Indholdsfortegnelse for January 9/16, 2023 i The Nation

FEBRUARY 12–19, 2023 The civil rights movement is one of the most significant chapters in our nation’s history. Half a century after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we have arrived at a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come and how much remains to be accomplished. While we confront increasingly racialized violence and emboldened white nationalists, we can look to the victories of the past and to the hundreds of thousands of brave Americans who took part in this history-altering movement, fighting—and too often dying—for the cause of equality. For those working toward social justice today, there are great lessons to be learned from the civil rights movement. A profound demonstration of commitment and courage succeeded against all odds. In the words of Dr. King: “The…

WE WOULD LOVE TO TELL YOU THAT THE MARACAY harlequin frog (Atelopus vogli) died peacefully in its home in Maracay, Venezuela, but that wouldn’t be very honest of us. We don’t imagine that having one’s habitat destroyed and turned into a bustling city would be a peaceful way to go. While the last known member of the species died in 1957, it is only now, after decades of fruitless searching by scientists, that the frog has been declared extinct. We humans probably should have seen this coming sooner. When Cornelius Vogl, the German missionary for whom the species is named, first saw them in 1933, his impulse was to kill 415 of them and send them to the Natural History Museum in Munich, where many of their faded, formaldehyde-soaked bodies…

Yes! A. M. GITTLITZ IN 2020, I PUBLISHED A BOOK ABOUT the Posadists, a communist sect from Argentina who believed that the extraterrestrial pilots of UFOs had come in peace to help us over-come the suicidal capitalist order that rules Earth. The Posadists were an apocalyptic cult with absurd ideas about nuclear war and comradeship with dolphins, but their party line on aliens was pretty sound. In this one respect, the Posadists’ view overlapped with that of Carl Sagan, the American cosmologist who helped provide a scientific rationale for the belief that our galaxy is full of advanced civilizations. (He guessed somewhere between 50,000 and 1 million.) Sagan’s estimate was based on his assumptions about the Drake equation, which multiplies the number of planets that can sustain life (R ·…

BEFORE SAM BANKMAN-FRIED BECAME THE POSTER CHILD FOR RAPACIOUS speculative folly, he was the anointed emissary from the future of finance—sharing conference stages with world leaders, hobnobbing with celebrities, and donating enormous sums of cash to political parties, think tanks, and charities. You might well say that if Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t already exist, the prophets of digital-age capitalism would have invented him—except that he beat them to the punch, producing a camera-ready image of himself as a tech innovator and philanthropic visionary while erecting a vast fortune out of the great rolling grift known as cryptocurrency. Bankman-Fried’s sudden fall from grace—which culminated in his mid-December arrest on eight criminal charges stemming from allegedly fraudulent transactions—has obscured much of the cult of personality that sprouted around him as he took his…

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Half my lung,Removed by knife,Is tightly packed in plastic nowAlong with other wasteThen dumped somewhere on Staten IslandOr Jersey. I had other plans for it of course.The lung.A state funeral along with the rest of meHonoring a life of plunder well-spent. Malignancy’s a funny thing thoughAnd it had other plans.I’m fearfulIt was paybackFor Silence. Who needs a full lungFor a mouth clamped shut in fearBy politics no less. I can remember, I think I canWhen I was on the stumpOn the shout full voice full furyPissing way above my rank—Good Lord the arc of it—On Them, their Crowns their HairDripped yellow in their eyes. Yup.Used to. I throw a blanket of silence nowOver things I’ve built.…

WHEN JUDGE DIANE KIESEL DISMISSED THE MURDER CHARGE AGAINST TRACY McCarter for the 2020 death of her estranged husband, she criticized media coverage of the case. In her December 2 ruling, Kiesel noted that McCarter’s case “became the focus of an intense advocacy campaign which received extensive attention in the press.” The New York state Supreme Court judge added that nearly all of the coverage “adopted the defendant’s narrative that she was the victim of domestic violence and that prosecuting her for killing her husband was unjust.” The 11-page decision is replete with references to coverage of the case, including my reporting for The Nation. As I reported, McCarter was arrested on March 2, 2020, for the death of her husband, James Murray, which she maintained in legal filings was…

I DON’T AGREE WITH BLACK REPUBLICANS. I THINK they are wrong on their policy prescriptions for America. I think many of them are entirely too tolerant of the systemic racism that plagues our society, even to the point of complicity. I think, when pressed, they too often resort to the victim blaming that runs through that core Republican ethos of “I got mine, why can’t you get yours?” But I can respect Black Republicans. I can recognize Black Republican scholars and politicians as legitimate thinkers who have something to add to the American political discourse. Rank-and-file Black Republicans are not “race traitors.” As I see it, part of the “dream” is that Black people get to be just as wrong and myopic as white folks. So I can accept that…

83% Portion of the freight railroad market controlled by four companies 45K Number of employees laid off in the freight carrier industry over the past six years 260% Rise in Norfolk Southern Railway’s stock price over the past six years 0 Number of paid sick days rail workers currently receive 48K Number of graduate students and researchers who went on strike in November at the University of California’s 10 campuses $44B 2021–22 budget for the UC system 38 Approximate number of US states with a smaller operating budget than the UC system 4% Portion of the UC budget that would cover the pay increases demanded by workers…

Tuzla, Bosnia JUST MINUTES AFTER THE POLLS CLOSED ON OCTOBER 2, A GERMAN DIPLOMAT NAMED Christian Schmidt changed the election laws of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He did so unilaterally and without public input, as he is empowered to do as the high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The vote had been going smoothly; international election monitors reported that it was peaceful and lawful. Then Schmidt’s decision suddenly pushed the country into crisis. For more than a year, Schmidt had been suggesting that he would rewrite the election rules to “promote the functionality” of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the two constituencies that make up the country, along with the Republika Srpska. But he walked back those promises after protests of more than 7,000 people in Sarajevo over…

Here We Go Again Re “Russia Hating,” by David Bromwich [Nov. 14/21]: We are once more, in the name of democracy, supporting a leadership that suppresses dissent. Even worse, it prevents public workers from speaking Russian in Donetsk and Luhansk and ignores the history of the Azov Battalion and the assassination of questioning mayors. I am ashamed of my fellow progressives and a liberal media that almost unanimously censures all less-than-eager support of Ukraine as another multibillion dollars goes mostly to our own defense contractors. The publication of Bromwich’s critique of the media’s uncritical support for the war in Ukraine is the beginning, I hope, of a needed reappraisal of exactly what we are doing, again, in another war on the far side of the world. I hope The Nation…

Martin Luther King Jr. “The Last Steep Ascent” John Steinbeck “Dubious Battle in California” Howard Zinn “Finishing School for Pickets” Toni Morrison “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear” Naomi Klein “Capitalism vs. the Climate” Ralph Nader “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy” Carlos Fuentes “Mexico: Land of Jekyll and Hyde” Ralph Ellison “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” Bill McKibben “Too Hot to Handle” Tony Kushner “A Socialism of the Skin” Michelle Alexander “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote” Langston Hughes “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” Hannah Arendt “What Is This New Philosophy They Call ‘Existentialism’?” Freda Kirchwey “One World or None” Gore Vidal “Some Jews & the Gays” Arthur Miller “Our Bloodless Coup” Laila Lalami “Against Easy Stories” James Baldwin “A Report From…

ANA GRACE MÁRQUEZ-GREENE WAS 6 YEARS OLD when she, along with 19 of her first-grade classmates and six educators, was murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Conn., 10 years ago this month. But she lives on through her loving parents, Nelba Márquez-Greene and Jimmy Greene; her surviving brother, Isaiah, about to graduate from high school; the family’s work helping survivors of gun violence; and the Ana Grace Academy of the Arts, a K–8 magnet school in Bloomfield, Conn., that just opened this year. “Love wins” has been the mantra of all her family’s efforts. But in another way, Ana Grace was erased, by journalists and even well-meaning gun-control activists, who seized on the narrative of 20 “white suburban” first graders massacred as proof of how deep America’s gun…

MY HUSBAND AND I STOPPED EXCHANGING GIFTS A FEW years ago. Instead, we make donations and do something fun, like see a play. It’s great: no shiny new books to add to the teetering tower of unread tomes, no scarves to add to the overflowing basket of same, and especially no complicated kitchen equipment to gaze up reproachfully from next to that never-used air fryer I got from a neighbor on Freecycle. Whether or not you give presents to your loved ones, here are some suggestions for your end-of-year donations. 1. GiveDirectly. What do low-income people need? Money! That’s the idea behind GiveDirectly, which sends stipends of around $40 a month for three years to poor villagers in Uganda, Liberia, and other African countries. It is amazing what a difference…

THE DATE WAS OCTOBER 22, 2022, TWO AND A HALF WEEKS before the pivotal midterm elections. In north-eastern Arizona, a windstorm was kicking up fine particles of sand from the desert ground, filling the air with an unpleasant mustard-colored fog. Out on a few scrubby acres of land north of the remote town of Cameron, at the western edge of the Navajo Nation, a lunch held to honor local Navajo community activists and Democratic Party organizers had almost been upended by the winds. The stakes supporting the canopies that provided shade for the tables had to be held down by guests, and the paper plates and bowls meant for the soups, fry bread, and chilis that had been cooked up in large metal vats atop giant propane burners blew east…

After it happened, I never strayed too far.I stayed close to the wound, I swaddled it like a newborn.I asked if it was hungry and, like a newborn, it gazed through me, it couldn’t focus or smile.That was the end of all questions. From then on, I fed it untilit became drunk with my milk. My breasts were engorged at the timewith something like fear, tender to the touch. The wound had been bornwith sharp teeth. It bit and it gnawed. I was not trying to fatten it up or make it closelike a wing, like a whisper to someone falling asleep or about to die.I did not wonder whether it looked like me or its father, or whatwould become of it as the years went by. I never waited…

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