Innehållsförteckning för June 3, 2019 från The Nation

A Priceless Answer To justify sounding a false alarm that doctors’ opposition will torpedo single-payer health-care reform, Mike Konczal turns to a Koch-brothers-funded analysis that claims Medicare for All would either slash doctors’ income and hospital funding or break the bank [“The Score: $5 Trillion Questions,” May 13]. Konczal credulously adopts the Koch study’s underestimate of single-payer savings on insurance overhead. But more important, he (like that study) ignores overwhelming evidence that single-payer would save doctors and hospitals vast amounts on billing, insurance paperwork, and other wasteful tasks that are required by the current byzantine payment system but would be eliminated under single-payer. For instance, a recent Harvard Business School and Duke University study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the average primary-care doctor at…

Egged on by the ultra-hawkish duo of National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump has brought US-Iranian relations to the brink of war. Like the war against Iraq in 2003, launched on the pretext of spurious charges about nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, the crisis with Iran is a manufactured one. And were it to occur, a war between the United States and Iran would have incalculable consequences—for Iran’s civilian population, for the entire region, and for the world’s economy, still dependent for a third of its oil on shipments from the Persian Gulf. It is a war that the American people, its representatives in Congress, America’s allies, and the United Nations cannot allow to…

Although unfamiliar to most Americans, the Eurovision Song Contest is the longest-running televised musical event in the world. Launched in 1956 by the Eurovision broadcasting network as part of a broader attempt to unite Europe after World War II, the competition borrows from the campy musical aesthetics of Abba and Céline Dion (both past winners) and precedes popular shows like The Voice by many decades. Eligible entrants may come from countries with a European Broadcast Union member—including nations in Europe, other states on the Mediterranean, and via no easy historical logic, Australia. The main sponsor of this year’s competition, which ran May 14 to 18 in Tel Aviv, Israel, was MyHeritage, a DNA ancestry-tracking company that launched a campaign called One Big Family to promote the event using the contestants’…

We’re so late-stage that we trade our storm-wet cash forsynthetic fuzz, as if fleece wasn’t the shorn warmthof a bleating thing. There is a new wolf in me this winter and I can’t keep it fed.I can’t stray near livestock, can’t turn up to casual drinksin blood, musk, and appetite. I’d pay a lot for a fence that could hold me. When it becomesQueens, the bus route runs along Fresh Pond Rd withouteven rumor of reservoir. Today was the day I paid for a new gym membership and alsothe day I told the sales associate I’d be cancelling it after thefirst month, I’m just visiting. I’m trying to say that I’m trying to stay out in the elementsuntil I can’t feel much of myself. I proffered my shareof the rent,…

Tax policy, usually an underdiscussed subject, has become a heated issue in the race for 2020, with Democratic candidates offering proposals to redress some long-standing unfairness in the tax code. Elizabeth Warren has a bold proposal to levy a new wealth tax, and Bernie Sanders is calling to significantly hike the rate on inheritances. But before any new taxes are imposed, we have to grapple with a problem plaguing our existing tax structure: A lot of people already avoid paying what they owe. That problem is worst at the top of the income scale, yet the IRS too often expends its precious resources going after the poor. Our current president offers a particularly egregious example of what the rich can get away with. Over the course of his time in…

In 1972, the British art critic John Berger responded to the proliferation of television by making his own show. The series, called Ways of Seeing, encouraged viewers to think critically about the images flowing through their sets, connecting theories from thinkers like Walter Benjamin to midcentury media consumption. He adapted the show into a book with the same name that year. Damon Krukowski set out to emulate Berger’s model in his new book, Ways of Hearing. Noting how podcasts, streaming music, and other audio saturate contemporary life, he hoped to shine some light on the ways that the digitization of sound has profoundly reconfigured our listening habits. Ways of Hearing began life as a podcast series on Radiotopia, but Krukowski, following Berger, always meant to publish it as a book…

Geoffrey Servante, the last surviving British member of the International Brigades, which fought Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, has died. He was 99 years old. The last American volunteer, Delmer Berg, died in 2016. When fascist Nationalist forces mobilized against the Spanish government in 1936, the United Kingdom and the United States declined to help, leaving it to volunteers to defend Spanish democracy. Most of the fighters were labor activists or communists, but Servante claimed he joined the brigades at age 18 to win a £100 bet (nearly $9,000 today). Servante enlisted with an artillery unit known as the John Brown Battery. On one occasion, he was called upon to man an artillery gun, and his shot went so far off target that he was disciplined. Only later…

25 Number of Palestinians killed in early May (including two infants) in the deadliest attacks by Israel since 2014; four Israelis were also killed by Hamas rockets 12 Number of years that Israel has maintained an air, land, and sea blockade on Gaza, making it a de facto open-air prison 1M People in Gaza who may be without food by June 2019—half the population 97% Percentage of water in Gaza that is undrinkable 53% Unemployment rate in Gaza 4 Average Average number of hours of electricity per day in Gaza 4:1 Ratio of news headlines in the US focusing on Israelis versus those on Palestinians—Isabel Cristo…

On May 7, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed the most extreme abortion ban in the country. HB 481 outlaws abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, usually about six weeks into a pregnancy and before many women even know they are pregnant. Doctors who violate the Georgia law can face criminal charges. The law is silent on whether the women can be prosecuted, too. Kentucky, Mississippi, and Ohio also enacted so-called heartbeat-ban laws this year, and legislators in Missouri, Tennessee, and Alabama are vying to pass their own versions. None of these efforts have gone unchallenged. The courts suspended the Kentucky law shortly after it was passed, and a federal judge will hear a challenge to Mississippi’s in late May. The Georgia law will not go into…

According to The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column, President Donald Trump made his 10,000th “false or misleading claim” on April 26, 827 days into his first term. Astonishingly, the pace of his falsehoods keeps accelerating, from fewer than five per day during his first 100 days in office to an average of more than 17 per day in the week leading up to number 10,000. During a recent 45-minute telephone interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump managed to utter a falsehood about once every minute. There is no discernible pattern to Trump’s lies. The Post found that 2,217 occurred during his rallies, 1,803 on his Twitter feed, and 999 in his speeches. He lied about the same topic—his imaginary border wall—on 160 separate occasions. Overall, the president has repeated…

Nephelopsis obscura, the common ribbon leech, is black and slimy, segmented, and like the earthworm, hermaphroditic. In the shallow waters of the Great Lakes region, it spends the day buried in mud and then, when darkness falls, emerges to feed on animal remains. Bobby Matthews is an Ojibwe who traps these leeches on the aptly named Leech Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. “As soon as the ice goes out in April I start looking around,” he says. At dusk, he sets his traps—perforated containers suspended from a Styrofoam float—and removes them at dawn. A sturdy overnight haul, sold to convenience stores and bait shops, can net him $1,000. Though Matthews makes a decent living as a leech trapper, he is also a man of countless other seasonal trades: a collector…