Innehållsförteckning för May 21, 2018 från The Nation

@thenation.com Crossed Wires I have warned my children and grandchildren for years about the insanely dangerous levels of electromagnetic frequency (EMF) allowed in the United States. I cringe when I see young people with cell phones glued to their faces. Kudos to The Nation’s Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie for linking Big Wireless cover-ups to the same tactics used by Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and Big Government [“How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe,” April 23]. What I can’t fathom is why corporate executives in all sectors continue to put so many youth at risk. Are they all childless, or just heartless? MARIANNE BUCHANAN LONG BEACH, CALIF. Thanks for the cover story about Big Wireless and the various “captured” (i.e., industry-lobbyist-infested) entities. Also deserving mention is…

Matthew Bowman once wrote that employers who provide contraception coverage “kill embryos and bow to the altar of fruitless intercourse.” He believes that contraceptives cause abortion and enable “promiscuity” and that the birth-control coverage mandated in the Affordable Care Act was part of the government’s “anti-fertility” campaign. He rants about contraception as a part of “liberal faith in the sexual revolution.” And he is deputy general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in the Trump administration and an architect of Trump’s health-care policy, including the rule that overturned the ACA’s contraception mandate last year. This is now the approach to family planning in our country. Under the Trump-Pence administration, attacks on reproductive rights are reaching a fever pitch—not just on access to abortion care, but on…

Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, popularly known as “MBS,” has received a lot of great press lately as a modernizer. You may have seen his smiling photo in Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, right up there with Jimmy Kimmel and Cardi B. The accompanying paragraph by Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi feminist who was jailed in 2011 for driving a car, is cautiously optimistic: “At first I was skeptical of the prince’s Vision 2030 plan to modernize our kingdom. I have come around. Most Saudis are under age 30, and have only known elderly rulers. Now a major leader is our peer. I want to see the changes lead to political reforms, even a constitutional monarchy and full freedom of expression. If MBS would do…

IN FEBRUARY 2017, JUST A FEW WEEKS AFTER DONALD TRUMP BEGAN ROLLING OUT EXECUTIVE ORDERS TARGETING undocumented immigrants, activists in Phoenix submitted a petition to the City Council requesting that Phoenix become a sanctuary city. It was an ambitious demand: Phoenix sits in the middle of a state with some of the most draconian anti-immigrant laws in the country, at the epicenter of what was, for nearly a quarter of a century, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s brutal fiefdom. Declaring Phoenix a sanctuary city would have meant defying both law and tradition, as well as the orders of the new president. The council promptly rejected the petition in a 7–2 vote. By July, however, the city had revised its policy. The Phoenix Police Department announced that its officers would no…

—after Rodin’s Female nude climbing out of a pot It opened with glissandi, repeated sweeps of fingers acrossKeys, but like waves seen from a distance, making their wayAlong the shore, the machine guns that ripped through the villageCan no longer be heard. Even the church bell lies on the floor of theSanctuary, tongue melted to the cheek of its mouth like the fingersOf Thomas pressing the holes in Christ’s side in order toBelieve. Batter-batter, batter-batter, we’d all start to chatterWhen someone on the other team got up to bat. The deep red dyeMade from wild madder, when eaten, turned the bonesOf animals red, the claws and beaks of birds, too, and cloth dyedWith madder was used to wrap Egyptian mummies. By candlelightIn the Villa des Brillants, Rodin loved in the…

If, as appears almost certain, President Trump announces on or before May 12 that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), we will start down a path leading to increased regional tensions, the further spread of nuclear weapons, and, in the not-too-distant future, the outbreak of another Middle Eastern war. All that stands in the way of this terrifying scenario is the possibility that the JCPOA’s three European signatories—Britain, France, and Germany, or the “E3”—will devise a last-minute plan to assuage some of Trump’s objections to the deal, and that the Iranians will remain within the accord despite the threat or actual reimposition of US sanctions. As it now stands, the Iran accord is one of the…

Road rage is an American pastime. Nearly 80 percent of motorists admitted to at least one instance of aggressive driving in the past year, according to a 2016 study. A generation ago, drivers confronting each other over a traffic squabble could assume their quarrel would end with strong words or, at worst, a black eye. But in 2013, after one car tailgated another, two men in Ionia, Michigan, stopped in a parking lot to resolve their dispute. Instead of duking it out, they pulled out guns and shot each other. Both men legally carried a concealed weapon; both died in the hospital. (In states without a “right to carry,” the law usually requires people to store their firearms in the trunks of their cars.) When states passed right-to-carry laws, violent…

Over a two-day period, students and others parked cars adorned with large Confederate flags in front of Bay City Western High School in Auburn, Michigan. The vehicular protest began after a white student claimed that a black classmate had removed a Confederate flag from his truck. And so, on April 17, six trucks bearing the battle flag pulled up outside the school; the next day, a dozen more joined in support. In response, a small group of student counterprotesters gathered outside holding rainbow flags and “Black Lives Matter” signs. Rumors of adults planning to confront the students prompted school officials to cancel classes the following day. Despite potential threats to the students, Auburn Mayor Lee Kilbourn defended the First Amendment rights of the pro-flag demonstrators: “They’re doing their legal constitutional…

DURING THE CIVIL-RIGHTS MOVEMENT, AFRICAN AMERICANS led the fight to free this country from the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow. Though they all too often were—and remain—invisible to the public, African-American women played significant roles at all levels of the movement. Some led causes and organizations, such as Dorothy Height, the president of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and the National Council of Negro Women. Others did not have titles or official roles, including Georgia Gilmore, one of the cooks who organized to raise money to support the Montgomery bus boycott. These women didn’t stand on ceremony; they simply did the work that needed to be done, without expectation of personal gain. Often unnamed or underappreciated, African-American women helped to construct the cultural architecture for change. African-American women leaders…

What’s more primal than singing to the dead? “I sing to you, Geneviève / I sing to you / You don’t exist / I sing to you, though”: So begins Now Only, the ninth album that Phil Elverum, the 39-year-old multi-instrumentalist, has recorded under the name Mount Eerie. Geneviève did exist, once, as Geneviève Gosselin, and then as Geneviève Castrée, an accomplished artist and musician, and finally as Geneviève Elverum, before her death in 2016, at age 35, from pancreatic cancer; she was diagnosed just four months after the couple’s only daughter was born. Death changes things for the living left behind, and though that’s an easy observation to make, it’s much harder to live with, there in the aftermath when everything’s changed. Now Only is remarkable for many reasons,…

700+ Children separated from their parents at the US border since October 550 Children who, fearing deportation, skipped school in Morristown, Tennessee, after a raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement 70% Income that a family loses, on average, within six months of a parent being detained or deported by ICE 42% Increase in ICE arrests in the first eight months of 2017, compared with the same period a year earlier “There’s just fear and sadness written all over their faces.” Jessica Bailiff, a physics teacher in Morristown, Tennessee, describing her students after an ICE raid on a nearby meatpacking plant…

Los Angeles County’s latest effort to fight homelessness is the literal opposite of NIMBYism. A pilot program to build backyard “granny flats” for homeowners who agree to host a homeless person or family is making headway, as officials narrow down hundreds of applicants for sponsored Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) to six finalists. The Los Angeles Times reports that one granny flat could cost the local government just $15,000 a year for three years—about the same as a shelter bed. While ADUs are not new, they have failed to gain traction as a housing alternative. A proposal in Oregon recently stalled due to challenges posed by existing building regulations and potential tax hits to participating homeowners, while another in Seattle was delayed in 2016 by a coalition of wealthy homeowners. ADUs…

Paulette Wilson, 61, came to Britain from Jamaica in 1968, when she was just 10, to live with her grandparents. She never left, living legally in the country for the next 50 years—attending school, serving meals at the House of Commons and to the homeless at her church, and becoming a grandmother. Then, in 2015, Wilson received notice that she was an illegal immigrant and would be sent “back” to Jamaica—a country where she didn’t know anyone. She was taken to a detention center, and only a last-minute legal reprieve kept her in the UK. “I wondered what was going to happen to me. All I did was cry, thinking of my daughter and granddaughter; thinking that I wasn’t going to see them again,” she told a reporter from The…

ACROSS 1 Provide food and support for insect (11) 7 Partner’s half of counterrevolution (5) 8 Where celebrities are often found: an eco-chamber? (5,4) 10 Fat cat’s last permit (6) 11 People making a choice to eat right (doughnuts, more or less) (8) 12 State “Costello is McKellen” to actor in the lead (9) 14 Small joke twisted… (4) 17 …with phone-company unit (4) 18 Frame that is ruined as a consequence (9) 20 Jockey is a guy backing theatrical program of skits, songs, and dances (8) 22 Eatery with zero cash (6) 24 In Northern California, crank is awake during the night (9) 25 Ironclad escape for 7A (5) 26 Filmmaker’s building extension in roughly all four directions (5,6) DOWN 1 Legal action in polite attire? (5,4) 2 Race…