The Nation May 6, 2019

Cover to Cover What a heart-tugging progression of covers over the last few weeks: First came the March 25 cover featuring “the climate kid” Greta Thunberg—her intense, ageless, unforgettable face, followed by my euphoria over the huge impact she was able to achieve. Immediately following, on the April 1 cover, there was the stark plastic water bottle with the message that pollution is going to get worse. This devastating cover was then followed by the heartwarming April 8 cover that framed the abortion issue in positive terms; I have always deplored the way the label “pro-life” consigned the “pro-abortion” stance to the side of death. It is wonderful that a group of women of color in Mississippi are restoring the right to choose to its proper context: that of truly…

Donald Trump is not an electoral mastermind. He is something far more dangerous: a persistent political grifter who is desperately, shamelessly determined to maintain his grip on the presidency that he assumed after losing the 2016 popular vote by almost 3 million ballots. Trump’s desperation will intensify as the 2020 election approaches. He will turn with increasing frequency to the playbook of racism and xenophobia that he has employed from the moment four years ago when he crept from reality TV onto the Republican debate stage. Trump confirmed his intentions in mid-April, when he began launching incendiary attacks on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar after she observed, regarding the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, that “some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our…

900M Number of eligible voters in India 10% Percentage of the world’s population expected to cast ballots in India’s general election 39 Number of days it will take for all the ballots to be submitted—from April 11 to May 19 12M Number of poll workers deployed to the 1 million polling stations, which by law may be no more than two kilometers from any eligible voter 15,256 Feet above sea level of India’s highest-altitude polling place, which will serve 48 voters and be staffed by officials with oxygen tanks 4 Days traveled on foot by polling officials to the village of Cheppe in Arunachal Pradesh state to serve 24 voters —Isabel Cristo…

Julian Assange’s strange seven-year residence in Ecuador’s London embassy has ended, and Assange, thanks to the American president he helped elect, is now in British custody facing a US extradition request. The question now is what the freshly unsealed Justice Department indictment against him means—and doesn’t mean—for Assange, the British courts (which must decide whether to hand him over), and US press freedom. Compared with the worst that Assange and his supporters have always feared (black-hooded rendition, indictment under the Espionage Act, the death penalty), the indictment, filed under seal in 2017, may seem like good news. It’s brief: six pages. He is accused of conspiring with Chelsea Manning to hack one password on one classified government database. There’s no criminal allegation of spying, nothing touching Russia or the Democratic…

Thanks in part to documentaries like Cartel Land and hit shows like Narcos, Mexico has garnered a reputation as a narco-state, a country whose government and police forces are terrorized or even controlled by drug cartels. Last year, Oswaldo Zavala, a Mexican journalist turned professor of Latin American literature at the City University of New York, set off a debate in his home country when he challenged that idea with his book Los Cárteles No Existen (The Cartels Do Not Exist), which argues that violence and trafficking do not threaten the state but rather are central to its operations. While his thesis is controversial, many believe it offers a plausible account of how drug policy is used to make Mexico subservient to US foreign policy. —Jessica Loudis JL: Is your…

The Green New Deal resolution introduced in Congress on February 7 had a less-than-flattering term for places like the one I’m from in central Pennsylvania: “depopulated rural communities.” Deep in Trump country, my hometown newspaper has already printed smears of the ambitious climate justice platform. But some of the goals outlined in the GND resolution—job security in a time of wage stagnation, investment in clean air and water, and support for family farming—should resonate in small towns across the country. This is because the Green New Deal, like the New Deal before it, has the potential to combat disinvestment in Middle America. In the 1930s, when for-profit utilities left nine of every 10 rural homes without electricity, the Rural Electrification Act authorized loans nationwide to launch cooperative power companies. The…