Portside

Successive High Court decisions have done more than enfranchise corporations at the expense of the rest of us. The same logic in the same cases now defines public corruption down: that a direct and palpable quid pro quo must be seen to operate. Absent that smoking gun, the financial elite has no limits on bankrolling campaigns whose candidates then vote their interests. To the nation's founders, that untrammeled influence was the essence of public corruption.

Last week, Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, made PEN/America Center's shortlist for the Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The prize goes to "an author of a distinguished book of general nonfiction" "notable literary merit and critical perspective" that highlights "important contemporary issues." Allen's book was published last year to a host of lively reviews. Here is one of the earliest, by Steven B. Smith. Also included below is a link to Allen's homepage.

Last week, Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, made PEN/America Center's shortlist for the Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The prize goes to "an author of a distinguished book of general nonfiction" of "notable literary merit and critical perspective" that highlights "important contemporary issues." The book was published last year to a host of lively reviews. Here is one of the earliest, by Steven B. Smith. Also included below is a link to Allen's homepage.

Last week, Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, made PEN/America Center's shortlist for the Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The prize goes to "an author of a distinguished book of general nonfiction" of "notable literary merit and critical perspective" that highlights "important contemporary issues." The book was published last year to a host of lively reviews. Here is one of the earliest, by Steven B. Smith. Also included below is a link to Allen's homepage.

Last week, Our Declaration, by Danielle Allen, made PEN/America Center's shortlist for the Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, for "an author of a distinguished book of general nonfiction" of "notable literary merit and critical perspective" that highlights "important contemporary issues." The book was published last year to a host of lively reviews. Here is one of the earliest, by Steven B. Smith. Also included below is a link to Allen's homepage.

Gentrification is no myth, and saying so is magical thinking. Through oral histories and a solid grasp of urban history and urban geography, journalist GW Gibson shows not just its quite palpable and direct contribution to the displacement of low-income people, but, using New York City as his template, traces the radical decline of affordable housing city-wide. Case closed!

Chief Justice John Roberts grew up in a town that banned black residents. Places like Long Branch, Ind., were often called Sundown Towns. Only whites were allowed on the streets after dark. James W. Loewen published the first study of these towns ten years ago, just as Roberts was named to the court. Laura Wexler published one of the few reviews of the book. Along with the review, below, are links to the book's website and to the book's introduction.

Anatomy of a cultural product with the potential to ameliorate social inequities but threatened by digital corporate conglomeration and hijacking by the security state. Book covers the implications for cultural democracy in various sectors-music, film, news, advertising-how battles over copyright, piracy and privacy laws have evolved, counterpoints to invasive data-mining and a "People's Platform" supporting the politics of a fightback.

Several of the biggest steps toward today's condition of mass incarceration and ever-more-visible lethal police violance against civilians were undertaken during Democratic Presidential administrations. Naomi Murakawa has written a history of these developments. Here, Mike Konczal shows us that changing the police-prison industrial system starts with an outlook that begins to think "not about how to make the system better, but about how to take it apart."

Soumission, Michel Houellebecq's novel about a Muslim party's takeover of France, is "a melancholy tribute to the pleasure of surrender." It's 2022, the National Front is set to win the presidency, so the Socialist and Gaullist parties bloc so that a charismatic centrist Islamist politician wins instead. Whether or not France deserves a moderate Islamist state, "it has found in Houllebeque a sly and witty chronicler..." An English version will appear in September.