Innehållsförteckning för July 15, 2019 från The Nation

Cruel and Inhuman The force-feeding of prisoners on hunger strike, so powerfully described by Aviva Stahl in “Gag Order” [June 17/24], would not be possible without the active complicity of medical professionals. Whether or not the practice is held to be constitutional by the courts, state licensing boards generally do have the authority to act decisively against such providers. As important, certifying bodies like the American Board of Internal Medicine have the power to suspend participating physicians from their rolls, hospitals are within their rights to deny them privileges, and insurance providers can refuse them malpractice coverage. Inserting a nasogastric tube over the objections of a competent patient is a clear violation of the basic ethical norms we teach our medical students. If physicians and physicians’ assistants faced significant disciplinary…

President Trump reportedly called off, at the last minute, air strikes against Iran, ordered in retaliation for the shooting down of an unarmed US surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz. But according to former intelligence officials, he did approve US cyberstrikes against the Iranian military’s computer systems, and top White House officials are pushing him to order an attack at the next hint of provocation. With Tehran moving to enrich uranium beyond the low levels agreed to in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of 2015—a pact that Trump withdrew the United States from a year ago—such an occasion could arise at any moment. While it is entirely possible that Trump has followed his gut instincts in avoiding a direct military clash, perhaps perceiving that it would alienate…

In June, a year and a half after Scott Warren was arrested by Border Patrol agents for providing aid to migrants along the US-Mexican border, the jury in his trial announced that it was hopelessly deadlocked and could not reach a unanimous verdict. Despite this setback, the US government refuses to drop the charges and may pursue another trial. Warren faced up to 20 years in prison on felony charges of harboring and conspiring to transport undocumented immigrants as part of his work with the humanitarian organization No Más Muertes (No More Deaths). He regularly left water, canned food, blankets, and clothes along migration corridors in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, one of the deadliest stretches along the southwestern border. At least 8,000 people have died in these borderlands since the 1990s.…

The following is an abridged version of a speech by the iconic TV newsman Bill Moyers, as prepared for delivery at a conference at the Columbia Journalism School on April 30. A video of the speech can be seen at TheNation.com/moyers-speech. The conference kicked off Covering Climate Now, a project of The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review that, in partnership with The Guardian, aims to dramatically improve how the media covers the climate crisis. To contact Covering Climate Now, e-mail coveringclimatenow@cjr.org. I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO BRING THIS GATHERING TO a close by summing up how we can do better at covering the possible “collapse of our civilization and the extinction of much of the natural world,” to quote the noted environmentalist David Attenborough speaking at the recent United…

physicists say we change an object simply by turningour attention to it—really I am a grandsononly when we are eating at Panera—one of us is lyingalways about her particular hunger—I love the children outside of mecounting to 30 while covering their eyes—whose bodywill we sacrifice to be in the company of another—eachday across my ongoing—I haul the husk of her—firetowers are designed for distance viewing—and I am righthere—mothering you into the next life—call me coverwhen you don’t know who I could be—time’spsychologic and legal assault—no one is listening toice become water—burying you to keep us alive—…

ACROSS 1 Viciously beat staff, incorporating a way to learn: It’s good for you, supposedly (4-8) 9 Failing dandy invested in knight’s regressive scams (3-4) 10 Even one enclosure for eleven alien butterflies (7) 11 Radical left embracing empty warships (5) 12 Reversing durations (including second and minute) can be somewhat bitter (9) 13 Perceptive butler, say, pursues uninitiated task (9) 15 Understands, forward and backward (4) 17 Retracted commercials for 22’s movement (4) 19 Vibrate broken coils at the 11th hour (9) 21 Pay no attention to turning down angry person’s primal urge (9) 24 Yes, Russian favoring Republicans was brazen (5) 25 I can be found after friend, taking jog in African country (7) 26 Brad, with a note written backward in foreign language (7) 27 Building trade’s…

Fifty years ago this June, a routine part of life for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people suddenly became intolerable. Rather than scatter or submit to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s West Village, LGBTQ people fought back, resisting arrest and attacking police officers. The Stonewall riots took place in the context of a nation in upheaval, with other movements, including the anti-war and Black Power movements, increasingly embracing a spirit of militancy and radicalism. Stonewall was not, as it’s often imagined, the very first moment that LGBTQ people asserted their right to exist; organizations seeking rights for gays and lesbians had been around since at least the 1950s, and there were other, smaller riots in response to police raids on…

Joe Biden loves to rattle off the names of the dead racist politicians he befriended in the same spirit of nostalgic reverie that a hero of a 19th-century French novel might reminisce about the mistresses he enjoyed as a young man. At a fund-raiser on June 18, the current front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination cited his warm relationships with the late James O. Eastland and Herman Talmadge, both ardent segregationists. “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden told the audience. “He never called me ‘boy.’ He always called me ‘son.’” (Was Biden even aware of the racist code that reserved “boy” for black men and “son” for white ones?) “At least there was some civility,” he added. “But today, you look at the other side and…

News, as the columnist Walter Lippmann wrote a century ago, comes to us “helter-skelter.” This is fine, he said, in simple cases like a baseball score or a weather report, but where the picture is more nuanced, “as for example in the matter of the success of a policy, or the social conditions among a foreign people…where the real answer is neither yes nor no, but subtle and a matter of balanced evidence,” then journalism “causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding and even misinterpretation.” One could hardly find a better example of the maladies Lippmann diagnosed than in President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again orders to attack Iran. Reporters are desperate to write the kind of hushed-breath tick-tock accounts in which experienced warriors and diplomats make life-or-death decisions based on a…

ELIZABETH WARREN HAS A STOry she wants you to hear. She told it over and over across the state of Iowa on Memorial Day weekend. You could find the repetition a sign that she’s on autopilot, but in person, the opposite effect comes across: that this story is so important that she can’t afford to get a detail wrong. Her approach is chock-full of policy, sure; “I’ve got a plan for that” has become a rallying cry. Her flurry of proposals—for a wealth tax that would fund free public college and universal child care and pre-K, for a “Green Marshall Plan,” for canceling student debt, and for fighting the opioid crisis—is earning her headlines and driving her recent success with voters. In a national Economist/YouGov poll in mid-June, she grabbed…

Namwali Serpell’s debut novel, The Old Drift, asks a lot of big questions about Zambia but also more generally about the history of the postcolonial world: How does a nation come into being? How does the intimacy between two people change the world around them? What are the politics and ethics of remembering the past and imagining the future? The scope of these questions is necessarily too wide even for a novel of nearly 600 pages, but just raising them opens us up to a world humming with human life and complexity, and some nonhuman murmurings. The Old Drift is a multigenerational tale, following three Zambian women, two white and one black, as well as their descendants over the course of almost a century—a century in which a nation is…

70.8M People worldwide forcibly displaced by persecution, conflict, violence, or human-rights violations by the end of 2018—a record number 13.6M People newly displaced in 2018 138.6K Refugee children unaccompanied by or separated from their parents (likely an underestimate) 67% Percentage of the world’s refugees who come from just five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Somalia, and South Sudan 3.7M Refugees in Turkey in 2018, the country with the world’s most for the fifth year in a row 22,491 Refugees resettled in the United States in 2018—the fewest since 1980…

In one of the largest-ever investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, US prosecutors and regulators determined that Walmart used middlemen to bribe officials around the world for more than a decade. The Obama administration imposed a $600 million fine, but on June 20, the Delaware-incorporated company agreed to pay just $282 million—out of annual revenues of $500 billion. The Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched their investigation in 2012, after The New York Times reported that Walmart shelled out millions in illegal payoffs to enact a rapid-expansion scheme in Mexico. The inquiry led investigators across the globe, with the company’s alleged misdeeds ranging from paying $400,000 to an unnamed “sorceress” in Brazil who could speed up the building-permit process to funneling money to a landlord…

It is no exaggeration to say that Jay Toole is a living legend. Born in the South Bronx in 1948 and kicked out of her family’s home for being gay, she spent decades on the street before entering the New York City shelter system in the late 1990s. Eventually, Toole cofounded Queers for Economic Justice in 2002 and became director of the organization’s pioneering Shelter Project, where she spent over a decade advocating for queer homeless people in the city’s shelters. Toole is, in her own words, an activist, a storyteller, and a “Super Butch,” as well as a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall riots. —Naomi Gordon-Loebl NGL: So, Jay, you grew up in New York? JT: I was born and raised in the South Bronx. My mom was in…

AT 10:52 AM ON FRIDAY, MAY 3, A LARGE BUS EMBLAZONED WITH DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY DECALS, its windows whited out, stops outside the little adobe City Square Church less than a mile south of downtown Phoenix. The doors open, and 50 bedraggled asylum seekers, men and women with their children in tow or clasped to their breasts—and all, without exception, brown-skinned—descend the steps of the bus. All of them have bracelets with identifying information on their right wrist. On other occasions, when detention centers run out of bracelets, activists report, the guards have simply written the identifying numbers onto the immigrants’ forearms in black Sharpie. Disconcertingly, Eddie Calderon, a 23-year-old DACA recipient who works for Jews for Justice and spends his days helping immigrants, tells me this on Holocaust…

Even when the garlic crop is good,something else is always dying— the peas withering in the afternoon we hopedfor rain instead of watering, the tomatoes over-shaded. It should teach us somethingabout pathos or fate, but really couldn’t we have tried harder? Predictedthe week of heat when the spinach bolted? The trouble with gardeningis there’s rain and wind and sun to blame, like the woman in the buffer zoneoutside the clinic who spat at me and screamed What kind of man is he to bring you here?while I held your hand, and our daughter curled in her crib at home with the sitter.Afterward, I dozed against you on a park bench overlooking the cityuntil I was ready to go back to work. But that’s not gardening.And still there’s the garlic— those…