Innehållsförteckning för September 24/October 1, 2018 från The Nation

Let’s agree: Jerry Brown deserves real praise for his role as a first-generation climate leader. As California’s governor, he helped shepherd the state to a place near the top of the green league standings, by reducing the demand for energy and producing more of that energy with renewables. But let’s add: Global warming is a timed test, one that now demands stronger responses. And the governor is flunking that test. Yes, it seems unfair to rag on Brown for losing track of the plot—but boy, would it be nice if he proved the exception to the rule and used the final months of his governorship to help the world move to the next stage of the climate fight. Brown worked hard to cut energy use and to increase the use…

Dear Liza, I’m a cis man in a monogamous relationship with a strong feminist woman. But I’ve long had qualms about the idea that being with just one person is the defining trait of commitment. Recently, I decided to do some reading about ethical non-monogamy, and it really resonated. I’m starting to think that it may be the best relationship model for me. When I broached the topic with my partner, however, she got angry and dismissed non-monogamy as a ruse of patriarchy designed to justify male sexual predation. I haven’t dared to bring it up again. I don’t think she’s right and can articulate why, but it’s pretty obvious this is a deal breaker for her. What are your thoughts on ethical non-monogamy as a sex-positive feminist? I’d also…

AT THE PARIS CLIMATE SUMMIT IN 2015, JERRY BROWN WAS TREATED LIKE A HEAD OF STATE AND A CLIMATE LEADER PAR excellence. Heads turned throughout the gargantuan press center as aides hustled the California governor to a row of makeshift studios where the world’s leading television networks waited. As the governor of what was then the world’s sixth-largest economy, Brown took a seat beneath the studio lights and told French TV about organizing the Under2 Coalition: 123 national, state, and local governments, representing more than a quarter of the global economy, that were collaborating to keep the global temperature rise under two degrees Celsius. Days later, the international community endorsed the coalition’s goal by adopting the Paris Agreement, which pledged to limit warming “well below” that mark. This year, from…

24% Amount of land in the Northern Hemisphere covered by permafrost, about 9 million square miles 20% Amount of surface permafrost that could thaw by 2040 due to climate change 1.5B Estimated tons of carbon to be released each year by thawing permafrost, averaged over the remainder of the century 28˚F Average temperature of the Arctic permafrost in 2015, up from around 18⁰F in the 1980s 1.7˚F Estimated temperature increase that thawing permafrost could contribute to global warming 21 People in Siberia diagnosed with anthrax after thawing permafrost released Bacillus anthracis spores in 2016…

What are we to make of the bizarre story of Avital Ronell and Nimrod Reitman? She’s a superstar deconstructionist professor at New York University, teaching in the German and comparative-literature departments. He’s a graduate student who came to NYU to be her advisee. In 2017, two years after getting his PhD, Reitman claimed that Ronell had stalked him, sexually harassed and assaulted him, and sabotaged his job search. After an 11-month Title IX investigation, the university found Ronell guilty of sexual harassment, both verbal and physical, and punished her with a one-year suspension without pay. Ronell denies everything. To me, her hundreds of histrionic e-mails read like a humorless novel of obsessive passion. Not so, she claims; they were lighthearted fun “between two adults, a gay man and a queer…

If only more people had been reading The Nation! That’s the melancholy conclusion that emerges from a review of the hundreds of climate-related articles we’ve published over the last 20-plus years. Writers like Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Mark Hertsgaard, James Hansen, and Chris Hayes have produced some of the most farsighted reporting and analysis of the climate crisis to appear anywhere. They remind us that solutions have long been available, and that our failure to apply them might still be remedied. Herewith, The Nation’s top 10 articles on climate change, all of them worth reading—and acting on—today. 1 Bill McKibben “Too Hot to Handle” November 10, 1997 America’s foremost climate writer was educating readers more than two decades ago about climate change, the scientific method, and the need to push…

A DAN ANGUIANO HAD BEEN WORKING IN THE solar industry for just a few months when his employer, Evolution Energy, got a contract to install a solar-heating unit two blocks from his home, in the Boyle Heights section of East Los Angeles. “I was working on the roof and looking straight at the view of where I grew up, and it was like: Wow,” he recalled. Just a few years earlier, Anguiano, 33, would never have imagined himself with this job—or any job. He had begun “making mistakes, getting into trouble” in high school, leading to a two-year stint in a juvenile-detention facility when he was 16, and then a couple of short prison terms in his 20s. “I didn’t have anything,” he said. “I fell back in the same…

Aretha Franklin is a singular figure in American culture. Even as a child, her musical gifts were monumental. Smokey Robinson recalled first hearing her sing when she was just 4 years old. He told biographer David Ritz that Franklin came out of the rich Detroit culture that produced so many musical greats, “but she also…came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.” That voice, so full of history and power, defined popular singing and set the standard for any who would aspire to her standing. She was, indeed, the Queen. Shaped and refined in Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father, the legendary C.L. Franklin, reigned in the pulpit, Aretha absorbed his rhythms and cadences as well as those of the black…

This summer, just about a year after a white nationalist murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, I visited Memphis, Tennessee, and witnessed an odd scene. There’s a small park in the middle of the city, just off the main drag downtown. It’s a peaceful spot, perched above the Mississippi River and shaded by tall old trees. For generations, locals knew it as Confederate Park, with cannons ringing its edges in hostile formation. A statue of Jefferson Davis—the Confederacy’s only president—towered in the center, striking a triumphant pose, about a mile away from the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead. Memphis is an overwhelmingly black city, and after Heyer’s murder, municipal leaders wanted white-supremacist iconography removed from its public spaces. But the Tennessee Legislature keeps vigilant watch over…

AMONG CLIMATE ACTIVISTS, THE SCENE IS REMEMBERED WITH A MIX OF EMBARRASSMENT AND SCORN: AT THE END OF HIS 2006 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore, having just detailed the existential threat posed by global climate change, offered the audience a way to take action: Change your light bulbs. Gore’s prescription seemed completely incommensurate with the scale of the problem. The future of the human race, as well as millions of other species, is hanging in the balance—better get to the hardware store for some compact fluorescents. Yet even today, at this late hour, the fight against global warming is bedeviled by public bewilderment. Climate change is such a huge, multidimensional threat that it’s hard for many people to grasp the root causes of the crisis. Perhaps most pernicious,…

’68 Letdown What a gigantic disappointment the special 1968 issue, “Year of Global Insurrection” [Aug. 27/Sept. 3], must be for anyone who was actually alive and aware in ’68 and expected a comprehensive and progressive history of that year—a year to be remembered not only for the male-founded-and-operated Students for a Democratic Society, the male-dominated anti–Vietnam War movement, the protests in Paris and Mexico, and the trial of eight radical men in Chicago. So much more was happening that year. In 1968, the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, the Miss America protest, and other female-organized actions demonstrated that feminism had taken a bold new turn. Feminist leaders were on the cover of every magazine; women’s consciousness-raising groups were meeting in living rooms around the country; and, two years later, 50,000 women would…

Whether or not Paris was the “capital of the 19th century,” as it has sometimes been called, it really was the capital of 19th-century art. That’s something to ponder, because at the start of the century, its preeminence might not have been easily predicted. Just before the Revolution, the one figure we still recognize as belonging among the great masters is Chardin, essentially an outlier: a largely self-taught artist who gained the esteem of the French Academy with paintings that ignored its promotion of a narrative and literary art focused on heroic public action over the depiction of everyday domestic life and its mute objects. We also still remember the florid talents of his contemporaries Fragonard, Boucher, and Greuze, but they offer little hint of art’s future. The postrevolutionary scene…

ACROSS 1 Stand and kick habit, to begin with (5) 4 Arrow maker in Florida—one who leaves an impression? (8) 10 Famous LSD advocate embraces grand goal… (9) 11 …by swallowing stray fruit (5) 12 Like some exams after commencement, displaying a sense of right and wrong (4) 13 Send small joint (4) 14 Castro redeploying district leader to the east for agricultural area (5) 16 Lunatic did in knockout youngster (5) 17 River running west and east at location in reverse (8) 19 Second alternative to milk for a loud baby, perhaps? (8) 21 Moving front to back, drain jugs (5) 25 Moderates try to return, imbued with energy (5) 26 Looking at just the rear ends makes the Bayeux Tapestry erotic (4) 27 Pressure to get old part…