Innehållsförteckning för November 5, 2018 från The Nation

With the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court of the United States is now a wholly realized threat not just to social and economic progress, but to equal justice under the law. Kavanaugh himself promised that would be the case at the conclusion of the confirmation charade orchestrated by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley. The nominee raged against “the left” and imagined that senators who had concerns about allegations of sexual abuse, his lies under oath, and his judicial record were part of “a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election.” Now that Kavanaugh has been seated, how can any of us forget the menacing message in his testimony: “What goes around…

Economist Jeffrey Sachs has been at the forefront of global economic policy for close to four decades. He’s helped countries transition from communism to capitalism—with varying degrees of success—and advised the United Nations on programs promoting sustainable economic growth and the alleviation of poverty. He’s also directed the Earth Institute at Columbia University and is the author of eight mass-market books on poverty, wealth, and sustainability. In his latest, A New Foreign Policy, he focuses on America’s international relations. Alongside an angry condemnation of Trumpism, Sachs offers a set of progressive policy solutions that he believes can put all people, not just Americans, first. —Atossa Araxia Abrahamian AAA: You’re an economist. Why foreign policy, and why now? JS: Foreign policy is at a point of complete crisis with Trump’s deliberate…

Hell hath no fury like a white man scorned. If you take nothing else from the Senate’s confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, take that much. Know that the angry hysterics of Lindsey Graham and Charles Grassley and Orrin Hatch were a continuation of the long, howling tantrum that began when Donald Trump descended from his tower in 2015. It is the same frustrated rage that spews out of Fox News nightly, and that erupted into deadly violence in Charlottesville. It is the frightened cry of power when shocked to find itself suddenly unsure. “I’m a single white male from South Carolina, and I’ve been told I should shut up,” Graham whined the day after the Senate hearings. “But I will not shut up.” No, he will not. Hopefully, though, this mounting…

Some Trick Thirteen StoriesBy Helen DeWittNew Directions. 224 pp. $22.95 If anyone is entitled to misgivings about the pernicious world of publishing, it’s Helen DeWitt, the long-suffering veteran of a by-now-well-known bevy of artistic successes and commercial failures. The Last Samurai, an exuberantly experimental novel about a child prodigy and his brilliant but depressive mother, made a triumphant debut at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999, but its publication was fraught. DeWitt fought to retain her idiosyncratic typesetting, faced off with a belligerent copy editor, and saw few profits in the wake of financial disputes with her publisher. Worse still, the imprint responsible for The Last Samurai folded in 2005. Though the book commanded a dedicated cult following, it went out of print until New Directions reissued it 11 years later.…

$25K Cost of one of security company EAGL’s gunshot-detection systems, which alert police after sensing that shots have been fired $384K Estimated amount that the Kenosha, Wisconsin, Unified School District plans to spend installing EAGL systems in its schools 50 Number of schools nationwide set to use EAGL systems this school year $1.1B Amount of money in the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Fund, which Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wants to allow schools to use to purchase firearms 25 Number of bills proposed in 14 state legislatures in the two months following the Parkland shooting that support arming school personnel…

On October 4, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation released the names of this year’s “genius”-grant winners. The 25 recipients will be awarded $625,000 each over five years; they include a journalist reporting on the coal industry in West Virginia, a Los Angeles Philharmonic violinist who organizes concerts for the homeless, a human-rights lawyer who challenged President Trump’s Muslim ban, and two Nation contributors: AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves and Poor People’s Campaign leader the Rev. William J. Barber II. The awards were announced as Barber was being arrested alongside McDonald’s workers at a protest in Chicago. In 2013, he launched the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina to rally against the state’s conservative policies. While most of the grantees focus on a specific discipline, Barber’s work grapples with…

Inequality, Inc. I was much impressed by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s “The Inequality Industry” [Oct. 8/15]. While understandably not as objective as a peer-reviewed journal article, it came close. I read it as “wisdom in black and white.” FRANK DIXON MADISON, VA. Overruling the Court Regarding Richard Kim’s editorial “Court Reform, Anyone?” [Oct. 8/15]: It says right in the Declaration of Independence that when the government isn’t working for the people, they have the right, the duty, and the obligation to change the “forms to which they have become accustomed” and organize a government that better suits the people’s needs. And that’s what they did after waging a nine-year war. The Declaration was the first step; the Constitution was the second. Yet when the rules for the Supreme Court were written,…

Evolution is a tenuous metaphor for artistic growth, but it’s a good one for describing the kinds of progress that occur under pressure, when a certain natural selection takes place between the useful and the irrelevant. This kind of growth is thrilling to watch, not only because those developments are so terrifyingly high-wire, but because they can reveal so much. Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, the debut solo album by Sophie Xeon, the Los Angeles–based singer, songwriter, and producer who records under the starkly capitalized mononym SOPHIE, shows the artist experiencing this kind of metamorphosis before our very eyes. On Oil, we follow Xeon to a more rarefied place than she’s been before; while her earlier releases as an affiliate of the electronic collective PC Music were prismatic—all Day-Glo obfuscation—Xeon’s…

On September 30, 2016, Rachael and I celebrated one year of marriage and 11 years together by booking a hotel room in Los Angeles and going out for fancy Asian fusion. It was our first night away from our 4-month-old son, Carl. Rachael had a great new job as an English professor in Santa Barbara. My career as a progressive activist was going gangbusters. We had just bought a beautiful house and could see decades of happiness stretching out ahead of us. We were the luckiest people we knew. The next morning, we had brunch with my oldest friend, a first-year medical resident. I mentioned to her that my left hand was feeling weak, and after playing with it for a few minutes, she told me I needed to see…

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report on October 8 that outlines the likely changes to the planet with each half-degree increase in global temperature. The earth is already hotter by 1 degree Celsius than it was before the Industrial Revolution. If the planet gets another half-degree hotter, the report warns, coastal flooding would increase dramatically, and ice-sheet collapse and other “large-scale singular events” would occur more often. But at 2⁰C of warming, there would be catastrophic climate-related suffering: 10 million more people displaced from coastlines and hundreds of millions impoverished. As the global system stands today, we are on track for 3⁰C of warming. The Trump administration has let slip that it’s operating under an assumption of 4⁰C by 2100. But a less horrendous future…

CONTESTANTS DEMOCRAT Ann Kirkpatrick REPUBLICAN Lea Marquez Peterson IN A DARK KARAOKE BAR, THE INTERIOR DULLED BY DEEP-RED NEON LIGHTING, THE WALLS COVERED WITH TACKY posters featuring busty women advertising cars and beer, the GOP precinct captains for Arizona’s Cochise County met to discuss politics. The primaries had taken place a couple of weeks earlier, and now, in mid-September, they were strategizing their dash to the election finish line in November—in this case, the fight for the Second Congressional District, a key toss-up race in the struggle to determine which party will control Congress. This year, moderate Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick faces off against Republican Lea Marquez Peterson for the seat vacated by Martha McSally, who is now the GOP candidate in the race to replace retiring Senator Jeff Flake. The…