Innehållsförteckning för May 6, 2019 från The Nation

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…

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…

The dragons have always been the least of it—not to mention the wargs and the Children of the Forest and the First Men and the hard-to-remember, centuries-long backstories of the Starks, Lannisters, Targaryens, Baratheons, Greyjoys, Tyrells, and Martells. The elements of fantasy that obsess the millions of fans of Game of Thrones give the story its strangeness and beauty and feed endless, ingenious speculation. To tell the truth, though, these embellishments also give the series its tedium. I mean, really, zombies? Dragonglass? That whole Three-Eyed Raven subplot? At its heart, Game of Thrones is a story about human beings and the ways they are shaped by the harsh, medievalesque world of Westeros. By now, as the eighth and final season airs, we know these characters better than we know some…

To be a British commentator traveling through Europe at the moment presents a credibility challenge. The problem is not when people ask you what will happen with Brexit. Journalists are not clairvoyants and shouldn’t try to be. In a moment as volatile and fragile as this, we should devote our energies to being descriptive rather than predictive. Not least because journalists have proved to be pretty poor at predicting anything of late. Those who did not foresee the rise of the Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn or Donald Trump’s taking the White House or Britain’s voting to leave the European Union probably aren’t the ones you want to rely on to figure out what will happen next. The problem occurs when they ask you what is happening. That we should know.…

BRUCE MILLER GOT A JOB AT A SEARS IN TOM’S RIVER, NEW JERSEY, “fresh out of high school,” he said. He didn’t have any experience other than repairing cars in his backyard, but a friend who worked in the maintenance department knew he was looking for work and recommended him. That was the beginning of a 36-year career with the company. “Everyone I had talked to said, ‘Get into Sears. Stick with them. They’re a great company. They’ll take care of you,’” he recalled. “I just kept my eyes open and my nose clean and worked my way up.” He eventually became an auto mechanic. In 2005, the hedge fund ESL Investments Inc., owned by Eddie Lampert, took over the company. In the 1990s, Sears struggled to keep up with…

ACROSS 1 Antique bicycle in famous lane with distant object (5-8) 9 Old vessel swapping adjacent components with one getting the blame for harbor craft (7) 10 Look into return of fire pit (7) 11 Subway ran into European capital halfway (5) 12 Inside shelter, worth changing direction (9) 13 Lure of shortened cable (4) 14 Tuesday Weld’s parts frequently repeated: This one is very much like another (10) 18 Rascal gets into variegated pastels in multilayered document (10) 19 Missile silo’s cover: something to chew over (4) 22 Boy rested uneasily where seafood can be found (6,3) 25 and 16 Poet sent back fruit to daughter adopted by icy, ghoulish family relation (5,9) 26 Rise unsteadily to swallow 59 potions (7) 27 The Rev. Spooner’s claimed the fourth locale…

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…

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 Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College recently announced that this year’s Izzy Award “for outstanding achievement in independent media” will be given to three journalists who undertook groundbreaking and in-depth reporting in 2018. Nation contributing writers Laura Flanders, Dave Lindorff, and Aaron Maté will share the award with Earth Island Journal. Flanders was recognized for providing progressive and internationalist perspectives to American audiences and producing forward-looking media that investigate the policies driving racism, sexism, and economic exclusion. Longtime Nation contributor Lindorff spent months investigating the Defense Department’s annual financial reports and funding requests to Congress and found that it had simply been concocting the numbers, making Pentagon expenditures opaque and misleading. His detailed report for The Nation was cited by politicians and academics in 2018 and provides…

LAST SUMMER, DURING THE DEADLIEST WILDFIRE SEASON IN CALIFORNIA’S history, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes got into a revealing Twitter discussion about why US television doesn’t much cover climate change. Elon Green, an editor at Longform, had tweeted, “Sure would be nice if our news networks—the only outlets that can force change in this country—would cover it with commensurate urgency.” Hayes (who is an editor at large for The Nation) replied that his program had tried. Which was true: In 2016, All In With Chris Hayes spent an entire week highlighting the impact of climate change in the US as part of a look at the issues that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were ignoring. The problem, Hayes tweeted, was that “every single time we’ve covered [climate change] it’s been a palpable…

I make love when I am bored. That’s how I know I’m an intelligent animal. It’s easy to tremble—a pistil brushed with a bumblebee’s fur—and who doesn’t want to be golden, like pearls of fat glistening in an artery or a mother’s first milk? I want to send you photos of dead fledglings on the sidewalk, those perils of the lavish season, but we are wrong, a news story tells me so, explaining beauty drives evolution, not a mate with an advantageous beak. I wish I could tell you this. Letters and novels keep seducing me with their fantasies of closure, but I like the way your silence wastes inside me. I am a grieving animal. Let’s not pretend souls are beautiful. They’re as ugly as white petals wilting, crisping…

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…

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…

On March 30, a Chinese woman named Yujing Zhang, 32, was arrested after bluffing her way into President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. According to an affidavit, Zhang told Secret Service agents that she was there for a “United Nations Chinese American Association” event scheduled for that evening. No such event existed. “She lies to everyone she encounters,” federal prosecutor Rolando Garcia said. Secret Service agents found four cell phones, $8,000 in cash, a USB drive thought to contain malware, and a signal detector—a device used for finding hidden cameras—in Zhang’s hotel room. Investigators concluded that she had purchased a travel package from an organization called the United Nations Chinese Friendship Association, which offers clients the chance to meet powerful US political figures. The UNCFA, which has no relationship with…

THE LATE HERB SCHMERTZ was a public-relations legend, a dedicated oil man who revolutionized the way his industry and other corporations manipulate American news, public opinion, and government policy. As a senior PR executive for Mobil, Schmertz pioneered what he called the op-ad. Beginning in October 1970, Mobil paid The New York Times to publish regular op-ed articles, written by the oil company, in which it delivered its views on energy, the environment, and other issues of the day. In a 1991 interview revealed here for the first time, Schmertz explained: “Everything we did was organized as if it was one big political campaign.” The goal of the campaign, Schmertz continued, “was to win elections also. On public-policy issues.” And win they did. By 1983, Schmertz and his colleagues in…

On each body is carried the shape of its absence—the uncontrollable morning—a hammock over-turned by the wind—birdshit—which implies beauty but is not beautiful in and of itself—now on both sides of the cloth— How does it feel to not want— I want a woman’s body that isn’t afraid of me—my back against whatever is stronger—a pillow, a table, the hood of a car—I want to lift and be spread out—a blanket on the deck—the earth turning at a thousand miles per hour—18 miles a second hurtling through space—I want to be held to the ground—a bird after it has been a bird against a window—I want what any woman wants—a body she can sleep in—my own—sheets pushed to the side—…