Debbie Nathan

I knew it would be standing room only at the Nation’s and the Brecht Forum’s “Emergency Forum on the Economy,” on Friday night. So I made plans to go downtown early. I decided to drop by the New York Stock Exchange first, to gauge the mood on Wall Street. I arrived in late afternoon. The [...]

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Here’s a must-read from the wonderful writer Judith Levine, about how Wall Street is as irresistible to Americans as wife beaters are to women: For a girl who grew up in a communist family, this month’s events should be cause for fireworks. As Marx predicted, the self-sown seeds of capitalism’s own destruction are spreading tendrils [...]

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In “Born-Again Democracy,” a comment in the Oct. 20 issue of The Nation, William Greider notes that “Our country is at a rare and dangerous juncture. The old order is crumbling, and virtually all the centers of power that govern us have been discredited by events…Given that political paralysis, people have to find their own [...]

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Joann Wypijewski has a fine piece in The Nation’s Sept. 29 issue, about McCain’s political exploitation of Sarah P.’s MILFy, B&D, Book of Daniel sex vibe. This reminds me of how Sarah’s trotted her kids out. Not just their bodies and faces but their names, which Mom flashes like medals (go to CafePress.com and you’ll [...]

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Men browsing “French postcards” by the Seine Hey folks, I’m back! — after some annoying website problems and a summer vacation from the blog. In July I traveled with my family to Scandinavia, Lithuania, Poland, Paris and points east again. We were doing family things, including finding my great-grandfather’s shtetl near Kovno (now Kaunas). It [...]

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Note to Debbie’s friends and regular readers: I lent my blog to Michael, who just graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul. He’s a friend of my son, as are many of the people he worked with to organize the event described below. (Nachus far di mames!) At shortly after 7:30 am on Wednesday, July [...]

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Ah yes, children and porn. Children consuming porn, I mean: a venerable American past time. Did you know you can check out its history for free, next time you visit our nation’s capital? I did and here’s what I learned. Exactly a century ago, in 1908, a middle-aged storekeeper named Pasquale Eliseo, of 119th Street [...]

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Found this today at the neighborhood 99-cent store, in the Bronx just across the Harlem River from Upper Manhattan. Have no idea what it means. It was mixed with a pile of other pink backpacks decorated with the identical Barbie face, but without the headscarf. The secular Barbies had the same plucked eyebrows, lipsticky lips [...]

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(ALL IMAGES IN THIS POST ARE COMPUTER GENERATED) To go right to the “real or virtual” article, skip all the emo in italics. I won’t be offended! A funny thing happened to me this weekend in Huntington, Long Island. I’d taken a commuter train there from Manhattan, to interview someone in a neighborhood that’s walking [...]

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