Innehållsförteckning för April 16, 2018 från The Nation

@thenation.com Beyond #MeToo As an on-and-off reader for over 30 years, I devour everything JoAnn Wypijewski writes. Thanks to her heartrending and mobilizing piece on #MeToo [“What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo,” March 19/26], you can be sure I will be reading for another 30. In this wise and subtle essay, I hear the echoes of a Marxist, sex-positive feminist and historian—part exposé and memoir, part treatise. More than all of that, Wypijewski writes from the heart. I have so longed for her meditations on this messy life, this fully human and complicated experience of the world. I so long for thinking people to see how class- and race-blind, how polarizing and cruel, this supposedly liberatory moment is. Reading her column gets us most of the…

Law-enforcement officials in Raleigh, North Carolina, have started to request user data from Google—not necessarily for people suspected of a crime, but for everyone with a mobile device in an area up to 17 acres from where a crime occurred. An investigation by local news station WRAL-TV revealed that in at least four cases last year, ranging from homicide to arson, police issued “area-based” search warrants to identify every device in the vicinity of the incident. It isn’t uncommon for tech giants to disclose user data at the behest of government agencies. In 2017, Google received requests for the anonymized data of more than 33,000 user accounts in the United States, and shared information for 81 percent of those requests. What is new is that police may not have a…

NET NEUTRALITY MUST BE RESTORED. THAT’S A GIVEN. THE decision in December by the Federal Communications Commission to abolish the First Amendment of the Internet was, in the words of dissenting commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, “not good for consumers. Not good for businesses. Not good for anyone who connects and creates online. Not good for the democratizing force that depends on openness to thrive.” So, yes, net neutrality must be renewed. But how? Ideally, Congress would pass legislation reversing the FCC’s decision, or a federal court order would overturn it. But that could take time—years, perhaps—and if we’ve learned anything about the digital age, it’s that the future doesn’t wait for Washington to catch up. So the pressure is now on state officials to take the lead in restoring a free…

From U2’s rock anthems and Enya’s smoky dirges to Snow Patrol’s post-Britpop, Ireland, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have produced some noteworthy musicians whose sounds have become staples in the United States: It’s hard not to immediately associate the TV show Grey’s Anatomy with Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” (2006), or any sorrowful event with Enya’s “Only Time” (2000). But despite all the artists who have crossed over and all the genres they have influenced, hip-hop hasn’t been so lucky—that is, until Rejjie Snow. Born and raised in Dublin, the 24-year-old rapper has become Ireland’s most popular hip-hop export. (The trio Hare Squead, whose contagious “Herside Story” was adapted for GoldLink’s 2017 album At What Cost, isn’t far behind.) Snow began garnering attention in 2011, back when he was recording under the…

Things are where we wanted them to be.These cutouts—blue—on the city, spreadLike holes in the folds of a map: I walkInto them, little frames of a sequenceIn which I am a person touring swimmingPools. Perhaps I feel something pass.Perhaps I’ve begun to gather somethingThat seems elusive only because I can’tTurn away. At the base of this pool, emptyBut for a pile of leaves and Robert MosesSliding out from under my reach—as I fall—Slipping pool lights into my eyes: like crystals,They color inside themselves, a blue whichClears the second the light leaves them.…

Fifteen years ago, President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, initiating one of the longest military engagements in US history. In an address to the nation, Bush declared, “America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality…. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.” Those weapons never materialized, of course, and the decision to go to war under false pretenses proved to be catastrophic. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including at least 180,000 civilians, have been killed since 2003, and nearly 4,500 US soldiers were killed during the US occupation. The financial costs of the war also vastly…

Say what you will about the terrible, terrifying Trump years, one good thing has already come out of them: the discrediting of evangelical Christianity. For decades, believers have boasted of their superior virtue, especially in matters of sex and marriage and parenting and social propriety. They’ve blasted premarital and extramarital sex, LGBTQ people, divorce, pornography, sex work, foul language, crude behavior, and not being a Christian—as they define “Christian”—blaming these things for everything from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina. They never get tired of going after Bill Clinton for his infidelities and Hillary Clinton for “enabling” them. (How frustrating it must have been for them that Barack Obama, the Muslim Kenyan communist, spent eight years in the White House with nary a whiff of scandal!) Now they’ve sold their souls to…

Why is the United States separating asylum-seeking children from their parents? Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, has avoided answering this question, which makes a recent lawsuit by the ACLU so important and so necessary. The suit is based on the case of a Congolese woman and her 7-year-old daughter—identified in court papers as “Ms. L.” and “S.S.”—who fled the violence in their home country, traveled to Mexico, and then crossed into California last November, turning themselves in to border agents. Ms. L. was processed and detained in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in San Diego, while her child was torn away from her and taken to a different facility in Chicago—2,000 miles away. They were not brought before a judge or given a chance to be heard.…

¿Qué es lo más cabrón que te ha pasado en la vida?The most fucked-up thing to happen to me?Addled by busyness, I crumpled my life and let it dropand then I outlived my life, rockingon my misery like a cypress in the wind. I watchedstars emerge from a black egg. Lucidityof loss. Someone came to tell me the spidervibrating on its long legs in the ceiling cornerover my desk does not exist now. It is wedgedbetween the violent uninterruptednessof one single day and the void I discoveredinside myself. Forehead tautening with self-pity.I said, You think you know me, but you don’tknow me from Adam’s goat. And she said,I do, and you are one and the same thing.…

ACROSS 1 Bowing abjectly, Republican breaks in support of the government (9) 6 Almost make a connection involving love? That could make your baby cry (5) 9 No answer for fan of chocolate and fruit (7) 10 Gasp mantra when infused with a bit of Holy Spirit (7) 11 Cheap yet extravagant accessory for a pirate (8) 12 Audio equipment restored after removing its casing and rearranging the parts (6) 14 Hunk of dust in the wind (4) 15 Color of gym ball frantically grabbed by libertine (5,4) 17 College administrator holding inappropriate idyls is one of seven (6,3) 19 The Chosen includes “…The Chosen includes…” (4) 21 Live-in compadres I’d evicted (6) 22 Nightingale in a Tuscan city (8) 24 Favoring the most high-class tree that exists within (7) 25…

For decades, Senator Bernie Sanders has objected to the failure of major media outlets to adequately cover the growth of economic inequality in America. As a presidential candidate in 2016, he used every opportunity that was afforded him to address poverty, plutocracy, and the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of the “billionaire class.” On March 19, Sanders found another opening to tip the popular discourse away from the story lines of the super-rich and toward the real-life concerns of working class Americans—hosting a live-streamed town-hall meeting in the US Capitol auditorium on “Inequality in America: The Rise of Oligarchy and Collapse of the Middle Class” with Senator Elizabeth Warren, filmmaker Michael Moore, economist Darrick Hamilton, and others. Earlier this year, Sanders hosted a similar town-hall meeting on…

Robert Grossman, the cartoonist, caricaturist, illustrator, sculptor, animator, and commentator, who died on March 15, will be much missed, but his unforgettable images will live on. I had the honor of publishing Bob, then fresh from Yale, in Monocle, the political-satire magazine I had founded—with the help of Richard Lingeman, among others—while at Yale Law School. Way back in the early 1960s, Bob gave us one of the first black superheroes, Captain Melanin, along with Roger Ruthless of the CIA; with the latter, he did as much to question the agency’s work at that time as any print journalist. As art director Steven Heller wrote some years ago, “These strips acerbically address issues of the day, most often before they are on the popular culture radar screen.” Grossman also gave…

IN 2014, WHEN NEWLY ELECTED VIRGINIA GOVERNOR TERRY MCAULIFFE TRIED TO GET THE STATE Legislature to approve Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, he ran into a brightred wall in the House of Delegates. Even though 100 percent of the initial cost was to be paid by the federal government, 66 of the chamber’s 67 Republican Delegates voted against the measure. Later that year, in a special session, McAuliffe tried and failed again. A 2017 effort died as well, once again on a party-line vote. As a result, almost 400,000 low-income Virginians went without health insurance, even as Medicaid enrollment grew by some 16 million nationwide. Then, last November, Democrats pulled off a massive upset at the polls: 15 challengers, 11 of them women, captured GOP-held seats in the…