Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i The Nation

I FILED THIS IN MID-OCTOBER, BUT THE OUTCOME of the 2024 election will presumably be known by the time you read these words. What’s already clear, though, is how rapidly Donald Trump’s Republican Party is accelerating toward a decisive point at which elections simply don’t matter anymore—the dream that the authoritarian American right cleaves to as it fantasizes about turning America into a more lavishly armed and funded version of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. That project, like much of the rest of the MAGA agenda, has fallen to the Trump movement’s designated heir apparent, JD Vance. The Ohio senator Trump tapped as his running mate has performed many stunning reversals and acts of intellectual self-cancellation in his new role as MAGA ideology czar, but the most distressing of these has been…

BY NOW, THE WHOLE WORLD HAS HEARD THE STORY OF Gisèle Pelicot, and it’s hard to say what the worst part of it is. Pelicot is the 72-year-old French woman whose husband, Dominique, is on trial for drugging her food and inviting at least 80 men to rape her while she was unconscious. (He photographed the whole thing, saving the evidence in a computer file conveniently titled “abuse.”) Over the course of a decade, Gisèle visited many doctors for strange symptoms—memory loss, unexplained headaches, gynecological problems—and none had a clue what was wrong. This unbelievably courageous woman opted to reveal her name and make the trial public, to call attention to rape; in France, as elsewhere, women are often blamed and shamed for their own violation, and French rape law…

Nancy Pelosi, according to National Public Radio, is “arguably the most powerful woman in American political history.” The Urban League describes her as “the most successful and effective Speaker of the House in U.S. history.” The Associated Press employs no qualifiers, simply referring to the Democrat, who has represented San Francisco in the US House of Representatives since 1987, as the “dominant figure for the ages.” Pelosi was a prime mover in the passage of the Affordable Care Act during Barack Obama’s presidency. She was the face of congressional opposition to former president Donald Trump. When Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020, she united House Democrats to support the new president’s agenda. Even after handing off the leadership of the House Democratic Caucus to Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the…

WHEN RUTH WAS 21, SHE PUT ON A wedding dress; it was high time, her parents and everyone else around her had said, for her to be married. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Ruth (a pseudonym to protect a victim of abuse) had been told over and over what it meant to be a woman—and marriage was at the center of it all. In Sunday school and Bible study, she had been taught that a wife’s role is to be submissive and accept her husband’s headship. Women were not allowed to address the congregation at her church. The faith she had grown up in was a “dark and bloody” one, she told me; in her Sunday school lessons, she had been taught to expect…

THE RECENT DEATH OF LT. WILLIAM CALLEY, WHO PERPETRATED THE My Lai Massacre in 1968, is an apt reminder of what the almost-forgotten Vietnam War was about. If truth is the first casualty in war, memory may be the last. Lies about a mythical attack on an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, lies about how we were winning when we never were, lies about who we were bombing and where. Lies piled on one another like dead bodies. Here is what happened at My Lai on March 16 of that year. Lieutenant Calley led over 100 men into a small inland hamlet halfway up the eastern coast of South Vietnam. Calley’s orders from his superiors were ambiguous, but the idea was that anyone in the hamlet, including women,…

TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER’S NEW NOVEL, LONG ISLAND Compromise, begins with a kidnapping. The year is 1980; Carl Fletcher, a wealthy Jewish factory owner living in the fictional Long Island town of Middle Rock, is getting into his car one morning when he suddenly finds himself blindfolded and hooded and then driven to an unknown location. Days later, with FBI agents gathered in the Fletchers’ living room, one of the kidnappers calls Carl’s wife, Ruth, and demands a ransom of $250,000. “I am a colonel in the organization known as the Caliphate Freedom Fighters of the Valley of Palestine,” he tells her. “We claim responsibility for the bombings in the JCC of Tulsa on February sixth and at the Hamish Middle School in Los Angeles on March first…. We have your Zionist scum…

PRESIDENT BIDEN’S LEGACY IS BEING WRITTEN IN GAZA’S RUBBLE. OVER THE PAST YEAR, HIS administration has sent billions of dollars in weapons aid to Israel, enabling a campaign that has triggered a humanitarian catastrophe, one that the International Court of Justice is investigating as a plausible case of genocide. At a minimum, suspending offensive arms transfers to Israel is necessary to realign the United States’ actions with its stated values. This is about more than legality—it’s about avoiding a moral stain that will linger long after the bombs stop falling. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was overshadowed by the Vietnam War; Biden’s domestic ambitions risk being eclipsed by his blank check for Israel’s war crimes. If he doesn’t take action, his presidency may be remembered not for “building back better” but…

JOHN MORALES, THE FLORIDA TV METEOROLOGIST who went viral after fighting back tears as he warned about the megastorm Hurricane Milton, personifies a little-known fact: Local TV weathercasters are the most trusted figures in American news. Even as the popularity of “the media” has plummeted in recent decades, people still trust their local TV weathercasters. After all, those weathercasters talk their viewers through scary times by providing practical, life-saving information. “People have known me as the just-the-facts, non-alarmist guy,” Morales later said, adding, “I think it really shocked a lot of the people that have known me as a weathercaster for 33 years.” Given that level of trust, it makes perverse sense that the same liars and haters who vilify immigrants and people of color would eventually come for weathercasters.…

LIKE VARIOUS DISGRACED POLITICIANS BEFORE HIM, Andrew Cuomo has made a habit of periodically showing up at Black churches since he resigned from office, seeking absolution from audiences liable to be sympathetic to people tangled up in the legal system. (Usually those people are victims of racism, but we’ll get to that in a moment.) With New York City Mayor Eric Adams in a political death spiral and New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s approval numbers at painful lows, the ex-governor is road-testing a return to public life from the pulpit—proclaiming “God is great!”—in a not-so-surreptitious attempt to reclaim support from Black voters, who make up 25 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary in New York City. So it seems relevant to perhaps make something clear: Andrew Cuomo is…

TONY PERKINS, THE CLEAN-SHAVEN, SMOOTH-talking, dad-joking president of the Christian right think tank the Family Research Council, was halfway through a sentence at the group’s annual Pray Vote Stand summit on October 4 when he seemed to lose his way. “I want to examine this moment in which we are in,” Perkins said into the tiny microphone affixed to his face, “which is a very, very…” He trailed off, gazing at the thin crowd. This time last year, he was presiding over a bustling gathering at which legions of the faithful lined up to watch the Republican presidential contenders jockey for the white evangelical vote. Donald Trump won the group’s straw poll in a landslide. This year, Trump was not only absent from Pray Vote Stand. He had forsaken its…

No Mention of Genocide I was disappointed to see The Nation’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president [“For Kamala Harris,” October 2024]. Arming a genocide should constitute more than an incidental detail in a presidential candidate’s track record, especially for a publication with a principled, progressive history. Harris robotically repeats that she “unwaveringly” supports Israel’s “right to self-defense,” without ever spelling out that this right must stop where Palestinians’ and US citizens’ right not to be murdered with impunity by Israel begins, and that it must not be construed to encompass genocide. On her watch, Israel has slaughtered 17,000 children with our bombs and munitions, not counting the thousands more children who are buried beneath the rubble or starving to death. She has signed on to Joe Biden and Antony…

THE 3-YEAR-OLD BUCK BENT DOWN TO SIP FROM A small pond on a late November afternoon in Iowa County, Wisconsin. It was nearing the end of the annual rut, and the animal was likely mad with lust for a mate. Alas, he had swaggered into the wrong watering hole. There was a loud blast. In an instant, a bullet tore through the tissue of the buck’s long neck. He collapsed bleeding on the bank. As the deer lay dying, a man emerged from a camouflaged structure on the far side of the pond. His name was Mike Foy, a 67-year-old hunter and former official with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, who had spent many cold mornings and long afternoons waiting for the deer that would fill his family’s freezer…

IN RETROSPECT, WILMERHALE, THE LAW firm that prepared Harvard president Claudine Gay and UPenn president Liz Magill for their congressional testimony last December, appears to have missed the point of the exercise. The success or failure of their clients’ performance would not be determined by legal nitpicking; the hearings were always going to be political theater. Trying to stay as close as possible to the language of the law—technically, that whether speech can be prohibited depends on its “context”—the presidents refused to make the political statement that the moment required: that if there had been genocidal speech threatening Jewish students, then of course that speech would not have been permitted. Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, was advised by the firm of Covington and Burling, but like the other university heads, she…

ON A RECENT VISIT TO BARCELONA, MY HUSBAND AND I stayed in Poblenou, a part of town we had chosen because of its relative isolation from the mass tourist draws like La Rambla and the Sagrada Família. Upon our arrival, we discovered that we had landed in a 21st-century neighborhood: an old industrial zone that had been aggressively and creatively redeveloped in recent decades and had emerged as a startling blend of past, present, and future. Its Encants Market, a ragtag hive of secondhand merchandise that has been in operation since the 14th century, had been relocated in 2013 from a nearby plaza and was now housed in a humongous, multilevel high-tech shed with a lofty, free-form mirrored metallic ceiling. Even the street outside our hotel was a surprise. The…

LIKE MANY REAL-LIFE OFFICE WORKERS, THE CHARACters of Industry take refuge in the bathroom. The cold comforts of the toilet are often the de facto hideaway for the London-based employees of the investment bank Pierpoint & Co. A place for gossip or escape more so than micturition, the facilities are also a hotbed of illicit activity, per the customary recklessness fostered in a stressful profit-making environment. In the series’ pilot, a young, inexperienced banker dies alone, slumped on the floor of a stall, after suffering a heart attack brought on by sleep deprivation and stimulant use. Life and death (literal and spiritual) occur in the restroom, if for no other reason than it’s a sanctuary from the cutthroat trading floor, where vulnerability can be bought and sold just as easily…

Rimbaud’s Beach is only a mile from the “Elephant Trunk”where dolphins leap up laughing and Russian women twirl,where Goldmore Road stretches, and beer like water flows,where sailors drown among the nymphs. I was there secretly, observing a blind lighthouse,watched how the seaweed swayed with the waves.Aden held a star on her forehead, strove to lifta bolder off of the oppressed Arabs’ chests. Is Rimbaud’s Beach still there stretched longand shimmering in the red setting sun,like a lighthouse flaunting its light, free, unmatched?Are there any women swimming in the tranquil sea? Aden is now gone, and we are finished too.Let’s ask: What were we then, and who?…

WE’VE NEVER SEEN THE AMERICAN PLUTOCRACY OPerate quite like this. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, spent the homestretch of the 2024 presidential campaign providing a degree of public and financial support to a candidate that’s all but unprecedented in the annals of pay-to-play American electioneering. Not since Howard Hughes secretly funneled cash to Hubert Humphrey, Robert F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon in 1968 has an unstable, flamboyant billionaire industrialist exerted such influence on a presidential race. According to the latest Federal Election Commission filings, in the last quarter, Musk gave $74,950,000 to America PAC, the pro-Trump organization he cofounded with like-minded tech billionaires. He also gave $289,100 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Other right-wing billionaires have contributed tens of millions of dollars to Donald Trump–supporting PACs.…

THE DEHUMANIZATION OF IMMIGRANTS BY REPUBlican politicians has become such a consistent feature of our political discourse that I fear people have stopped noticing it. In fact, it has become so commonplace for politicians, law enforcement, and media personalities to describe immigrants with bestial terminology—most people talk about their pets in more human terms than they talk about immigrants—that even I have become used to it. Every time Donald Trump or his running mate, Captain Eyeliner Vance, opens his foul mouth, I know something horrible about immigrants will spew forth. The two of them are saying everything necessary to induce violence against immigrants while trying to maintain plausible, January 6–style deniability should any violence be carried out. And the media is only too happy to amplify their hate. While their…

173 The number of journalists and media workers killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023 32 The number of journalists who were killed while working 70 The approximate number of press facilities in Gaza destroyed during the war, according to the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate 5 The approximate number of media offices that were shuttered by Israel 1 in 10 The proportion of journalists in Gaza who have been killed by the Israeli military, according to an analysis from Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and The Intercept  0 Members of the Israel Defense Forces who have been held to account for killing, targeting, attacking, or abusing journalists…

IN FEBRUARY OF 2016, THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONtrol and Prevention released guidance that counseled all reproductive-age women who were not using contraception to abstain from drinking just in case they got pregnant. This guidance infuriated feminists—and many others—by treating women as childbearing vessels rather than as autonomous individuals capable of making their own decisions about drinking, sex, or anything else. As you may recall, abortion was still a protected constitutional right in 2016, so there was, in theory, the option of termination in the case of an unintended pregnancy. This type of overweening advice for pregnant people—or even potentially pregnant people—was exactly what the health economist Emily Oster sought to counter with her first book, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—and What You Really Need to Know.…