Innehållsförteckning för December 3/10, 2018 från The Nation

This Is What Heroism Looks Like Re Ady Barkan’s article “My Word Count” [Nov. 5, 2018]: Whatever the word count, and no matter the ravages of ALS, Ady Barkan packed sufficient power into his comment to move me to tears, and action. Heroic. HAROLD FORDFLINT, MICH. Lost in Translation Halfway through his lengthy review of Andrea Komlosy’s Work: The Last 1,000 Years [“What We Do,” Nov. 5, 2018], Gabriel Winant notes almost in passing that “in its original German, Komlosy’s book is not titled Werk…but rather, Arbeit.” Yet nowhere in the piece is there specific mention of the book’s pair of translators, Loren Balhorn and Jacob K. Watson. A most unfortunate irony, then: In a review of a wide-ranging historical account of “work,” the actual labor of the translators who…

The Trump administration has spent the past two years attacking the rights of trans people. But the president’s biggest assault may be imminent: In October, The New York Times reported on a leaked memo from the Department of Health and Human Services and said that by the end of this year, the White House would likely seek to redefine “sex” under federal law as being based on the genitals a person is born with—a move that could lead to the loss of civil-rights protection for some 1.4 million trans and gendernonconforming individuals. I caught up with Chase Strangio, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Project, who has represented plaintiffs like Gavin Grimm, a transgender student who sued his school district after he was barred…

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley recently sent a letter to Heather Wilson, the secretary of the Air Force, asking why a single squadron at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, spent nearly $56,000 on mugs over the past three years. Apparently, the mugs’ plastic handles frequently break off, and since the company that makes them doesn’t manufacture individual parts, the Air Force often shells out more than $1,200 for each replacement. The mugs, which are used to reheat coffee and tea on air-refueling tankers, hardly represent the first overspending scandal in the military. In July, The Washington Post reported that, on at least three separate occasions, the Air Force paid roughly $10,000 to replace toilet-seat covers on Vietnam War–era cargo planes. As comical as these examples might seem, they point…

Waking up this morning and looking at the midterm results, I kept returning to the British expression “a curate’s egg”–an object or turn of events described as “good in parts.” The end of Republican control of the House of Representatives is certainly good news. So too is the Democratic pickup of seven governors, with the ousters of union foe Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Kris Kobach, the Kansas poster boy for voter suppression, particularly worth savoring. Jared Polis’s victory in Colorado makes him the first openly gay governor in the country, which is especially sweet since he ran on universal health care, stricter gun laws, the expansion of public education, and an opposition to fracking. The election of Alessandra Biaggi, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos, and other successful challengers to members…

COMMENT The people of the United States voted on November 6 to check and balance the presidency of Donald Trump. After two years in which the constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches was rendered meaningless by unitary Republican control of Congress, voters have given Democrats the House of Representatives. This is a monumental shift in the political dynamic at a crucial moment in our history, and Democrats must be aggressive in identifying it as such. If they fail to do so, Trump will maintain control of the narrative in what should be an accountability moment for his presidency and a policy-shift moment for the country. To get this difficult task right, Democrats must recognize why the voters engineered a transfer of power that has marginalized noxious…

What is most surprising about the mass murder at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and the pipe bombs sent to journalists, Democratic politicians, and the philanthropist George Soros is that we find it surprising at all. After all, both perpetrators were acting on messages they had repeatedly received from President Trump and his supporters in Congress and the media. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake traced the ricocheting effect of the Soros-centered conspiracy theory through the White House, Republican representatives, and the increasingly bonkers right-wing media. And it’s not hard to see where these terrorists thought they were getting their instructions. During the final days of his presidential campaign, Trump ran a commercial attacking Soros, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen—all of them Jews—claiming…

ON HIS PRIME-TIME SHOW IN AUGUST, FOX NEWS HOST TUCKER CARLSON declared that his opposition to immigration partly stems from his deep love for the environment. Instead of banning helium balloons, plastic straws, and other “things that bring ordinary people joy,” Carlson suggested, liberals would be better advised to get tough on immigration. “I actually hate litter, which is one of the reasons I’m so against illegal immigration: It produces a huge amount of litter—a huge amount of litter,” Carlson said. “And I mean that with total sincerity.” Carlson’s comment was mostly lost amid the uproar over the separation and indefinite detention of migrant children and their families at the US-Mexican border. But those who did catch it found themselves a bit confused about his point. “It’s unclear whether Carlson…

for V. Lamar Word is I wasn’t born so much as skimmed off another living thingby a source of light. Let’s just say that you are light-skinned andthe back of my mom’s hand is a color best worn around the eyesafter a knuckle’s kiss, though this fact itself is not here to implyI was born of an act of violence, but, rather, that I was born intoviolence as a cultural practice and product. And I enter post-crack,post-Reagan, when the big city newspapers sell themselves withheadlines about shadow-on-shadow crime like light doesn’t factorinto the equation by definition, like light doesn’t have a gaze uponthe world called the day. Fact of the matter is— sad as the matter is,I can only see myself in relation to it, to the light; I can…

Pink light sears the marbled bar & the straw in my drinkis pastel. On wood-paneled walls, American Traditional paintingsof my goddesses. Kati texts me: all this gaslightingtoday. I’m taking extra space, my bags all overthe butterscotch seats, & the only men around are behindthe bar, burning sage & lemon rinds for garnish, talkingabout mangoes—their remedial qualities, the cost & palette &current trend toward. I’m turning fuchsia, bottled up. Appropriate mesideways, my bags are full & I’m nothing if not a product,lush. Kati writes: like how I’m feeling isn’t legitimate enough. On the counter,two artificial flames are a native woman’s breasts. Durga save me,I’m liable to paint the borough white—that is,in reminder—my wrists already smelling of tamarind&; jasmine & not because it comes natural, but if I’m to investin anything, shouldn’t…

ACROSS 1 Going back and forth sick during time off (11) 7 and 27 Criticize crack in closet (6) 9 One interrupting President Hoover’s initial victory (7) 10 Large room in plant is not deep (7) 11 Army chief captivated by return of tiny animals (6) 12 Celebration of workers adorably frolicking (5,3) 14 Wring wet rag in front of entire Chinese landmark… (5,4) 15 …because nice mess follows end of chaos (5) 16 Cleaned bird, for example, replacing black with white (5) 18 Makes it known cannon use is unacceptable (9) 20 Cruz, harboring a sorceress, quivered (8) 22 Flawed teachers disregarding C (6) 25 After making some changes, I atoned for cutting back (2,1,4) 26 Poet with assassin (7) 27 See 7A 28 That guy sitting between relatives)…

The feminist resistance to Donald Trump marched from America’s cities, suburbs, and small towns into Congress and the statehouses on November 6. As of this writing, nearly 100 women will take their seats in the US House of Representatives in January; almost 90 percent of these women are Democrats. “I feel so good,” says Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock. The group had a plan to elect at least 23 Democratic women to the House, so that the 23 victories needed by the Democrats to control the chamber would be provided by women. Of the party’s 26 pickups in the midterms thus far, 19 are women, all endorsed by Emily’s List. Another six Emily’s List–backed candidates are in races too close to call. According to CNN exit polls, almost 80 percent…

When the poet and writer Ntozake Shange died on October 27, I felt her words explode on the underside of my heart and heard her voice—beautiful, big, and vulnerable—push through my ears. The reaction was immediate, like her work, and although the news of her death was upsetting, it somehow made sense. Not that it was time for her to die, or that her family was ready to let her go, but that, as I knew and understood her, she had been dying all along while she was living, bearing the weight of her particular brand of bold, brave emotional insurgency, and holding up the rainbow. I didn’t grow up knowing her work, which is perhaps why it hit me so hard when I first discovered it in college. As…

On october 20, president trump announced that the united states would pull out of the intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty after more than 30 years. In doing so, he ended an agreement that abolished an entire class of nuclear weapons and recklessly pushed us to the brink of a new Cold War. He’s brought us back to a time when the United States and Russia could develop and expand their nuclear arsenals without restraint. Trump’s decision is a wake-up call as much as it’s a clarion call. It highlights the flaws of a system in which one man can determine our collective fate, and makes clear why all nations need to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was adopted by 122 countries at the United Nations last…

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Bullshit Jobs A TheoryBy David GraeberSimon & Schuster. 368 pp. $27 Let’s just get this out of the way: All jobs are bullshit jobs. Even if you’re a public defender or work for Médecins Sans Frontières, insofar as your labor is determined by a system of abstract compulsion—insofar, that is, as it exists within capitalism—it’s bullshit. You know this. In his new book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber is interested in a particular variety of bullshit and work. In 2013, the anthropologist and anarchist (he hates to be called “the anarchist anthropologist”) published an essay slamming the proliferation of “pointless jobs” that seem to exist “just for the sake of keeping us all working.” The response was tremendous: It turns out that many people have jobs that they believe…