Indholdsfortegnelse for April 29, 2019 i The Nation

The Case Against the Liberal Case Although Eric Alterman makes several cogent points in “The Case Against Bernie” [April 15], he makes too great a leap in saying that the Sanders campaign “hurt [Hillary Clinton] in the general election” and that Bernie was responsible for the 12 percent who switched to Trump. Similar charges were brought against Ralph Nader in the disastrous 2000 presidential election. In both cases, such arguments start from the unstated assumption that all of the people who voted for the challenger would otherwise have voted for the next most left-leaning candidate (Gore in 2000, Clinton in 2016). It is more likely, however, that many people who voted for Nader or Sanders were previously disaffected. One could as easily argue that Nader and Sanders brought new voters…

COMMENT Fifty-one years ago, when Martin Luther King Jr. became a martyr in the struggle for “the beloved community” and multiethnic democracy, few imagined that, within half a century, he would have achieved the status of a founding father on the National Mall in Washington, DC. By the time of his death, King had long been a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and was no longer on speaking terms with President Lyndon Johnson. He had been put out of his own church denomination and rejected by many civil-rights organizations because he dared to question the violence of the permanent war economy and America’s slaughter in Vietnam. We cannot celebrate him today alongside Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson without recognizing what King showed us: that America’s experiment in democracy has…

The New York Times Magazine’s recently published forensic examination of the power and influence of the Murdoch media empire is both a testament to what journalism can accomplish and an indictment of what it has, in the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his two sons, increasingly become. The 16,000-word investigation should quiet anyone who thinks that the survival of that often-infuriating newspaper is of no particular consequence to the future of American democracy. It should also lay to rest any remaining arguments that the Murdochs are engaged in anything but a power-seeking charade: pretending to be in the news profession while subverting it at every turn. The piece, titled “Planet Fox,” by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, has not received the attention it deserves, in part because it does not…

This year marks my 25th anniversary as editor of The Nation. I first came to the magazine as an intern at the outset of the Reagan years, and after years spent working here in various roles, I followed in the footsteps of remarkable people like Victor Navasky, Carey McWilliams, and Freda Kirchwey—The Nation’s first woman editor. My tenure as editor has coincided with turbulent times, both for The Nation and the nation: from the Clinton impeachment to the Supreme Court’s selection of George W. Bush in 2000; from September 11 and the invasion of Iraq to Hurricane Katrina; from America’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the escalation of a new Cold War to, in 2016, the election of Donald Trump. My years at The Nation have only…

Dear Liza, I can’t stand going to my 8-year-old son’s Little League games. I love seeing him play and cheering him on. But one of his teammates (I’ll call him “Gordon”) has parents who seem to be complete assholes. Every game, every play, they’re screaming at their son: “Pay more attention, Gordon!” “Baseball stance, come on, Gordon!” “Watch the field, Gordon! Stop messing around!” It’s constant and unrelenting. Occasionally, Gordon’s mother will yell at other kids, or the whole team. Once, I heard her threaten to smack Gordon. I’m fine with parents cheering. But when parents coach and make negative comments, it just sucks—most of all for their poor kid. We saw a lot of coaching from the sidelines when our kids were playing under-6 soccer, but it dissipated as…

On April 2, followers of Taylor Swift Updates, a parody fan account on Twitter, received a message quite different from the usual speculations about the pop star’s eyebrows or her role in the upcoming film adaptation of Cats. “As most of you know,” wrote @LegitTayUpdates, the account’s 19-year-old creator, “I haven’t been very active in the past couple of months because I was in prison:/” When a follower asked, “omg why,” she replied, “I refused to join the IDF lmao.” The tweet garnered tens of thousands of likes and retweets, provoking a discussion on the practice of conscientious objection in Israel. Service in the Israel Defense Forces is mandatory for most Israeli youths; refusal is an offense for which the person can be sentenced to prison repeatedly. These refuseniks are…

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR DANA NELSON WROTE an important book some years ago: Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People. In it, she warned about a process of constitutional unbalancing that has steered the United States toward “presidentialism,” whereby the unitary executive becomes ever more powerful and ever more definitive when it comes to decision-making about fundamental issues. Nowhere is presidentialism more troubling than in the exercise of war powers. The role of Congress has been severely diminished as successive presidents have claimed ever-greater authority to order bombing raids and drone strikes, dispatch ground troops to distant lands, and spend billions of dollars without clear declarations of war or meaningful oversight. “We need to bring these wars to a close. We need to follow the lead…

ACROSS 1 Curry specialty: pintos, cooked and spicy (5,4) 6 Flip about knight (one getting out of bed) (5) 9 Progressive, say, confused 6A with UN (7) 10 Risk for addict involves falsifyin’ a poker hand (2,1,4) 11 Tart is cute, sporting professional attire (5,4) 12 Small swelling to go down (5) 13 France’s leader, in retirement, ate cheese (4) 14 Drunk with fur turned the wrong way round is protecting grand consortium of home builders? (6,4)  17 Stewed, um, escarole for appetizer, entree, and dessert? (6,4) 19 Pierce’s saliva (4) 21 Test odd characters in Tarrytown (3,2) 22 Hits a boy on the head with picnic food (4,5) 25 Christmas travelers, with archenemy almost sent back (4,3)  26 Zeus’s lover appears in play and museum exhibit (7)  27 Heads…

$266M Tax revenue from Colorado pot sales in 2018 that went toward funding public-health services $850M Annual revenue raised via a new Ohio gas tax that will go toward fixing the state’s roads 503K Number of handguns sold in California each year that may be subject to a gun tax to fund violence-intervention programs 1.5¢ Per-ounce soda tax in Philadelphia used to fund preschools and parks, though the tax has been criticized for targeting the poor $650M Estimated revenue from New York City’s abandoned pied-à-terre tax that could have been used to fix the subways…

Twelve years. That is how long climate-change activists say we have to limit the climate-change catastrophe. Twelve years from now, I will not even be 40 years old. My generation is the generation that will undoubtedly inherit this crisis if we do not act now. But there is hope. As a young black woman who lives at the intersection of multiple identities, I know it’s important for policies to be intersectional and take into account that many people like me are impacted by issues like climate change in distinct ways. The Green New Deal does just that. It does not just offer solutions like the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions and pollution, but it goes deeper and calls for “high-quality healthcare” for all, “affordable safe and adequate housing,” “economic security,” and…

What are you looking for in a presidential candidate? I want someone with fresh proposals on health care or the environment, you might say. A track record that testifies to experience and effectiveness. Or you might say: Listen, I’m just looking for anyone who can defeat Donald Trump in 2020. Whatever your position, you’re likely to have already gotten into spirited conversations about it with family and friends. And as the race for the Democratic nomination heats up, the debate has become increasingly acrimonious. In fact, it’s threatening to turn into a search for a savior. This search manifests itself in two ways. The first is the belief that electing the right person will result in immediate solutions to the multitude of systemic problems that plague the country. If only…

Born to Be Posthumous The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey By Mark DeryLittle, Brown and Company. 512 pp. $35 For 33 years, Edward Gorey rented an apartment in Manhattan. The author and artist hated New York City, but like so many others, he had moved there after college to embark on a career. The one-room apartment, at 36 East 38th Street, was Gorey’s refuge, his “cabinet of wonders, bohemian atelier, and Fortress of Solitude rolled into one,” as the cultural critic Mark Dery puts it in his new biography, Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. The place was crammed with books, art, and miscellaneous objects that Gorey had collected, often memento mori. These included a real mummy’s head, which, by…