Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i The Nation

I HUNG UP MY PROPHET’S MANTLE IN 1992, AFTER writing a column for New York Newsday predicting—on the basis of some combination of rumor, Broadway gossip, and a couple of polls—that New York Governor Mario Cuomo would jump into the presidential race and become the next occupant of the White House. His plane to New Hampshire was supposedly waiting on the runway, the papers required to enter the Democratic primary all filled out, but Hamlet on the Hudson never got off the ground. So when I say that things often don’t turn out as you—or at least I—expect them to, you can trust me. As I write, Vice President Kamala Harris leads former president Donald Trump nationally by a little over a point (in the RealClearPolling average) and by razor-thin…

HERE’S SOME GOOD NEWS: VACCINES WORK. I DON’T believe many people think about what life was like before vaccines existed for many commonly preventable viruses. We’re not talking about the Middle Ages—we’re talking about the 20th century, when diseases like polio struck fear into Americans from coast to coast. My father contracted polio when he was a child. My mother-in-law did, too. Only a few decades ago, it was common for cities to close schools, churches, public pools, and movie theaters when the virus was in town. Of course, we don’t have to go that far back to remember that kind of panic and anxiety. Recall the first few weeks of the Covid pandemic, and you can get a sense of what life was like in the pre-vaccine era. But…

EVER SINCE KAMALA HARRIS’S CANDIDACY PUT Democrats in array, there’s been a running joke online that Donald Trump is going to say the N-word—that is, in public—before the presidential election. It’s a kind of gallows humor, sure, but given Trump’s legendary bigotry, his sputtering meltdowns in recent weeks, and the racism and sexism he has already spewed at Harris, it’s a well-founded expectation. Trump has repeatedly called Harris a “bitch” in private, according to The New York Times, and he has publicly denigrated her as “lazy,” “a bum,” “stupid,” “real garbage,” and regarded as “a play toy” by foreign leaders. (“And I don’t want to say as to why,” he added, unsubtly. “But a lot of people understand it.”) After lying that Harris, the first Black woman and the first…

Buy Them! MATT BRUENIG WHEN THE TENNESSEE VALLEY AUthority outsourced 146 jobs in 2020, the unions representing the affected workers blasted the decision and asked federal lawmakers to intervene. President Donald Trump responded by removing two of the TVA’s board members and criticizing the CEO. Three days after Trump got involved, the TVA rehired the workers it had just laid off. The TVA is an electric utility company that serves 10 million customers in the southeastern United States. It operates as a giant monopoly. In most circumstances, this would make it an agent of “corporate power” that the government tries, mostly in vain, to rein in. But unlike normal companies, the TVA is owned by the federal government. Thus when the government wants the TVA to behave a certain way,…

I REMEMBER WRITING ABOUT THE 47TH ANNIVERSARY of the Nakba, and the 75th, and the 76th. I wrote about the pain and pride of my people—many of whom had been expelled from their homes and sent into what would become my homeland, Gaza. Decades after that first expulsion, many things have changed, but one thing has remained the same: Israel’s determination to erase us from our own land. For 2 million people still trapped in Gaza, that has meant a year of genocide—of death, starvation, displacement, and the constant search for safe haven; for tens of thousands of others, like me and my family, it has meant a Nakba of our own—a desperate flight from Gaza and into exile. For those of us who have been permitted a way out,…

SALLY ROONEY HAS BECOME KNOWN AS a novelist of love, youth, and the combination thereof. Her characters come together as they come of age, in novels that combine romance with heady conversations on the disappointments and injustices of contemporary life. Rooney herself has jokingly implied that her primary subject could be reduced to “attractive young people in their twenties and thirties hanging around Dublin, doing no work, and thinking about sex.” But over the past five years, she has also quietly turned her attention to several themes that are less remarked on in discussions of her work: bereavement and brotherhood, and sometimes both. First there were the Kearneys in her 2019 New Yorker story “Color and Light”: Aidan, a hotel worker, and Declan, his older brother by a year and…

THE GREAT STRENGTH OF KAMALA HARRIS’S UNLIKELY BUT EXISTENTIALLY IMportant campaign for the presidency is her powerful grasp of what is at stake in this election. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” Harris declared in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. But as she reminded the delegates, “the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” Warning of the danger to democracy posed by a reelected “Donald Trump with no guardrails”—especially after the Supreme Court’s recent 6–3 decision granting him “presumptive immunity” from criminal prosecution for his official acts—Harris urged Americans to “consider what he intends to do if we give him power again. Consider his explicit intent to set free violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at…

THIS JULY, THE FIRST COLLECTIVE BARGAINING agreement at the first US architecture firm to unionize since the 1940s was ratified. After years of strife and setbacks, architectural labor organizing finally has a concrete victory. It began when the workers at Bernheimer Architecture (BA), represented by Architectural Workers United (AWU), a division of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, successfully unionized in 2022. While previous attempts to organize architects had been thwarted by management’s use of union-busting tactics like forced elections, BA’s management decided to voluntarily recognize the union. Another unexpected twist: The workers at BA unionized not because their working conditions were terrible, but rather to protect existing positive attributes of the firm as it grows and, inevitably, changes. As BA architect Christopher Beck told me, “Ownership can…

41K The number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023 186K The predicted total death toll in Gaza, including indirect deaths caused by the war, such as the outbreak of disease and the destruction of hospitals 32 The number of hospitals that have suffered partial or total damage during the war 90% The portion of children in Gaza (ages 6 months to 2 years) who are living in severe food poverty 47 The number of homes and agricultural structures in the West Bank that were demolished in September 2024 $18.5B The amount of direct damage to Gaza’s infrastructure as of January 2024…

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHERE ISRAEL IS AT almost a year into its longest war, you might start by looking at two very different figures: Giora Eiland and Einav Zangauker. Eiland, a retired major general, is the former head of the Israeli National Security Council and has long been considered one of the most prominent “intellectuals” among the not very intellectual Israeli security apparatus. A frequent TV commentator, he does not come from a religious-messianic background, is a vocal critic of Benjamin Netanyahu and his politics, and generally presents as a moderate, sober thinker. Yet from the beginning of the war, Eiland led the way by calling to destroy Gaza. “The State of Israel has no choice but to make Gaza a place that is temporarily, or permanently, impossible…

IT WAS A FEW DAYS AFTER PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN HALTED HIS 2024 REELECTION campaign and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement at the top of the Democratic ticket. On Main Street in Platteville, Wisconsin, the Grant County Democratic Party headquarters was abuzz with activity. Volunteers were assembling yard signs for US Senator Tammy Baldwin, whose tough race for a second term suddenly seemed easier now that the party’s embattled president had dropped his flagging reelection bid. There was talk of flipping western Wisconsin’s congressional seat back into the party column. Folks were delivering plates of food “to keep everyone’s energy up!” Someone brought a radio so the volunteers could listen to the anticipated announcement of Harris’s VP pick. “It’s just so good now,” said Sue Leamy Kies, a…

THE SUPREME COURT RETURNS FROM ITS SUMmer vacation on October 7, four weeks and one day before the November 5 general election. The court’s fingerprints (as well as the fingerprints of the wealthy Republican donors who likely paid for some of the justices’ summer vacations) are already all over the upcoming election. Earlier this year, the court ensured Donald Trump a spot on the ballot when it ruled against an attempt to prevent him from running for president because of his participation in an insurrection against the government; then, in July, the Republican justices granted Trump “absolute immunity” for crimes committed as part of his “official duties,” likely ensuring that he will never face accountability for his worst actions. Thanks to these rulings, Trump can legally run for an office…

EARLY IN JANUARY AT LE MARS, IN NORTHWESTERN Iowa, a mob of a thousand farmers seized the attorney for an insurance company, dangled a rope before his eyes, and threatened him with immediate lynching.” So begins an article by the journalist Charlotte Prescott, published in The Nation in February of 1933. In the first paragraph, Prescott informs her readers that the protesters then “held the judge of the district court a prisoner in his chambers and defied the county sheriff.” She also notes that the farmers won: Soon after, local officials withdrew foreclosure proceedings against one farmer and tossed out a judgment against another. A “social revolution in the cornfields of Iowa,” a wholesale revolt of the rural population against the authorities, was under way. The Iowa rebellion was no…

IN THE MID-2010S, YOUNG BROOKLYNITES WELL ACquainted with the borough’s nightlife shared a psychogeography that was rooted around the Myrtle-Broadway subway stop. Upon exiting, you were greeted by the sight that began and ended your night—a trio of fast-food restaurants burned into the minds of all the dissolute people of my generation: a Popeyes, a Checkers, and a Dunkin Donuts. From there, you fanned out into a network of clubs, bars, and underground parties that surrounded the elevated subway tracks. There was something for everyone: For indie rock, you could go to Silent Barn, a DIY space and co-op; for the more spiritually inclined, there was the Body Actualized Center, where you could sway and meditate in a cloud of Palo Santo smoke; and for those who wanted to dance…

THE DRIVE FROM MY DAUGHTER’S AFTER-SCHOOL center back to our house takes only a few minutes. It’s just enough time for her to tell me one thing about her day before we get home. K. is 8, and on most days her news is treat-related. She once earned 29 M&M’s for correctly answering all her math questions. So one spring afternoon, when she began telling me about the reward she got following an “intruder-alert drill” at her school, I found myself willing my expression to stay neutral as her bubbly voice tripped over the words to get them in before we arrived home. I hadn’t received any notice that her school would be holding such an exercise. But if you’re the parent of a child who has gone through an…

IT’S PREMATURE TO HAZARD ANY GUESSES ABOUT THE outcome of the 2024 presidential campaign, but we can at least single out one major contribution to the nation’s civic health: At virtually every turn, this election cycle has proved pundit wisdom stupendously and gloriously wrong. Start with the big-picture structural forecasting. It’s long been a shibboleth among sober election observers that a few narrow indicators of economic growth render the national election result a foregone conclusion: If employment and wages are up, and inflation on a downward slope, the party in power will coast to victory. That truism was among the first casualties of Joe Biden’s abortive reelection bid. Voters disapproved of his handling of the economy, even though the major economic indicators reached historic highs. And attesting to just how…

If you’re outside of Minnesota and had heard of Tim Walz before he was being considered as Kamala Harris’s running mate, it’s probably because you had seen a photo from March 2023 of more than a dozen children smothering the Minnesota governor with hugs, his face red with delight. That image was taken after Walz signed a bill making the state the fourth in the country to offer all students free meals at school. Other politicians have also realized the merits of universal school meals. Danica Roem, who recently won a seat in the Virginia Senate, campaigned on the slogan “Fixing roads, feeding kids.” The policy has a multitude of benefits for families, schools, and the politicians who embrace it. Access to school meals staves off children’s hunger and helps…

I WRITE TO YOU FROM MY WOUNDED YET BEAUTIFUL home, Gaza. After months and months of destruction and extermination in a war where many battles have intertwined—the war of weapons, the war of starvation, the war of disease, and the war of siege and displacement—there have been moments when I thought we were enduring this pain alone. Where, I wondered, were the preachers for freedom, democracy, and human rights, especially the rights of children? Sometimes, disappointment crept into my soul. But after seeing people from all corners of the world demonstrating for the children of Gaza; after reading the messages from so many, young and old, for the people of Gaza; after hearing their chants calling for an end to the war and freedom for Palestine, I felt that their…

IN ONE OF HIS FEW LUCID MOMENTS DURING THE ONLY DEBATE OF the 2024 election cycle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the sitting president suggested he would be tougher on the border than his predecessor, blaming the former president for the demise of a “bipartisan border deal” that would have boosted the Border Patrol’s funding and significantly reduced access to asylum. Biden and top congressional Democrats had spent months negotiating its provisions, granting more and more concessions to conservatives in the hopes that they’d stop claiming that Biden had lost control of the southern border. But “when we had that deal done,” Biden said, Trump “called his Republican colleagues and said, ‘Don’t do it. It’s going to hurt me politically.’” The far right had refused to grant Biden a…

WHEN SAKINAH AHAD SHANNON FOUND JANE IN 1971, she was looking to help a childhood friend who needed an abortion. Sakinah, who went by Paulette Myers at that time, started asking around to find a safe abortion provider. “I put feelers out. I got a call from one of my other friends who had went to Jane, and she says, ‘Listen, I went to the women there, it’s wonderful. I only paid $50.’” Jane, also sometimes called The Service, was the colloquial name for the underground Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Founded in 1969, it consisted of a group of women who connected people seeking abortions to providers. Until it disbanded in 1973, Jane helped more than 11,000 women get abortions at a time when the…

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT “THE TRIAL OF THE CENtury” nearly a century after it happened? Many Americans have long understood the 1925 prosecution of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, for breaking a new state law that forbade teaching “the Evolution Theory” in public schools as a conflict of profound simplicity in which religious bigotry clashed with scientific reason. In it, Clarence Darrow, a veteran stalwart of the legal left, skillfully defended Scopes, a biology instructor, while William Jennings Bryan, a thrice-failed nominee for president and devout fundamentalist, clumsily led the case for the state. The trial was broadcast to the entire the nation over an enterprising radio hookup. Since Scopes freely admitted he had done the deed as charged, the guilty verdict came as no surprise. But what the…

THE SLOW HORSES OF SLOW HORSES USED TO BE AGENTS, analysts, or operatives working out of the headquarters of MI5, Britain’s domestic counterintelligence agency. But these are not retirees put out to pasture; they are the rejects, misfits, and screwups relegated to a dilapidated building called Slough House, condemned to spend the rest of their days on mind-numbing busywork. The man in charge is Jackson Lamb (zealously portrayed by Gary Oldman), the ornery, flatulent, and soused patron saint of slow horses. Nothing is meant to happen in Slough House. The agents there do not officially run operations; their purview is supposed to be strictly desk work. But it’s because MI5 treats the place as a trash bin that things get interesting. The nasty truths that higher-ups would rather bury or…