The Nation November 14/21, 2022

WITH TWO WEEKS TO GO UNTIL THE MIDTERMS AS WE GO TO PRESS, THE GOP IS gaining traction in many Senate races and taking a small lead in the overall congressional polls. As The New York Times recently reported, “Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinct advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.” It’s tempting to dismiss this one survey, as some Democrats have done. But we also have aggregates of polling data, such as those provided by FiveThirtyEight. These show a consistent story of dwindling Democratic opportunities in the Senate and…

DELEGATES FROM NEARLY 200 NATIONS, AS WELL AS hundreds of activists and representatives from nongovernmental organizations that focus on climate change and the environment, are convening in November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the UN climate negotiations, known as the Conference of the Parties (COP). At this year’s version, COP27, nations will once again work together to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which requires each country to submit a detailed plan to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. The UN gathers these binding commitments, known as Nationally Determined Contributions, to establish what the collective impact will be. In accordance with the Paris treaty, nations agreed to submit their NDCs by 2020 and then report back every five years. The…

IN “SHORTCOMINGS OF MEN,” THE SATIRIST BIBI Khanoom Astarabadi proposes that men stop trying to educate women and instead invest in edifying themselves, an urgent task because “yours truly does not believe that she is able to edify men.” Dated 1895, the pamphlet represents one of the earliest criticisms of mansplaining in Iran. Around that time, Iranian women protested en masse against a government tobacco concession that would have profoundly hurt farmers and merchants. Women mobilized for other progressive causes and significantly helped in advancing the Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the century. But when it came to drafting the Constitution, their demands were completely dismissed by the country’s leaders. In response, women decided to organize for their own rights and agreed that they should prioritize education, marking the…

IT HAS BECOME INCREASINGLY COMMON TO READ about people getting fired, punished, or otherwise “canceled”—often with good reason—for something they said on Twitter. Some of these casualties become free speech warriors or the subjects of searching profiles on the blurry line between our imagined “right” to be who we are on the Internet and our ability to still retain a job. And then there’s the recent case of Erick Adame, a popular weatherman on NY1 who lost his job after being anonymously harassed with images someone stole of him performing sex acts on a private, noncommercial website. We’re faced with fast-evolving standards of appropriate conduct. But we’re also dealing with the dissolution of boundaries between who we are and what we say or do depending on where we are. This…

UKRAINE IS A COUNTRY WE ARE JUST GETTING TO KNOW. What is more important is to hate Russia: an emotion in which Americans have been well trained. Media workers and the experts they interview, one notices, can’t help stumbling occasionally: “the Soviet Union—I mean, Russia.” A history of contempt takes us back to an entity at once exotic and primitive, suspended in time and space. This Russia hovers between barbarism and modernity, between Asia and Europe, an uncertain profile that has long troubled the Western mind. But the task has now been simplified: Hate Putin, hate “Putin’s Russia,” hate Russia—before, during, and after the fact, and in excess of the facts. And the Russian people? We will come back to them. The Western moral calculus that ramps up war fever…

In June, more than 3,300 people in Britain embarked on an exciting experiment: Their employers had signed up to pilot a four-day workweek in what is currently the world’s biggest trial of this shorter working schedule. Seventy-three British companies have reduced their employees’ working hours by 20 percent for six months while still giving them their full pay. Similar pilot programs are also underway in Australia, Iceland, Japan, and Spain. Some companies in the United States have taken the same step. One study found that more than 8 million US workers switched to a four-day schedule between 1973 and 2018. So far, the evidence that’s rolling in points in a clear direction: A shorter week allows workers to better take care of themselves without sacrificing productivity. Halfway through the six-month…