• Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo – Jennifer Schuessler (New York Times)

The Poor are Treated Like Criminals Everywhere, Even at the Grocery Store
By Jeanine Grant Lister
April 1, 2015
Washington Post

Anger toward those living below the poverty line seems to only be increasing. Maine and Missouri have proposed bills limiting residents’ food choices if they use SNAP benefits. Missouri House Bill 813 would bar the state’s 930,000 food stamp recipients from using their benefits to buy cookies, chips, soda, energy drinks, steak and seafood. (The legislature also implemented mandatory drug testing for TANF applicants in 2011.) If the bill becomes law, a Missourian can’t buy a can of tuna with an EBT card. Tortilla chips to go with salsa? Nope. Flank steak — tough, stringy and the only cut of beef I can afford — is off-limits, too. Who are these people, and what makes them think that what we eat is their business? And given that the average food stamp allotment in my state in 2013 came out to just $1.41 per person per meal, I wonder if they understand that recipients couldn’t buy lobster if they wanted to.
 

Vatican Ends Controversial Investigation of US Nuns with Olive Branch
By David Gibson
April 16, 2015
Religion News Service

The Vatican on Thursday (April 16) officially ended a controversial seven-year investigation of American nuns with a face-saving compromise that allows Pope Francis to close the book on one of the more troubled episodes that he inherited from his predecessor, Benedict XVI.
A brief statement from Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and leader of the effort to rein in the nuns, who were seen as too liberal, shed little light on what the long-running investigation achieved and seemed aimed at moving past the contentious saga.
Mueller said he was confident that the mission of the nuns “is rooted in the Tradition of the Church” and that they are “essential for the flourishing of religious life in the Church.”
The original report, issued almost exactly three years ago, had accused the nuns of promoting “certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
 

Word to Your Mother (Tongue): Can Hip Hop Save Endangered Languages?
By Chi Luu
March 3, 2015
JSTOR Daily

It’s no surprise that youth cultures across the globe have taken to hip hop music as one of their preferred forms of expression:  to tell their stories, to educate others and to participate in a popular culture that crosses cultural and linguistic lines. For indigenous communities in particular, where the community’s native languages may be endangered, community elders may have found it difficult to encourage younger generations to use their mother tongues actively. Hip hop has emerged to become a champion of not only preserving a group’s cultural history, but motivating younger generations to maintain the community’s language as living languages.
 

The Pen
By Rebecca Onion
March 22 2015
Slate

In 1873, two Quaker reformers living in Indiana, shocked by allegations of sexual abuse of female prisoners at the state’s unisex institution, pushed the state to fund the Indiana Reformatory Institute for Women and Girls: the first totally separate women’s prison established in the United States.
Recently, a group of women currently incarcerated at the 142-year-old institution (now called the Indiana Women’s Prison) began to pore over documents from the prison’s first 10 years. The perspective that the group brought to the project took what inmate Michelle Jones, writing in the American Historical Association’s magazine Perspectives on History, calls “a feel-good story” about Quaker reformers rescuing women from abuse in men’s prisons and turned it into a darker, more complicated tale.
 

Six PEN Members Decline Gala After Award for Charlie Hebdo
By Jennifer Schuessler
April 26, 2015
New York Times

The decision by PEN American Center to give its annual Freedom of Expression Courage award to the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has prompted six writers to withdraw as literary hosts at the group’s annual gala on May 5, adding a new twist to the continuing debate over the publication’s status as a martyr for free speech.
The novelists Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi have withdrawn from the gala, at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Gerard Biard, Charlie Hebdo’s editor in chief, and Jean-Baptiste Thoret, a Charlie Hebdo staff member who arrived late for work on Jan. 7 and missed the attack by Islamic extremists that killed 12 people, are scheduled to accept the award.
In an email to PEN’s leadership on Friday, Ms. Kushner said she was withdrawing out of discomfort with what she called the magazine’s “cultural intolerance” and promotion of “a kind of forced secular view,” opinions echoed by other writers who pulled out.