Innehållsförteckning för February 25/March 4, 2019 från The Nation

Populism Is Everywhere Steven Hahn’s article “The Populist Specter” [Jan. 28/Feb. 4] provides a clear and much-needed analysis of this distressing phenomenon. One area that is barely mentioned, however, is the populist influence on the academic disciplines, especially science. The populists’ disdain for political and business elites also extends to scholarly “elites.” The resulting movements include quack health faddists, anti-vaxxers, and climate deniers. The latter two are especially troubling, as they threaten public health and the global environment, respectively. Most of these science deniers have no training in, or knowledge of, the science that they reject but, under the populist doctrine, such ignorance is irrelevant. Unfortunately, The Nation has not always been innocent in this regard. For example, in your November 5, 2007, issue, the late Alexander Cockburn asserted that…

Kamala Harris announced her presidential bid on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. She has breathlessly recounted how her parents met during the civil-rights movement. She’s played Tupac at her book signings, danced to Cardi B, and even joked about smoking joints with Stephen Colbert. But will her frequent cultural cues be enough to win over black voters? In the past, the winks of wokeness worked well for national black candidates like Barack Obama. Through his command of popular African-American culture, Obama appealed to black voters without having to directly address antiracist public policy and alienate moderate whites. Obama’s black charm offensive ranged from a soulful rendition of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” to a Denzel Washington–like impersonation of Malcolm X telling his audience that it had been “hood-winked” and “bamboozled.”…

Last November, just days before the midterm elections, National Security Adviser John Bolton traveled to the anti-Castro stronghold of Miami to give his “troika of tyranny” speech—a retrograde, Cold War–style assault on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. “The troika will crumble,” Bolton predicted brashly. “We know their day of reckoning awaits. The United States now looks forward to watching each corner of the triangle fall: in Havana, in Caracas, in Managua.” At the time, the speech was perceived as little more than posturing to turn out the right-wing vote in Florida. In retrospect, however, Bolton was signaling the administration’s determination to restore US hegemony in Latin America. Advancing Trump’s MAGA mantra, it is clear, now requires flexing interventionist muscle in Venezuela. The administration’s endgame, though, appears to be Cuba—the island nation…

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not just the youngest woman elected to Congress: She’s also a brown, insanely charismatic leftist. That means she must be an idiot—or “a little girl” (GOP campaign consultant Ed Rollins), “not ready for Congress” (American Enterprise Institute scholar in residence Norman Ornstein), “this girl Ocasio-Cortez or whatever she is” (Florida Governor Ron DeSantis), even “a shiny object” (former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill.) Google her name along with “ignorant” and “dumb,” and you get over 1 million hits. I don’t deny that Ocasio-Cortez has made some slips: The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column has given her four Pinocchios, and CNN’s Chris Cillizza has lectured her for erroneously claiming that Pentagon accounting errors could pay for two-thirds of Medicare for All. Politifact said she was wrong, too, when she…

How much do you weigh? The question is almost invasive, no matter whether it’s asked with love or carelessness. It hides the other question—How much do you carry with you?—which is more important by far, and commensurately harder to answer. The heaviest things—the ones that alter the very shape of your body and mind—don’t have to be physical at all. Kiese Laymon, a writer and professor of English, has spent much of his life asking these questions. In his new memoir, Heavy, he offers the answers he’s found, although by the end of the book it’s clear those answers are less important than the price of the search. “I wanted the book to begin with my weighing 319 pounds and end with my weighing 165 pounds,” Laymon writes on its…

The New York Times recently reported that hedge-fund billionaire and GOP megadonor Kenneth Griffin shelled out a record $238 million for a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park. The news came just days after Oxfam International reported that 26 billionaires have the same combined net worth as the poorest 3.8 billion people on the planet. Meanwhile, many of America’s richest corporate executives spent the week hobnobbing in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum, where they focused on the preposterous idea of “upskilling” as a potential answer to rising economic inequality. It seems that each new day brings fresh reminders that the economy is rigged in favor of an out-of-touch elite gobbling up more and more of America’s—and the world’s—wealth. Yet until recently, politicians have, with few exceptions, failed to respond…

The year is still relatively new, but paid family leave is already a hot topic. A bill to create a state program was prefiled in Kentucky for this legislative session, and since January 1, similar bills have been introduced in Maine, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Vermont, with Colorado likely close behind. On the federal level, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s entrance into the 2020 presidential race ensures that paid family leave will be an important subject among the Democratic contenders, given that she sponsored a bill to create a national program. During the midterms, almost a third of competitive congressional candidates included it in their platforms. All of this energy is incredibly exciting in a country that, unlike nearly all of our peers, doesn’t guarantee paid time off to welcome a new…

Ostensibly, President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, announced on February 1, is intended to coerce Russia into admitting that it has violated the accord and then to destroy any weapons so identified. But the closer one looks, the more obvious it becomes that administration hawks, led by National Security Adviser John Bolton, have no interest in preserving the arms-control agreement but rather seek to embark on an arms race with Russia and China—a dynamic that will take us into dangerous territory not visited since the Cold War. According to the INF Treaty, “intermediate-range nuclear forces” are nuclear-capable ballistic or cruise missiles with a range of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, or approximately 310 to 3,400 miles. These can be fired from ships, submarines, planes,…

Every day they were trapped, we checked in with the nightly news to hear how the Wild Boars were doing. A boot camp had been set up at the mouth of the cave after two divers discovered the boys and their coach perched on a rocky ledge, licking the walls for water, edging away from the questioning sweep of the camera as if afraid of exposure to the light of the divers’ flashlights, then bowing in gratitude, their thin limbs, reminiscent of children in newsreels from the liberated camps. We listened for updates: volunteers pouring in—an Aussie doctor stayed with them, checking their hearts, their lungs, the ambient oxygen; a Danish spelunker cut short his vacation to map the underground labyrinth; a billionaire built a mini submarine to float them…

ACROSS 1 Fashion celebrity’s bad mood cut short when taking in poetic tribute to a hairstyle? (10) 6 Doctor said, “This is a good place to speak” (4) 9 Republicans aren’t accommodating Democratic sponsor (9) 10 Sorceress’s concept: I became an object (5) 11 Soothe, except when absorbing loss (5) 12 Some members of the film crew arrived with noodles (9) 13 Bother to break up President Taft’s original design element (5,3) 15 Trap disheartened medical examiner (6) 17 Happen to act as a detergent (6) 18 Criminal company in San Francisco is at fault (8) 21 Forbid part of cartoon pertaining to a European city (9) 22 British man in African nation switching sides (5) 24 41 nests in half-open flower (5) 25 More energetic running, but I shifted…

84M Number of people in the United States who experienced temperatures at or below 0°F as a polar vortex descended on much of the country 52 Number of consecutive hours the temperature stayed below 0°F in Chicago 10,605 Estimated number of New York City public-housing residents without heat on January 31, when temperatures fell to a low of 2°F 1,600 Estimated number of inmates in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center who were without heat or electricity for about a week 27 Number of deaths directly related to the polar vortex…

On February 3, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement took the Grammy-nominated rapper 21 Savage into custody. ICE claims that the Atlanta-based artist is a British citizen unlawfully residing in the US after overstaying his non-immigrant visa. Savage, born She’yaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, now faces deportation. Savage appears to have arrived in the country when he was just 7, and the rapper’s lyrics depict a violent upbringing. In the 2017 track “Nothin New,” he sings about his daily reality, with references to racial injustice, slavery, and the US carceral complex. Savage’s lawyers said in a statement: “The Department of Homeland Security has known his address and his history since his filing for the U Visa in 2017, yet they took no action against him until this past weekend.” U visas allow crime…

In 2015, the Paris climate accord set a goal of limiting global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels. But even this ambitious target won’t be enough to prevent fully a third of the glaciers in the Himalayas from melting by the end of the century, according to an alarming new report. The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment lists 210 authors and took five years to produce, and it has an even more dire warning if current emissions are not cut: The region will warm up by 5°C and lose two-thirds of its glaciers by 2100—disrupting water sources, like the Ganges, Indus, and Mekong rivers, upon which 1.65 billion people depend. The region spans eight countries, from Myanmar to Afghanistan, and is home to some 240 million people. There is no question…

FORTY-FIVE YEARS AFTER CONGRESS PASSED THE WAR POWERS RESOLUTION OVER RICHARD NIXON’S VETO, THE SENATE finally invoked its power to end a war. This past December, 56 senators voted to cut off all US support for Saudi Arabia’s horrific military campaign in Yemen, which began in the final years of the Obama administration, sharply escalated under Donald Trump, and has led to the deaths of an estimated 85,000 children due to starvation. The morning of the vote, Bernie Sanders addressed his Senate colleagues next to a photo of an emaciated Yemeni child and urged them to pass the resolution, which he’d introduced along with co-sponsors Mike Lee, a Republican, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat. “We have been providing the bombs the Saudi-led coalition is using, refueling their planes before they…