Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i The Nation

Paris WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORD CULTURE, WHAT DO YOU reach for? The Nazis, famously, reached for their guns—a response presumably based on the belief that there is something about art and culture that is intrinsically hostile to authoritarian values. But the myth that creativity is always on the side of progress—that artists must also be humanists, and therefore enemies of reaction—is equally cherished by many of us on the left. However culture is defined in the age of Trump, we tend to assume a shared set of “enlightened” values with its makers. The Christian right may have the megachurches and the White House (and, at least for the moment, the House, the Senate, and the Kennedy Center). But we will always have Hollywood, Broadway, National Public Radio, Saturday Night…

WHEN I LEARNED I’D BEEN SELECTED FOR A JOURNALISM award earlier this year, I felt humbled and honored. But I also felt hollow. It’s not that I’m ungrateful—far from it. But while I am recognized in exile, my colleagues who are still in Gaza remain caged in a death trap, targeted simply for the crime of reporting their own destruction. Recognition alone won’t stop the bombs. It won’t bring back the dead. World Press Freedom Day, which was marked on May 3, is a time when we deliver speeches, pledge solidarity, and commemorate journalism’s role in holding power to account. But in Gaza, the most basic freedom—the freedom to live, let alone to report—is denied at every turn. Since October 2023, more than 210 Palestinian journalists and media workers have…

WHAT ABOUT THE BOYS? THAT’S THE BIG QUESTION these days. They’re behind girls in school, and they’re less likely to go to college and to graduate. Too many spend all day playing video games, watching porn, getting stoned, and getting into trouble. As industrial jobs vanish, young men face a disappearing advantage in the new economy, where jobs require education and social skills. Some commentators, most famously Richard V. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, have diagnosed a new “crisis” of masculinity. All that’s been happening for decades, though—girls have done better than boys in school since at least 1914, female college enrollment has exceeded that of males since the early 1980s, and factories have been closing for decades. Misogyny is an old story, too.…

Boys Don’t Cry Re “Are Men OK?,” by Eamon Whalen [April 2025]: I was taken with Richard Reeves’s idea that some boys and men might benefit from a boys’ and men’s support culture that is not built around toxic models of manhood but instead recognizes that some boys and men need more help with adapting to cultural changes or learning so-called “soft skills” than others. I take issue, however, with his conclusion that all boys should be held back a year before starting school. Putting aside the income, transportation, housing, healthcare, childcare, and employment challenges facing most parents at this time, there is still the key matter of individual development. We cannot have just one blanket policy for all boys, especially when it is based on a category like biological…

A FEW DAYS BEFORE JOE BIDEN LEFT THE WHITE HOUSE, HIS under secretary for nuclear security at the Energy Department, Dr. Jill Hruby, took the stage at a Washington, DC, think tank and described in grim detail the instability of our nuclear-armed world. Russia, Hruby said, has in recent years stationed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus; withdrawn its ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; and lowered its threshold for nuclear weapons use. It also seems to be exploring new nuclear-weapons delivery technologies, including space-based weapons. Further south, China is rapidly expanding the size of its nuclear arsenal and appears to be moving away from a no-first-use policy for launching nuclear weapons. North Korea persists in building up its nuclear program, rattling the region with its regular missile tests, while…

ON FEBRUARY 11, 2025, REPRESENTATIVE SEAN Casten, an Illinois Democrat who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, questioned crypto industry executives at a public hearing about the dangers of the president of the United States launching a memecoin. These crypto tokens are also known as “shitcoins” since they’re widely considered worthless, a tool for pump-and-dump schemes. Because the rules of congressional decorum had not accommodated themselves to the vulgar conventions of 21st-century financial technologies, Casten had to phrase his question carefully. “It’s hard to talk about memecoins with the language that the industry uses to talk about them,” Casten said. “We’ll refer to them as ‘fecal coins’ for the purposes of this hearing. Is it safe to say from your smiles that you generally share the view of the…

First, they didn’t let me on the moon. Then didn’t let anyoneafter a while. So children let their dreams get smaller, enoughto fit the pocket of the jean jackets each generation woreevery time they invented irony. Soon, in the cities, downin their white noise canyons, people got on with the getting on.Looked at their feet, mostly. Or they practiced glancingslightly away when eyes met accidentally on the train.Like shoes under a table. Like sheep bumbling a mountain pass.The trick, we learned, was to pretend you’ve always beenlooking just over your stranger’s left shoulder, readingfor the thousandth time that list of things you’re not allowed,hoping there might be a prize in it. People got used to doing lesswith less. Hoarded their sorrys. People learned somethinghappens to an old friendship when one…

There is no one without his hourand the hour for us arrived at duskwhen two sparrows outside the café pecked crumbsoff the curb, suddenly turninginto birds of great plumage, both of them singing,male and female,unheard of, yet heard by us at a tablein a Broadway sheduntil the dinner hour came to a close, that hour in the first lineyou’ve already forgottenbecause I distracted you with the conversion of the birdsand the magical crumbslike words you follow down the pageuntil you come to the endand find yourself facing me. I tell you I’m starting to fall…but you interrupt, saying Ohand this is the next to last line and just the beginning.…

I KNOW THE DEMOCRATS WERE TOLD DURING THE ELECTION THAT THEY COULDN’T say anything good about the economy because it would just get people angry, but I don’t work for the Democrats. We had a very good economy in 2024, with strong job growth, low unemployment, slowing inflation, and rising real wages. It looks like that is quickly coming to an end under Trump. To be clear, I am not talking about the fear in the financial markets. That is genuine but largely a sideshow. The big story is what is going on in the real economy—the one that produces goods and services. The most immediate threat is Trump’s tariffs. Tariffs can be used effectively to support the development of key industries, as the United States and many other countries…

A WISCONSIN COUNTY JUDGE IS ARRESTED BY THE FBI and accused of helping an illegal immigrant evade capture… The president invokes a rarely used, 227-year-old law—the Alien Enemies Act—to declare undocumented people enemies of American security… Plainclothes officers bundle a graduate student into a vehicle and hustle her away… A desperate family, rushing their sick child to a Texas hospital, is forced back into Mexico… And a young Salvadoran, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, becomes one of the best known of millions of migrants, receiving his Maryland senator while remaining imprisoned—uncharged, untried in the US or in his homeland. The Trump administration has shown it is willing to test both public tolerance and long-established legal principle. It has repeatedly labeled millions of undocumented residents of the United States “terrorists” and “criminals.” Homeland…

IT’S BEEN FIVE YEARS SINCE HARPER’S PUBLISHED “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” a cri de coeur signed by 153 public intellectuals that warned against threats to freedom of expression from both the right and the left. “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter proclaimed. While it acknowledged that such threats have often emanated from “the radical right,” it focused the bulk of its concern on censorious campaigns from within liberal cultural institutions: “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the…

Donald Trump and his advisers have cited the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, to justify the arrest and deportation of Palestine solidarity activists like Mahmoud Khalil. Without supplying evidence that Khalil has ties to Hamas, the administration argues that an obscure provision in the law allows “any aliens or class of aliens” to be deported if their presence is deemed to have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” Pat McCarran, one of the act’s coauthors, was a conservative Democratic senator from Nevada and a known racist and antisemite whose disregard for civil liberties was consistently condemned by this magazine. His Internal Security Act of 1950 required communists to register with the federal government and established a board to investigate those accused of subversive…

LIKE FISHERMEN AND ROMANTICS, GAMBLERS NEVER forget the one that got away. For Rob Minnick, now 25, that was in 2018, during the annual “March Madness” college basketball tournament. Early in the competition, the underdog Retrievers of UMBC (that’s University of Maryland, Baltimore County) beat the favored Virginia Cavaliers in a massive upset. It was the first time in college basketball history that a 16th-seed team (for non–sports fans, that’s the worst, lowest-ranked team in its geographical region) had defeated a first-seed favorite. And Minnick felt like an idiot for not having laid money on it. “Worse than losing a bet,” he says, “is not making a bet that you would have won, and feeling regret about it. I was like, ‘That was obvious,’ even though it had never happened…

FOR A DEAD MAN WALKING, PETE HEGSETH SURE seems healthy. Any one of the several scandals he’s weathered recently would have instantly ended the career of a lesser man, but this avatar of masculinity whose fighting spirit so perfectly embodies our “pre-woke” military—the one he wrote about in his best-selling book, the one he never shuts up about—simply cannot die. Hegseth’s penchant for sharing classified information on Signal, his use of an unsecured office phone line and compromised personal devices, and his repeated celebration of Take Your Wife to Sensitive Meetings With Foreign Officials Day add up to more than just a bad look. These things, along with his purges of women and people of color from the top brass, the marginalization and/or termination of his principal advisers, and his…

DEAR JUSTICE THOMAS, I write to you in desperation. I need every possible Supreme Court vote to stand against the current racial reordering of American society along apartheid lines, and I have come to the admittedly wild conclusion that yours is the most gettable among my judicial enemies. The court is considering a number of cases stemming from Donald Trump’s attempts to rewrite the Constitution by executive fiat: revoking birthright citizenship, firing federal employees, refusing to provide funds authorized by Congress, abducting documented immigrants and sending them to concentration camps, and detaining students who speak out on behalf of Palestine. I assume you believe that Trump has the authority to do all or most of this. I also assume that you are not an idiot and can therefore see that…

55% Portion of Americans who disapprove of how President Trump is handling his job, according to an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll 45% Portion who said Trump deserves an “F” for how he’s handled his first 100 days, according to an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll 140 Number of executive orders Trump signed in his first 100 days 162 Number of executive orders Joe Biden signed during his entire presidency 200 Number of lawsuits filed against the Trump administration since January 20 70 Number of rulings federal judges have issued against Trump’s executive actions…

WHEN I JOINED GOOGLE, MORE THAN 20 YEARS AGO, it was just a start-up that employed a few thousand people. It felt like we were committed to making something useful for society. When I first visited the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, and saw people in Google-branded T-shirts, I thought it was a uniform—why else would someone wear a shirt announcing where they work? I’d never come across this sense of passion for one’s employer, but I soon understood it: Every few months, Google would launch a new product or feature that offered a free and truly useful service (Gmail! Google Maps!). But if my predominant feeling back then was pride, it’s now a very different one—heartbreak. That’s thanks to years of deeply troubling leadership decisions, ranging from Project…

AYANA, 28 YEARS OLD AND 28 WEEKS PREGNANT, EASES HERSELF onto the procedure table at Partners in Abortion Care in College Park, Maryland. She is a Black woman with the tiny bearing and erect posture of a bird. Above her head, a flock of pink and blue butterflies decorates the ceiling. In a few minutes, a doctor will perform an injection to the fetal heart to end her pregnancy. Ayana had spent months in turmoil over this abortion. As she chased after her two older kids while lugging her 1-year-old on family outings to the arcade and the movies, she tried to imagine hauling two car seats instead of one. While she changed her baby’s diapers, she thought about what a newborn would subtract from him. The family was already…

This July marks The Nation’s 160th birthday, representing over a century and a half of tenacious, independent journalism that holds the powerful to account, exposes corruption and exploitation, and agitates for bold action in the face of injustice and oppression. We remain committed to our founding principles of delivering the incisive political analysis and commentary, thoroughly reported investigative journalism, and trenchant cultural criticism that you rely on to make sense of these tumultuous times and to forge a path toward a more equitable future. In the past year alone, we have reported on the Democrats’ disastrous campaign and the radical changes the party must embrace to survive; the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza and calls for a pro-peace foreign policy; the alarming crackdowns on free speech and civil liberties…