Innehållsförteckning för November 19/26, 2018 från The Nation

Fact in Fiction Elias Rodriques’s useful review of Zora Neale Hurston’s best-selling Barracoon [June 18/25] is marred by minor errors and the omission of some large issues. Minor errors: Barracoon, according to Hurston, is not from a single interview but from her many with Cudjo Lewis, who was sold by Africans and shipped to Alabama; Timothy Meaher (who was behind the slave ship’s operation) was not on that voyage; and the Meahers did not divide the slaves only among themselves, for about 50 went to other whites. Significantly, Rodriques omitted what Hurston biographer Robert Hemenway reported in 1977: that she had heavily plagiarized in her 1927 article on Lewis. That finding raises issues, such as whether others’ editorial work, after Hurston’s death, quietly eliminated that problem for the published volume.…

A majority of working people in this country have zero retirement savings. The three richest Americans now have as much wealth as 50 percent of the population—some 160 million people. So what does Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell do? Having pushed through a trillion-dollar tax cut that lards its benefits on the wealthiest Americans, he announces that he wants to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and make another run at repealing the Affordable Care Act. Of course, McConnell didn’t say this in plain English, but in politicalese. He noted that the rising US budget deficit is “disturbing” and that “entitlement programs” are “the real drivers of the debt” and must be adjusted “to the demographics of the future.” This is Beltway argot for cutting Social Security, Medicare, and…

I recently spent an afternoon with some new friends in Connecticut, writing letters to registered Democrats in Georgia who hadn’t voted in the past few elections. It was a nice time: one man and five “middle-aged hysterics” (as one of the Chapo Trap House brocialists once called the women of the Resistance) trying to allay our preelection jitters and feel a bit less useless. As we were getting ready to leave, having written a collective total of 199 letters, I put on my columnist’s hat and asked how people felt about Elizabeth Warren. The general verdict from this tiny sample of revved-up white, liberal, never-miss-an-election New England Democrats was that she’s finished—or should be. “Too much has happened,” said one, referring to the current flap over Warren’s DNA-test results. “It’s…

ACROSS 8 Corporate practice I’d reflected about has an exciting quality (10)9 A biblical brother nearly produces a faddish fruit (4)10 Fur is, um, not yours (6)11 Spice is crime-free after reversing habit (8)12 Madly in love with contrarian view of T.S. Eliot, for instance (8)15 Young woman conceals diamonds with a piece of expensive underwear (6)16 Predicament of the author on Social Security (4)18 Cow’s daughter (a female relative) (5)19 Game played with balls and a body of water (4)21 Makes a confession amidst maneuvers (6)23 Beach city in South America entrusting orange to Jamaican, perhaps (8)25 Apostate almost torn to pieces by Jove and Neptune, ultimately (8)27 The latest information involving Asner recalled the item that completes a set together with a 1 found elsewhere in the grid…

As the 2018 midterm elections approach, there are signs everywhere of an imperiled American democracy. Four weeks before Election Day, Georgia officials put over 53,000 voter applications on hold—an estimated 70 percent of them from African Americans—partly through the state’s controversial “exact match” verification program. The Supreme Court upheld a North Dakota law that bars voting by people without street addresses on their IDs, despite the fact that thousands of Native Americans in the state live on reservations without such addresses. From Dodge City, a majority-Latino community of 27,000 in western Kansas, came the news that the town’s single polling place had been moved outside the city limits, to a location more than a mile from the nearest bus stop. “It is shocking that we only have one polling place,…

Dear Liza, Women are staring down the barrel of a conservative Supreme Court that will likely dismantle Roe v. Wade. Abortion, as a right, is already hobbled, with many states essentially regulating it into oblivion. Faced with increased career opportunities but a lack of support systems, women are postponing or refusing motherhood. I think that an awareness of the falling birthrate will soon reach the people in power. To me, this all seems like a perfect storm. Should we expect an even more brutal backlash against reproductive rights? As a career-focused 30-year-old woman with no plans for a baby, I feel as though I should be making arrangements. What if my current methods of birth control fail? I’ve already started mapping states that will outlaw abortion—and mine, Texas, tops the…

Throughout most of October, the US State Department was recruiting American contractors to train prison officials and guards in Saudi Arabia, according to The Young Turks, an online news show. Federal procurement records describe the project’s goal to develop “a women corrections academy training that graduates [Saudi General Directorate of Prisons] staff that are prepared to work in a modern correctional setting.” The move prompted human-rights organizations to once again condemn the United States for enabling Saudi abuses. Adam Coogle of Human Rights Watch told The Young Turks that Saudi prisoners are often “mistreated with a view towards coercing confessions that are later used in court to convict the person.” The need for trained personnel to work in women’s prisons comes from the increasing number of women behind bars in…

75–90% Amount that industry emissions must fall by 2050 to ensure only a 1.5⁰C rise in average global temperature 45% Percentage decline in CO2 emissions required by 2030 to hit the 1.5⁰C mark 80% Percentage of meat and eggs currently consumed that will have to be replaced by other proteins 100% Percentage of cars that will need to be electric by 2030 2.5% Percentage of the world’s GDP that should be devoted to mitigating global warming over the next 17 years 0 Level of net CO2 emissions that needs to be achieved by 2050 to prevent catastrophic climate change Source: IPCC…

On October 18, Sesame Street waved farewell to one of its most beloved denizens. After nearly 50 years, Caroll Spinney, 84, who played both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, has retired. As far back as the Nixon era, many conservatives have argued that public broadcasting—Big Bird’s primary home until 2015—was a frivolous expenditure of taxpayer money. Just this year, President Trump’s proposed 2019 budget would have slashed funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to zero. In response to Trump’s plan, PBS president Paula Kerger pointed out that the cost of public broadcasting is small—about $1.35 per citizen per year. And while taxes subsidize only a tiny percentage of Sesame Street, the show’s positive influence on millions of children across the world has been a huge return on that…

Like a child keen to move on to dessert before they’ve eaten their greens, the Democratic Party has started wrangling over who would make the best presidential candidate before the midterms are even over. As I write, California Senator Kamala Harris is on her way to Iowa, two weeks after New Jersey Senator Cory Booker headlined the party’s fall gala there. Since her visit comes only a few days after she went to South Carolina, Harris has apparently mapped out an electoral strategy that goes after California and the South via Iowa and cedes New Hampshire to Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Meanwhile, journalists parse Sanders’s words to divine whether he is making a progressive pact with the Massachusetts senator. In a recent Politico story headlined “Sanders hints at reckoning…

Frederick Douglass Prophet of FreedomBy David BlightSimon & Schuster. 912 pp. $37.50 Let me begin on a personal note. Over half a century ago, my uncle, the historian Philip S. Foner, rescued Frederick Douglass from undeserved obscurity. Beginning in 1950, he edited four volumes of Douglass’s magnificent speeches and writings, each with a long biographical introduction that chronicled his rise to international renown as a crusader for abolition and racial equality. It is difficult to believe, given his prominence during his lifetime, but Douglass was virtually unknown outside the black community at the time. Almost all of the books about him were by black writers—Benjamin Quarles, Shirley Graham Du Bois, even Booker T. Washington—or by white ones, such as my uncle, oriented to the Old Left and attuned to the problem…

MisdemeanorlandCriminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows PolicingBy Issa Kohler-HausmannPrinceton University Press. 328 pp. $29.95 New York City’s infamous explosion of misdemeanor arrests over the past 20 years can be traced back to a single eight-page document: “Police Strategy No. 5.” Developed in the summer of 1994 by then–Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, the strategy outlined how the theory of “broken windows” policing should be implemented in the city to “reclaim” its public spaces. “New Yorkers have for years felt that the quality of life in their city has been in decline,” the document warned. The solution? “By working systematically and assertively to reduce the level of disorder in the city, the [New York Police Department] will act to undercut the ground on which more serious crimes…