Innehållsförteckning för May 28, 2018 från The Nation

April 27, 2018, was a historic day for Korea, and for the millions of people on both sides of that tragically divided peninsula. In a meticulously planned event, Kim Jongun, the 34-year-old hereditary dictator of North Korea, stepped carefully over the border running through the truce village of Panmunjom and clasped hands with Moon Jae-in, the democratically elected president of South Korea. Kim’s action marked the start of a remarkable day in which the two nations “solemnly declared” an end to the Korean War, which ripped the country apart from 1950 to 1953. “When you crossed the military border for the first time, Panmunjom became a symbol of peace, not a symbol of division,” said Moon, the son of two North Korean refugees who fled south in 1950. A former…

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently expressed his concern that “the anti-Trump movement is a failure.… We have persuaded no one.… We have not hindered him.… We have not dislodged him.… We have not contained him.” Brooks then went on to note that “Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party is complete. Eighty-nine percent of Republicans have a positive impression of the man. According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 59 percent of Republicans consider themselves more a supporter of Trump than of the Republican Party.” A recent paper by Vanderbilt University political scientist Larry Bartels reveals a party that is thoroughly united behind Trump’s agenda of “antipathy toward Muslims, immigrants, atheists, and gays and lesbians, and racial resentment and concerns about discrimination against whites.” Herein lies a significant…

“I am glad you’ve read the Heart of D. tho’ of course it’s an awful fudge,” Joseph Conrad wrote to Roger Casement in late 1903. Casement, an Irish diplomat working for the British Foreign Office, had just returned to London from Belgium’s African colony, the Congo Free State, and was about to submit a report to Parliament detailing the existence of a vast system of slavery used to extract ivory and rubber. Looking to draw public attention to the atrocities, Casement traveled to the author’s home outside London to attempt to recruit him into the Congo Reform Association. Conrad was sympathetic: Africa, he told Casement, shared with Europe “the consciousness of the universe in which we live,” and it had been difficult for him to learn that the horrors he…

where did you leave itentangled in which propeller in whose mawwho preserves it as a keepsake in a small crystal vasewho uses it for shark baitwho keeps it as a chinrest while watching pelicans andramparts.maybe, mulattoit was food for someone dying of fear on araftwading through some riverscaling some fencecrossing some desertto change identity.maybe it lies with a moribund little boy who wanted tobreathe through your skinas he fell to the deep—manta ray of saltwaters run alive through your finger.waters ablaze with imprintsmulattowho kissed and curdled your fingerwho severed it gently …you had almost drowned when the coastguard lifted youand placed you in a penyour finger’s missing passport betrays youmislaidwho traces your footprint now mulattoah?…

85% Americans who want to overhaul campaign-finance laws 67% Americans who favor stricter gun-control laws 69% Americans who support capping green-housegas emissions 62% Americans who believe that upper-income individuals don’t pay enough in taxes 82% Americans who are bothered—either “some” or “a lot”—that corporations aren’t paying their fair share in taxes 18% Americans who trust the US government Statistics taken from “America Is Less Polarized Than You Think” by Frances Moore Lappé at TheNation.com…

Whenever I play the piano, I do so under the watchful gaze of the great civil-rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. A beautiful bronze bust of her sits atop my old spinet. I may play terribly, but she lends me courage in all endeavors. Born into slavery in 1862, Wells-Barnett attended what is today Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi. The college was founded in 1866 by members of the Freedmen’s Aid Society, who came south after the Civil War to set up schools where it had so recently been against the law to teach slaves how to read and write. Many had feared that literacy among slaves would “excite dissatisfaction” (as North Carolina’s law expressed it) and lead to rebellion; indeed, Mississippi’s antebellum law against educating slaves required that freed…

The Kids Are Alright Re “The Disrupters” by George Zornick [April 30/May 7]: This 75-year-old woman thinks these kids may be the way out of the mess this country is in. Moreover, those 17-year-olds can register, and the 18-year-olds can vote. Please, 18-year-olds, vote! Vote! JULIA NICHOLSON FREDERICK, MD. After Sandy Hook, I became a dues-paying member of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. I paid my membership for three years, but it all seemed to be futile, so I let my membership lapse. Now I have hope again. JEFF FAST MINNEAPOLIS The Lady Is a Champ In “Stormy Weather” [April 30/May 7], Katha Pollitt, always thoughtful and timely, nails it again (pun intended). DALLAS BAIRD LINCOLN CITY, ORE. A History of Decency As pastor of a church that…

It’s never been easy to make something new. Inspiration strikes; insight occurs; shit happens. The American electronic musician Richard Melville Hall, better known by the stage name Moby—yes, he’s related to Herman Melville—has always seemed a good example of that particular creative struggle. He’s spent the past three decades toiling away in the studio, making sure the conditions are right to bottle lightning in a Leyden jar, but it hasn’t always paid off. More than anything, the creative process operates at the level of faith and ritual, as a kind of prayer: Sometimes the void hears and answers, but more often the artist is left alone with his or her thoughts. Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, Moby’s 15th studio album, sounds like the product of hours spent in fruitless…

Dear Liza, My spouse and I are considering adoption, probably domestically. We are both white with professional degrees. We would welcome a child of any color and are disturbed by the clearly racist patterns in domestic adoption. But we also often sense something ethically ambiguous or even orientalist in certain adoptions by white people of children of color. I have also heard that these situations can be very difficult for the child. What’s the best thing to do? —Hopeful Parent Dear Hopeful, This question has been the subject of newly feverish discussion since the deaths in late March of six black teenage children who’d apparently been abused and neglected (even deprived of food) by their white adoptive parents. Compounding the horror, the white couple had enjoyed a sickening degree of…

The Trump administration is considering using the Defense Production Act of 1950 to assert sweeping authority over the nation’s coal and nuclear plants, according to Bloomberg News. The Cold War–era law would allow Trump to effectively nationalize these industries under his control “in the name of national defense.” The statute was first invoked by President Harry Truman to cap wages and impose price controls on the steel industry during the Korean War. Truman’s gambit largely failed, however: After months of protest and a lawsuit that made its way to the Supreme Court, the steel companies were able to block the president from seizing their mills. But this time the White House and industry are on the same side. The legislation lists energy as a “strategic and critical material,” and thus…

dónde lo dejasteenredado en qué helice en qué faucequién lo conserva de recuerdo en un frasquito de cristalquién lo usa para carnada con qué pescar tiburonesquién lo apoya en su barbilla para otear pelícanos ymurallas.acaso, mulatofue alimento de alguien que se moría de miedo en unabalsavadeando algún ríotrepando alguna verjacruzando algún desiertopara cambiar de identidad.lo tiene acaso algún niñito moribundo que quisorespirar por tu pielmientras caía al fondo—mantarraya de sallas aguas andaban vivas por tu dedo.las aguas ardían de huellas dactilarmulatoquién te besó el dedo de cuajoquién te lo arrancó tierno …los guardacostas te levantaron casi ahogadopara meterte en el corraly el documento ausente de tu dedo te traicionatraspapeladoquién te toma huella ahora mulatoah?…

Published in the late 1940s, a decade after his death, the Italian volumes of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks started the process of his secular canonization. A founder of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci had spent 11 years in Fascist custody. During this period, while his teeth fell out and his health failed, Gramsci filled 3,000 notebook pages with reflections on anything and everything he believed was relevant to Italian history and politics, and the prospects for the left in Europe. To get past the prison censors, he did so in coded, sometimes enigmatic abstractions. In 1937, still in Fascist custody, he died never having seen one of his two sons. At the time, he was mourned by his Communist comrades but by few outside those circles, and certainly fewer outside…

Conduzco y conduces—carpoolers & Catholics—conduction wires to Latin.“Brought together”—heads bowed as if praying—these women makestrange communion—wafer after wafer,paper-thin shavings fromingots of germanium.Solder-stitch to populatebreadboard to motherboardor read ohm resistors—by their bands of color—in circuit board syntax.Solid state switches—a nascent ancient rotary& tin can to starlight.Chicana Cherríe Moraga writingon her mother’s ‘piecework’for the nearby electronics plantexplains how her mother nightlysat before the TV ‘wrappingcopper wires into the backs ofcircuit boards.’ Braiding, I thought,to parse & plait those wiresthat would light the very imagesshe watched. I then looked upin Cosmo that knot-work.French, Dutch, Halo, Fishtail,Milkmaid, Spiral, & Braid to Bun—those chongos my nana madeover the years—the yank& tugged-tie, the brush-workthrough the hair of sus hijasthat sometimes produced a spark.…

ACROSS 8, 14A and 26 See 12 (2,8,2,8,4,7,4,4,2-4) 10 Pro-Democratic pyromaniac, initially enthusiastic about something that might burst into flames (4,5) 11 Understand flipping bird, for example (3,2) 12 Tehran lunatic forms an organization whose slogan is spoofed at 8, 14A, and 26 (3,3) 13 Security measure’s collapse involving faulty wire (8) 14 See 8 18 California uranium implicated in crude injury or death (8) 20 What a foreigner might have: a cold penny (6) 24 Sea smashed canoe (5) 25 Rearrange white rose, or else! (9) 26 See 8 DOWN 1 East Coast university admits one San Francisco eccentric (6) 2 Come out in mid-November with a bit of work? Excellent (6) 3 Piano note cut to get ready (8) 4 Oy—mining disaster brings disgrace (8) 5 Amusing lecture…