Innehållsförteckning för February 12/19, 2018 från The Nation

@thenation.com Red Famine Revisited Further to Sophie Pinkham’s insightful and balanced review of Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine [Jan. ⅛], it is also relevant that Applebaum asserts that there was a tendency in Western scholarship to avoid serious study of the horrific famine in the USSR from 1932–34, and that this massive and tragic loss of life (especially in Ukraine) went undocumented until the publication of Robert Conquest’s book on the subject in 1986. This is not true. In fact, some of the preeminent American demographers and other social scientists in the immediate post–World War II period, including Frank Lorimer, Ansley Coale, and Dana Dalrymple, did extensive research on Soviet population trends in the 1920s and ’30s. Their estimates of excess mortality in that period were attributed…

Ahed Tamimi was 11 when I met her, a little blond slip of a thing, her hair almost bigger than she was. I remember her grimacing as her mother combed out the knots each morning in their living room. The second time I went to a demonstration in Nabi Saleh, the West Bank village where she lives, Ahed and her cousin Marah ended up leading the march. Not because they wanted to, but because Israel Border Police were shouting and throwing stun grenades, and she and Marah ran ahead of the crowd. That’s how it’s been ever since. The Israeli military keeps pushing—into the village, into the yard, into the house, into the skulls and tissue and bones of her family and friends—and Ahed ends up out in front, where…

Have we reached peak #MeToo? I can’t stand to read one more word about Aziz Ansari sticking his fingers down “Grace’s” throat and whether she made her distaste so loud you could hear it across the street. So I will simply note a few things and move on. One, never trust a male feminist. Two, in the intergenerational clash that has simmered since #MeToo began, I am trying to be on the young women’s side, since one day the rest of us will be dead, but some aren’t making it easy. Stassa Edwards at Jezebel calls Katie Roiphe a second-wave feminist. Earth to Stassa: Roiphe is 49 and thus was minus-5 years old when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique; also, she has made a career of mocking and attacking…

When Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou visited Washington in 1964, he made no secret to President Lyndon Johnson of his displeasure with the US-backed proposal to partition Cyprus. The Greek ambassador later told Johnson that “no Greek government could accept such a plan.” The American president replied: “Fuck your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fellows continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant’s trunk, whacked good…. If your prime minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament, and constitution, he, his parliament, and his constitution may not last very long.” America has a consistent history of treating smaller, weaker, poorer nations with contempt. The litany of sponsored coups, assassinations (attempted and achieved), and…

AFTER A YEAR IN WHICH THE NEWS CYCLE BROUGHT A CONSTANT series of shocks and outrages, perhaps the least surprising development of 2017 was the announcement, on December 14, that Vladimir Putin would be running for the Russian presidency once again in March 2018. Since he returned to the Kremlin in 2012, there has been little doubt that Putin would seek another six-year term in office. There can be little doubt, too, that he will win. So far, the other contenders include some of the usual suspects—the socialliberal economist Grigory Yavlinsky, the nationalist provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky—as well as a few novelties: TV personality Ksenia Sobchak is standing for the liberal Civic Initiative party; Boris Titov, the Putin government’s commissioner for entrepreneurs’ rights, is running for the neoliberal Party of Growth;…

Donald Trump created such mayhem during the days surrounding the anniversary of his “American carnage” inauguration that he had to cancel plans to hightail it out of Washington and celebrate in the friendlier confines of his Mar-a-Lago resort. His vile, racist disparagement of Haiti, El Salvador, and the nations of Africa as “shithole countries” elicited an international outcry, leading to calls by the Congressional Black Caucus and the majority of House Democrats for a formal censure. Despite all the president’s boasting about the “art of the deal,” that outburst was just one of several incoherent interventions that derailed negotiations over an immigration agreement that could have secured the passage of a spending bill. Cue government shutdown. Trump, of course, tried to blame Democrats for the impasse—even though Republicans control the…

Dear Liza, When is it reasonable and in good taste for a straight man to comment on a woman’s appearance? Lately I’ve noticed that I cringe and tense up whenever male friends talk about their girlfriends’ asses or prettiness or whatever else. For a second, I thought this might be because I was jealous, but I think it might genuinely be that a man just can’t talk about a woman’s appearance without sounding like a total misogynist. Am I being too much of a feminazi? —Feminazi? Dear Feminazi?, Just about every creature whose reaction can be studied responds to a fellow animal whose facial symmetry, bright yellow feathers, or other superficial features it finds pleasing. Humans are lucky enough to have language to discuss such delights. In a post patriarchal…

IT’S NOW JUST A YEAR SINCE THE INAUGURATION. IN THAT year no party, no lobby, no organization has been as formidable an adversary to the Washington of Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell as California has. None has both the will and the heft that California brings to this fight. None has been as determined. “There should be no doubt that President Trump has officially declared war on California,” State Senate leader Kevin de León told The Guardian on January 4, referring to the Trump administration’s plans to prosecute medical- and recreational- marijuana outlets, to allow oil drilling off the California coast, and to intensify efforts to deport immigrants. When California fights back, it matters. With over 39 million people, it is the nation’s most populous state and the…

Making Trouble Life and Politics By Lynne Segal Verso. 384 pp. $19.95 2018 is the right time to read Lynne Segal. While many liberals and leftists consider the nebulous notion of “resistance” in broad terms—how do we participate? What methods are most effective?— Segal gives us insight into “another set of worries”: “whether and how feminism remains relevant to any such resistance.” Before I opened the recent reissue of her memoir, Making Trouble: Life and Politics, first published in 2007, I hadn’t seen the current predicament framed so succinctly. Is there anything of value left in the feminist project? Or has it become “co-opted and tamed by, even complicit with, the forces that have brought us here?” (“Here,” as you might expect, means living in the time of Trump, Theresa…

ACROSS 1 Lewis’s bun (7) 5 Quite a lot of boxes (7) 9 007’s beginning to wear right shirt to rest for the night (5) 10 State flower (9) 11 Criminals related to some electric guitars (9) 12 Make fun of a speaker’s drinks (5) 13 Vegetable decay (6) 14 Faced a prosecutor: “Thanks for what the NSA collects about your phone calls” (8) 18 Ultimate value: ten nuts (8) 20 Favorite rug (6) 23 Cut a bit of leather into a belt (5) 25 With what a right triangle has… (9) 26 …one should not be upset with a small program (9) 27 Darn photograph (5) 28 Springsteen agent adopts adolescent (7) 29 Road congestion, which we reduced by adjusting nine clues (7) DOWN 1 You hit me with…

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a report in January that calculated the staggering costs of extreme weather events in the United States. $306B Amount spent by the federal government in the aftermath of natural disasters in 2017—a new record 16 Current number of years between extreme-weather events like Hurricane Harvey, which were previously described as “once in a century” 50% Portion of land flooded by Harvey in Harris County, Texas, that was outside the official flood zone. FEMA doesn’t require people in these areas to buy flood insurance 1 Ranking of “extreme weather events” on a list of prominent and likely risks for 2018 released by the World Economic Forum in January…

On January 18, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court’s ruling that would have required North Carolina lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional maps. The initial decision found that the districts adopted by the GOP-controlled State Legislature in 2016 were designed to give Republicans an unconstitutional partisan advantage. In the 2016 elections, Republican congressional candidates won 10 of the state’s 13 available seats, despite winning just over half of the statewide vote. One key finding cited by the panel of federal judges showed that out of 24,518 randomly generated congressional maps, over 99 percent would have resulted in Democrats winning more than the three House seats they currently hold. Republicans did not hide their efforts to tilt the maps in their favor. As State Representative David Lewis, who spearheaded the…

Prisons in Florida and North Carolina have banned Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, a study of mass incarceration and racial discrimination in the criminal-justice system. New Jersey revoked a similar prohibition in January after the ACLU called it unconstitutional (as well as “grossly ironic, misguided, and harmful”). Earlier, New York Times reporter Jonah Bromwich wrote that the book was rejected by Florida officials because it features “racial overtures.” Though it’s unclear what “racial overtures” means here, it is obvious why officials might feel implicated by the 2012 best seller, in which Alexander writes: “In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination…. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label…