Innehållsförteckning för June 4/11, 2018 från The Nation

Imagine that the people of an American state, struggling after an overwhelming natural disaster and wrestling with a lingering debt crisis, were being forced by an unelected “control board” to live under a brutal austerity regime. Imagine that, rather than accept the cuts, thousands of workers and retirees took to the streets in defense of public education, public services, civil society, and their own economic survival. Imagine that security forces unleashed clouds of tear gas as they clashed with students demanding to preserve higher education in the face of devastating cuts. That should make a hell of a story, right? Wrong — because it happened in Puerto Rico. When the US territory rose up on May 1 to protest an austerity regime conceived in Washington and imposed without the approval…

You have this hero worship of police at a time when police brutality is an everyday occurrence. Howard Bryant has long been one of our most important commentators at the intersection of sports, history, and politics. He’s the author of eight books, including Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball; a senior writer for ESPN; and the editor of The Best American Sports Writing 2017. His latest book is The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism. —Dave Zirin DZ: What is “the Heritage”? HB: It’s the responsibility that the black athlete has accepted, or that has been placed on them, since World War II—the responsibility that these athletes feel to be the public and political faces of…

The arrest in April of a man suspected of being the Golden State Killer closed a case that has haunted Californians since the 1970s. More than 40 years after the first recorded attack, Joseph James DeAngelo—a former police officer—was charged with six counts of murder, though he’s believed to have committed at least 12 murders and 50 rapes. Even so, the details of the breakthrough in the decades-long search have raised questions about consumer privacy. Investigators uploaded crime-scene DNA samples to GEDmatch, an open-source genealogy database where users can submit their own genetic data to find undiscovered relatives. By creating a fake profile, police were able to match DeAngelo’s genetic information with relatives who had uploaded to the site, and eventually traced the genetic material to DeAngelo himself. Privacy experts…

Abrams is trying to rewrite the rules of Southern politics by making the electorate more closely reflect society at large. The governor’s race in Georgia is already one of the most closely watched in the nation, as a potential harbinger of the expected “blue wave” in 2018. Democrats haven’t held the office since Roy Barnes lost it in 2002, and winning it back is still a long shot. But the race remains notable for a couple of reasons. The first is history. Over the course of the state’s 242 years since the Declaration of Independence, all 81 of its governors have been white men. This year, the Republican candidate for the open seat will be yet another white man, almost surely Lieutenant Governor Casey Cagle. Nothing about this monopoly by…

“I’m here because I’m never going to let anything like what happened to me happen to my daughter.”—Aura Hernández ON A TUESDAY AFTERNOON IN MARCH, AURA HERNÁNDEZ DREW A BATH FOR HER DAUGHTER, CAMILA GUADALUPE, in a makeshift bathroom tucked inside the basement of a Manhattan church. The water was warm, but the toddler shivered as she stood inside her inflatable hot-pink tub. Hernández smiled at the girl and chuckled. “You know how it feels—the first time in a new place,” she said. “Everything is different. It’s an adjustment.” Indeed, everything was different, both for mother and daughter. One day earlier, the pair had moved into the Fourth Universalist Society of New York, a 120-year-old English Gothic church across the street from Central Park. They had made the dramatic move…

Visionary Women How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World By Andrea Barnet Ecco. 528 pp. $29.99 Since I was born during the short window between John F. Kennedy’s election and inauguration, I can claim with technical accuracy to be a child of the ’60s. True, my main accomplishment over the next 10 years was learning to ride a bike, but the iconography of the decade is so inescapable that I’ve always felt as if I actually knew what it was all about: raised fists, civil-rights and antiwar marches, hippies, the Beatles, the hair—an epoch of resistance. Andrea Barnet’s new biography of four women who helped shape that era rewrote that definition a little for me—or at least broadened it. One thing that unites Rachel…

57K Estimated number of Hondurans who will lose their temporary protected status (TPS) on January 5, 2020, making them ineligible to work in the United States and vulnerable to deportation 1998 The year that Hondurans became eligible for TPS, in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, among the deadliest on record 22 Average number of years a Honduran TPS holder has lived in the US 53K Number of children born in the US to Honduran TPS holders 42.8 Homicide rate per 100,000 people in Honduras, among the highest in the world 333K Number of people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan set to lose their TPS in 2020…

The same week that Mark Hertsgaard and Mark Dowie’s groundbreaking April 23 cover story for The Nation, “How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe,” was published online, an independent peer review of National Toxicology Program research confirmed that “clear evidence” exists that cell-phone radiation causes cancer in rats. Commissioned by the Food and Drug Administration in 1999, the NTP study discovered much more evidence of a connection between cancer and cell phones than is widely assumed or acknowledged. In their article, Hertsgaard and Dowie revealed the wireless industry’s decades-long global campaign to manipulate media coverage and persuade government officials (as well as the public) that cell phones are safer than the independent science suggests. They showed that the industry’s own researchers privately warned that there were…

We’re finally catching on: Periods aren’t embarrassing, and menstrual supplies are essential. When is a necessity not a necessity? When it’s a product used by half the population every month for 35 to 40 years, but never even once by the other half. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m talking about menstrual supplies. Pads and tampons cost women up to $120 a year—and that’s not counting pain relievers like Midol or Advil. Over a lifetime, it can add up to as much as $4,500. Menstrual supplies have been in the news thanks to attempts by activists in several states to repeal the so-called tampon tax—the sales tax levied on menstrual supplies in 36 states. The rationale for applying sales tax to menstrual products is that they are…

It’s a Witch Hunt! Or Some witchlike people have disguises that May cover up a black and pointy hat. The one nabbed first of all, to Trump’s chagrin,“Lock Her Up” adviser Michael Flynn.Then Manafort and Gates, Paul’s former pal,Were eased into the Mueller team’s corral.And then—surprise!—indictments were announcedOf Russian guys whose names can’t be pronounced.And Papadopoulos then upped the score.It’s now a coven and a half or more.Who circles there, despite the curling smoke,Around a cauldron full of Diet Coke? Who waves his broomstick with a practiced easeTo conjure up a hamburger with cheese?Who gives a guiding light to Robert MuellerBy being, for the most, bright orange in color?His curses, maybe dozens at a clip,May do no good if other witches flip. Complaints about a witch hunt are for naughtIf…

info@thenation.com Betrayal of Beliefs I very much enjoyed Katha Pollitt’s column “Church of Hypocrisy” [April 16], but I thought I would let her know that not everyone is laughing at the evangelical Christians who support Donald Trump. Some of us who shared that path at one time have been increasingly concerned by the direction in which some of the leaders have been urging their flocks. While we have shuddered at the things we’ve observed these last years, we have been stupefied with horror at the lengths these leaders have gone to support Trump since he acquired the presidency. Donald Trump has never met a commandment that he did not want to break, including the ones against adultery, bearing false witness, and worshipping false gods (money and profit). But there is…

With the replacement of Palestine by Israel and the expulsion of most of its Arab population in 1948, it appeared that the Zionist dream had become a reality. A Jewish state had arisen, and there was no competing Palestinian state; ethnic cleansing had produced a massive demographic transformation, and the land of all those “absent” Arabs could be appropriated. The Zionists’ hope and expectation was that the refugees would simply disappear, and even the memory that this had been an Arab-majority country for more than a millennium could be effaced. As Golda Meir put it, “There were no such thing as Palestinians…. They did not exist.” It seemed that the colonial-settler ideal had been realized: The natives were gone, there was plenty of space, their beautiful stone houses could be…

On April 25, the Supreme Court heard its final argument for the current term—fittingly, in Trump v. Hawaii, the challenge to President Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban.” That case will provide the first direct Supreme Court test of this administration’s excesses. But it is only one of the many blockbuster cases still to be decided this term—in nearly all of which the administration has urged the Court to adopt radical positions, overruling or disregarding precedent to further the White House’s political ends. By the end of June, when it recesses for the summer, we will have a much better sense of whether the newly reconstituted Roberts Court, joined by Neil Gorsuch last term, will prove a brake on the president, or an aider and abettor in his radical schemes. (Disclaimer: The…

The latest squabble between Washington and Beijing has officially taken flight. In a series of recent letters, China’s Civil Aviation Administration demanded that more than 30 international air carriers, including United and American Airlines, change any language or website architecture suggesting that Taiwan, Macau, or Hong Kong are not part of China. The White House, in response, has denounced the edict as “Orwellian nonsense.” The wording of an airline’s drop-down menus may seem a trivial affair, but the demand is indicative of a larger pattern: While the Chinese government has routinely imposed restrictions on foreign companies operating within the country’s mainland borders, it is increasingly attempting to export its censorship abroad. Beijing exercises an uncompromising “One China” policy. Hong Kong and Macau are both special administrative regions of China with…

“I took out all my savings and cashed in my retirement.”—Rick Treviño, Democratic candidate for Congress San Antonio RICK TREVIÑO IS ON A MISSION. WE’RE in the middle of Fiesta, the city’s annual commemoration of the battles of the Alamo (won by the Mexican Army) and San Jacinto (won by the Texas settlers). It’s a 10-day-long street party with music, parades, and its own rituals, one of which is the accumulation and display of Fiesta medals. These brightly colored enamel pins, often suspended from a piece of ribbon, range from advertisements to calaveras (sugar skulls) to cartoon characters. Treviño, a Democratic candidate in Texas’s 23rd Congressional District, came here to meet voters and sell some medals he’d made himself to raise money for his campaign. Based on the Lotería (a…

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden By Denis Johnson Random House. 207 pp. $27 It can be difficult to read, let alone write about, a posthumous work by a beloved writer. For one thing, such books are often not very good: Consider the lovingly, if haphazardly, collected omnibus of oddments the writer might not have bothered publishing, had they lived; the perpetually incomplete would-be masterpiece wrangled into semi-coherence by well-meaning editors; the half-written draft brought to Frankensteinian life by a collaborator. We read such books with skepticism as well as sorrow; we wonder if our memory of the writer might have been better, purer, had we elected to abstain. Yet we can’t look away. And even if the book is legitimate, fully authored and authorized by its stated creator, and…

ACROSS 1 Darkness at Noon, e.g.: story excerpts in digital sample? (5,7) 9 Hatch a goose egg right before unfinished external layer (5) 10 Acknowledge and return witty remark involving company executives at first (9) 11 Kelly green on the radio is colorless (9) 12 $1,000 is secon d sign of affection (4) 14 Circle unfamiliar area? Yes, allowing movement in a specified direction (3-3) 15 Coffee is a mysterious gift to almost all of the others like this (8) 17 Cross composer with, um, tourist (8) 19 Audibly express frustration at critical personality (6) 22 Johnny’s money (4) 23 Ordinary quarrel for one appearing in court (9) 26 A crazy teal eating another bird is out of the ordinary (9) 27 Agree to move around like a beaver? (5) 28…