Innehållsförteckning för January 14, 2019 från The Nation

Beyond Family I agree with Bryce Covert [“A Simple Plan,” Dec. 17/24] that something must be done about poverty. However, her column leaves out a group of people who are also excluded from the plans by Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker: poor, childless adults. I am 67, single, with no children. I have had nothing but low-paying jobs all my life, in spite of having a college degree and being an Army veteran. Therefore, I have lived my adult life at or near the federal poverty level. I live in Northern California and can’t afford my own place. Please do not forget those of us who are poor, childless, and alone. ROBERTA BENJAMINSANTA ROSA, CALIF. Fox Lite Re Nawal Arjini’s “Et Tu, Chuck?” [Dec. 17/24]: I too have noticed…

293 Number of newsrooms, out of 1,700 queried, that participated in the American Society of News Editors’ employment-diversity survey 22.6% Percentage of the workforce in newsrooms made up by people of color, compared with 16.5 percent in 2017 41% Percentage of the workforce in newsrooms made up by women 19% Percentage of newsroom managers who are minorities, compared with only 13.4 percent in 2017 41.8% Percentage of newsroom managers who are women, compared with 38.9 percent in 2017…

o matter how ridiculous their claims about the media’s “liberal bias,” conservatives never stop working the refs. It doesn’t matter how powerful or wealthy the owner of any given media institution may be: Accuse him—and it’s always a him—of being biased against conservatives, and the next thing you know, he’s offering back rubs and foot massages to people who claim that Sandy Hook was a hoax and that Hillary Clinton ran a pizza parlor for pedophiles. It worked with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. It worked with Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. And now we’ve learned that it also worked with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. According to a report by Wired’s Nitasha Tiku, Adam Kovacevich, Google’s director of public policy, stated at an internal meeting: “I think one of the directives we’ve…

PROGRESSIVES WERE ON THE MARCH IN 2018. THEY weren’t just resisting Trump; they were outlining the alternative to Trumpism. They weren’t just winning the battle of ideas by moving Medicare for All and Fight for $15 proposals into the mainstream; they were winning battles at the ballot box as well. The fight for the future is far from over, but 2018 offered signs that it can and will be won. The Nation’s 2018 Progressive Honor Roll recognizes the dissidents and the strategists, the veteran campaigners and the next-gen leaders who are charting the course. “I am not in the House to appease special interests, so it’s fine if Big Pharma and defense contractors don’t like me.”—Ro Khanna Most Valuable Progressives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley Democrats…

FOR THE 40-ODD YEARS OF THE COLD WAR, THE UNITED STATES AND its allies were governed by the overriding strategy of containment: a scheme to obstruct the Soviet Union’s advances around the world and eventually trigger its collapse. Every aspect of US foreign and military policy—and much of America’s economic, F all-inclusive concept. Once the Cold War ended, however, US strategists lacked a unifying theme for military planning and spending, and so they flirted with one imperfect substitute after another—the campaign against “rogue states,” the “Global War on Terror,” and so on. But now, with Donald Trump in the White House and a new cast of hawks at the Pentagon, military leaders have landed on a new grand strategy: overmatch. Overmatch decrees that the United States must retain military and…

Heavy and expensive, hard and blackWith bits of chrome, they lookedLike baby cannons, the real children of war, and IHated them for that, for what our teacher saidThey could do, and then I hated themFor what they did when we gave upStealing looks at one another’s bodiesTo press a left or right eye into the barrel and seeOur actual selves taken down to a cellThen blown back up again, every atomic thingAbout a piece of my coiled hair on one slideJust as unimportant as anyone else’sGrowing in that scienceClass where I learned what little differenceGod saw if God saw me. It was the start of one fear,A puny one not much worth mentioning,Narrow as the pencil tucked behind my ear, lostWhen I reached for itTo stab someone I secretly loved:…

Vince Staples isn’t disturbed by dissonance: The California rapper’s music—stark, biting, and oblique—revels in knotted tensions that defy easy resolution. His world is one of white fans dancing to black death, of relationships crumbling into oblivion, of shootouts killing both enemies and friends—and it all feels natural. Staples’s ability to evoke these contrasts and then slash through them is unmatched, in rap and beyond. He’s a master at drawing listeners close, only to explode that proximity. FM!, his latest album, extends that tradition, using a radio station to amplify the signal. The record features some of his most accessible songs to date, and in typical Vince Staples fashion, stings as much as it slaps. On his debut album, Summertime ’06, Staples rapped, “We love our neighborhood/So all my brothers bang…

For the first time in the 45-year history of the War Powers Act, senators have passed a resolution that would help end a war—in this case, US involvement in the Saudiled war on Yemen. But the catalyst had little to do with the conflict itself. In March 2018, the Senate had voted 55–44 against bringing the same resolution to the floor. Then, in October, Saudi agents brutally murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. After Khashoggi’s death saturated the news, the outrage boiled up into Washington’s hawkish political class. Senator Lindsey Graham, a hardline critic of Iran and supporter of US arms sales to the Saudis, called for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to be replaced. Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said…

We don’t have much time to tackle climate change. A new report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that we need to reduce carbon emissions by 45 percent in the next 12 years to keep the earth from heating up “only” 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. This isn’t a problem for future generations; this is an emergency now. Into this crisis comes a demand for a Green New Deal, a call to mobilize the federal government to tackle this threat. Led by the young organizers of the Sunrise Movement, the campaign received a signal boost when Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined its members during a sit-in at Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi’s office. The fact that the earth is rapidly warming is reason enough to pay attention. But there are…

Sear Un, 41, was born in Cambodia during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, when, from 1975 to 1979, some 2.2 million people—about a third of the country’s population—were killed or starved. Thankfully, when Un was just a baby, his family escaped across the border. He spent his early childhood in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines until, in 1984, the family was resettled in the United States. As refugees, they were given “permanent” legal status—but for noncitizens, US residency is always precarious. In 1997, when Un was 20 years old, he was involved in a home burglary. According to court documents, he waited in the car while his friends stole a TV—for which he was paid $125. Still, his conviction was enough to render him deportable. Before 2017,…

Last month, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced her plans to revise Title IX regulations and dramatically narrow the definition of sexual harassment at colleges and universities. Under her proposed rules, accusers will undergo a process more similar to the one they might experience in a court of law, which means cross-examination and a higher burden of proof. DeVos’s initiative came not long after then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions supported a lawsuit attacking race-based affirmative action at Harvard University, which if successful would effectively make it harder for African-American and Hispanic applicants to get into elite schools. As student activists prepare to defend the survivors of sexual assault as well as students of color on their campuses, it’s worth asking: Are Title IX and affirmative action, as they stand today, worth defending?…

The New York City subway is filthy, sluggish, and fickle—and, as any weary straphanger knows, it’s getting worse. But fixing the subway won’t come cheap: It could cost some $40 billion over the next 10 years. But now a team from New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation has put together what it believes to be the best solution for the city’s transit nightmare: legalizing and taxing cannabis and using the money to overhaul the ailing system. The plan arrives at a moment of surprising cultural acceptance. As the report notes, “marijuana is one of the least polarizing issues in the United States today,” with 62 percent of Americans supporting legalization. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on December 17 that he would push to legalize marijuana statewide. Cannabis has…

A friend of mine has a new habit of sighing, “I’m so glad I’m not 10 years old.” It’s an interesting way to express her pessimism: by personifying her angst in the figure of a child. She’s worried about the encroaching climate devastation, the current administration’s relentless denialism of reproducible fact, and our nation’s increasingly exuberant geysers of zealotry. The planet’s increasing numbers of humans aren’t helping her peace of mind, either: They’re charted to spike to 11 billion by 2100—before which time toxic air may be suffocating us into extinction anyway. I try to resist giving in to dark imaginings, but I share her dread. I don’t know what to do; I am sometimes unable to trust even my own senses. One of the peculiar responses to the proliferation…

My friend tells me his uncle the sailor diedand left him a parrot that nobody else would takebecause the bird was so profane, and not long after,my friend threw a party at his house, and the parrotwas in a cage in the kitchen, and I must have walkedby him a dozen times to get a beer, fetch ice, usethe rest room, and the parrot was silent the whole time,and finally almost everyone had gone home,so I went back in to get a broom and help clean up,and I stopped in the kitchen and lookedat the parrot for a good long minute, and finallyhe took a couple of those little childlike stepsparrots take when they’re sidling down that barthey all perch on, and when he got closeto the bars of the…