Innehållsförteckning för October 29, 2018 från The Nation

I really thought we had come farther. Even Barbie says it: Girls can do anything. After all, we now hold the majority of bachelors’ degrees, half the seats in medical schools and law schools, run businesses and universities, and sit in Congress. There are even three of us on the Supreme Court. But if you ask why men still run the world, the answer you’ll get back isn’t sexual harassment, male violence, or discrimination—the mere mention of which is deeply unfair, to men. The explanation instead is still some variation of the one Lisa Belkin gave in The New York Times Magazine in 2003, when she profiled a bunch of Yale alumnae who had given up their big-time jobs to become stay-at-home wives: Because we don’t want to. We’d rather…

Dear Liza, With the recent heat waves and other climate related problems, I have become anxious and despondent about the future. In fact, I am doubtful there will be much of one in 10 or 20 years. My anxiety often keeps me glued to my computer, looking at more and more stories, which tend to get more and more extreme. I have started reading reports of human extinction within the next century, if not sooner. I sometimes look for articles about the climate crisis that are more positive; but, at best, that gives me a temporary reprieve from the general tenor of the coverage. It makes it almost impossible to do my work. And I can’t avoid these stories, as I teach a community-college course on sustainability. I have even…

Listening to news reports over the last weeks, I have felt sadness and a deep sense of the absurd. As 1,600 migrant children were quietly transferred under cover of darkness to tent cities in the desert, I watched reports in which Donald Trump defended Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by comparing him to George Washington—who, the president asserted, might also “have a couple of things in his past.” The next clip on the newsfeed was titled “Seal slaps man with octopus.” Somehow, the juxtaposition seemed apt. The Kavanaugh hearing has become a spectacle blocking all other light. The nation stopped and fell silent during Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony because it raised existential questions about the norms of teenage behavior, about class difference, and about the disproportionate power over women’s bodies…

ON JUNE 26, FEW PEOPLE OUTSIDE NEW YORK’S 14th Congressional District knew who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was. But by the next day, when news spread that she’d toppled her opponent, 10-term Representative Joseph Crowley, in the Democratic congressional primary, she was a national celebrity. She appeared on CNN, Meet the Press, PBS’s Firing Line, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, and MSNBC as the fresh face of a revived American left. Her lip color of choice—Stila Stay All Day Liquid Lipstick in Beso—sold out in several stores. When she appeared a few weeks later at a rally near Wall Street’s Charging Bull statue in Lower Manhattan to endorse Zephyr Teachout, who was seeking the Democratic nomination to become New York’s next attorney general, a large crowd cheered—many of…

The Gore-y Truth I must take exception with Jason Mark’s denigrating reference to Al Gore in “The Climate-Wrecking Industry,” [Sept. 24/Oct. 1]. At the beginning and end of his otherwise honest piece, he accuses Gore of telling us to solve climate change by using better light bulbs. Gore has been a lifelong environmentalist. He was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Since founding the Climate Reality Project in 2006, he has trained over 12,000 people from 126 countries to be “climate leaders.” He also convinced India to opt into the Paris climate accord by cutting a deal for free US solar-panel technology, thereby preventing the construction of 400 new coal-fired power plants. In this fight for our lives, it is often difficult to keep clear who the real…

The millennial generation—whose oldest members are 37, and the youngest 22—has come of age at a strange time. Over the past two decades, huge advances in technology have made the world smaller and noisier; meanwhile, the reach of capitalism has ramped up to such an excruciating degree that almost everything has become a commodity, including our public personas. From the outset, millennials have also found themselves in a vortex of economic insecurity, with many of them entering the job market just as the Great Recession set in. Today, more millennials live with their parents than previous generations did. We’re marrying later, if we marry; we’re having children later, and fewer of them. It is nearly impossible to own a home without financial help—an inheritance, a down payment from the in-laws.…

A year has passed since the State Department virtually shuttered the US embassy in Havana in response to a rash of ailments reported by embassy personnel, which included hearing loss, headaches, dizziness, insomnia, and cognitive impairments. Multiple US agencies, among them the CIA, the FBI, and an elite military-science advisory team known as the JASON Group, have undertaken major inquiries into the origin of these mysterious maladies—with no discernible conclusions. Doctors who have examined more than two dozen embassy workers now refer to their brain trauma as “the immaculate concussion.” “They have a few theories,” says one Capitol Hill staffer who has received classified briefings, but “are no closer to knowing how this happened or who was responsible than they were over a year ago.” The initial theory was that…

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Kavanaugh–Blasey Ford hearing perfectly illustrated the conundrum that we find ourselves in today. We teach our children to live by the core values of honesty, civility, respect, and fair play, and we do our best to live up to them ourselves. Yet it is our own adherence to these values that leaves us vulnerable to the campaign by Donald Trump and the Republican Party to destroy what remains of our democracy. It is no secret that—amid his whining, braggadocio, and staggering displays of self-pity—would-be Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly perjured himself. Fact-checking articles in the days after the hearing identified well more than a dozen lies: lies about his high-school years, his college years, his drinking habits, his calendar, his yearbook, his judicial beliefs, the…

President Trump wants a bigger military. Both on the campaign trail and in office, he has vowed to give the US armed forces—already the most powerful in the world—“everything” they need to “rebuild.” And on August 13, Trump signed a bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) allocating $717 billion to the military, bringing defense spending to a level higher than at any time save for the height of the Iraq War. But it seems that young people are reluctant to heed the president’s vision. About a month after Trump signed the NDAA, the Army announced that it was more than 6,000 candidates short of its recruiting goal of 76,500 for fiscal year 2018. “A strong economy and a lower propensity among the population of 17- to 24-year-olds to enlist are…

113 Number of Supreme Court justices in US history 4 Number of female justices who have served on the Court 178 Years that the Supreme Court was exclusively white and male 100% Sitting Supreme Court justices who attended either Harvard or Yale 35 Average number of years that new justices are predicted to serve, according to the Harvard Business Review 38% The Supreme Court’s approval rating among Democrats as of July—down from 67 percent in 2016 72% The Supreme Court’s approval rating among Republicans as of July—up from 26 percent in 2016…

Greg Kaufmann rejoins The Nation as a contributing writer focused on poverty. From 2011 to ’13, Kaufmann wrote the regular Nation series “This Week in Poverty,” part of our continuing coverage of an issue that editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel calls “the shame of our nation.” Kaufmann will revive this beat with two columns a month focused on those waging today’s War on Poverty, paying particular attention to the emerging Poor People’s Campaign, now at work in more than 40 states. Kaufmann will also provide updates on legislative efforts at the national, state, and local levels; highlight the work of community activists; bust myths in the media’s coverage of poverty policy; and identify ways of changing the narrative. He will demand accountability from the Republicans and Democrats who stand…

BETO O’ROURKE IS ON FIRE. IN FRONT OF THE ALTAR OF THE HISTORIC GOOD STREET BAPTIST Church on a steamy late-summer night in Dallas, the wiry young congressman is pacing back and forth across the red carpet. He is not speaking. He is preaching, with a fury at injustice that echoes across the centuries—from the West Texas populist rabble-rousers of the 1890s to the San Antonio labor organizers of the 1930s to the border-town civil-rights campaigners of the 1950s and the intersectional activists of right now. O’Rourke’s words do not come in a steady stream of predictable political parlance. They explode in bursts of righteous anger and indignation over the killing of another young African-American man by another white police officer. “How can it be, in this day and age,…