Nancy Goldstein

Nancy Goldstein's work has appeared in venues including the Guardian, The Nation, NPR, Politico, Raw Story, Salon, Slate, and the Washington Post, where she was an Editor's Pick and the winner of the blogging round during their Next Great Pundit Contest. You can follow her on Twitter at @nancygoldstein.

Recent Articles

The Military's Suicide Scandal

AP Images/Charles Dharapak

What a drag it’s been these past few weeks to watch the military brass—those kings of accountability when it comes to other people’s behavior—huffing and bluffing and outright lying about what they knew and when they knew it. First we had to endure the sight of them gaping over the news that the sexual-violence crisis they’ve done nothing to squelch since the assault of 83 women and seven men at the Tailhook Air Force convention in 1991 has worsened. Now those same Pentagon officials are shocked, simply shocked, by the military’s spiking suicide rates, despite the fact that those numbers, which have been rising steadily for the past 12 years, come from their own reporting system (and some claim are still an undercount).

The Military Can't Handle the Truth

Flickr/West Point Public Affairs

The real scandal this week around military sexual violence isn’t the release of the latest in a string of Department of Defense (DOD) reports to show stunning levels of sexual assault—hell, even the DOD estimates 26,000 actual incidents compared to the 3,374 reported incidents. It’s not the fact that this year marks the third in a row to show an increase in sexual violence (under law, DOD has published them yearly since 2004), or that the latest report “found that among the one-third of women who reported sexual-assault allegations to a military authority, 62 percent suffered retaliation for speaking up.” It’s not even the arrest, two days before the report came out, of the officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs for the Air Force on sexual battery charges.

The Letter CUNY Should Have Written to Tony Kushner

After offering, rescinding, and re-offering an honorary degree to the playwright Tony Kushner, the City University of New York has a lot of explaining to do.

Tony Kushner (AP Photo/Paul Hawthorne)

Monday night, the Executive Committee of the City University of New York's Board of Trustees did its best to stem an endless flow of bad publicity and buck-passing in the wake of its earlier decision to first grant and then rescind an honorary degree to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner. The committee rescinded the rescission and granted the degree to Kushner, but that doesn't mean all is well.

Getting Away With Murder on Long Island

The press, the police -- and the killer(s) who dump women's bodies along Ocean Parkway

Lorraine Ela displays a cell-phone photo of her daughter, Megan Waterman, 22. Waterman was one of four women whose bodies were dumped along a desolate beachfront strip on Long Island. (AP Photo/Pat Wellenbach)

"I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed," Mr. Ridgway said in his statement. "I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught."

-- Gary Ridgway, the "Green River Killer," who admitted in 2003 to killing 48 women (quoted in Silja J.A. Talvi's Nov. 13, 2003 AlterNet story)

Frances Fox Piven: Still Tougher Than Glenn Beck

The legendary anti-poverty activist talks about the current political moment and what can be done to reclaim government for the people.

Courtesy of Democracynow.org

You have to hand it to Fox News faux-populist Glenn Beck. If it weren't for him, Frances Fox Piven, professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, might not be doing today's National Teach-in on Austerity, Debt, Corporate Greed (and what YOU can do about it) alongside Princeton University Center for African American studies professor Cornel West live from New York City's Judson Church. Nor would they have 200-plus campuses participating in the livestream and teach-ins.

Pages