Innehållsförteckning för July 29/August 5, 2019 från The Nation

In Defense of Aesthetes I found James McAuley’s analysis of Renaud Camus [“Killer Kitsch,” July 1/8] broadly persuasive, but I think he’s mistaken to claim “the aesthete is a natural reactionary.” Certain species of aesthete—e.g., the fussy period fetishist Camus seems to be—do tend that way, and many examples come to mind (Céline, Pound, Riefenstahl, and Marinetti, all of whom McAuley mentions). But if an aesthete is someone who takes questions of beauty and representation seriously, who meditates as deeply as one can on the means and ends of art, who sees the pursuit of art as braided inextricably with life itself—and, for me, that is what an aesthete is—there is nothing natural at all about the association of the aesthetic with political reaction. There are a great many aesthetes…

“I can’t photo of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and get the image out of my mind.” I received this text from my wife hours after seeing the his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, drowned in the Rio Grande. For the next 48 hours, the devastating photo was every where we looked. We are choosing to ignore evidence of atrocity, to look away. When my wife says she can’t handle looking at such awful images, I know how she feels. As the creative adviser at Independent Diplomat—a nonprofit that supports democratic groups and opposition movements fighting oppression—I’ve spent years working with images coming out of Syria, trying to draw the public’s attention to the tragedy that has been unfolding there. And I am the father of a 21-month-old, so I am understandably…

Remember 2017? Those were the days. In Trump’s first year, we marched and demonstrated constantly, for women’s rights, for immigrants, for science, for the planet, and for the release of his tax returns. We jammed the airports to protest the Muslim travel ban, subscribed to civic action sites like 5 Calls, and made phoning and postcarding part of our daily routines. We confronted Republican lawmakers at their town halls and even picketed the homes of Democrats like Senator Chuck Schumer, who seemed too eager to compromise with Trump. Inevitably—and rightly—protest turned into politics and the patient, sometimes frustrating local organizing that electing new leaders requires. We took back the House and made important progress in the states, including Virginia, New Mexico, New York, and Maine. Black voters mobilized, and so…

DONALD TRUMP WILL NOT BE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES FOREVER. HE WILL LOSE HIS REELECTION BID IN 2020 or be term-limited out of office in 2024. Or perhaps the inevitable result of human frailty will do its work and put an end to Trump’s ongoing illegal reign. Most people now living will outlast his presidency and be left to pick up the pieces of the shattered nation he will leave behind. But Trump’s Court—the collection of judges and justices now swarming our judicial system, nominated and confirmed to lifetime appointments on his recommendation—will linger, like an infected wound poisoning the body politic even after the initial injury has scabbed over. As of this writing, the Trump administration has had 123 federal judges confirmed, including 41 to the federal courts…

Position: Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Age: 46 Hostile to: Human rights, dignity, campaign-finance regulation One of the worst things about Donald Trump is that he’s made some people forget what a truly terrible president George W. Bush was. When it comes to judicial appointments, we have to remember that many of the judges appointed by Trump would have also been appointed under George Bush, Jeb Bush, or even the sycophantic Billy Bush. We have to remember that all Republicans, including the never-Trumpers, have been complicit in this conservative takeover of the federal judiciary. James Ho is the terrifying amalgam of 30 years of post-Reagan conservative legal malpractice. He somehow combines all of the old-school conservative night-marishness with being a new-school Trump warrior doused in inexperience, partisan hackery, and naked…

Position: Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Age: 47 Hostile to: LGBTQ rights, women’s rights For conservatives, it’s no longer enough to nominate judges who merely won’t protect women, the LGBTQ community, and people of color from discrimination; now they want judges who have been on the front lines of the culture wars, firing off rounds and hurling grenades. Kyle Duncan is that kind of culture warrior. Prior to being elevated to the Fifth Circuit, he spent time as Texas’s assistant solicitor general and worked for the Louisiana attorney general. Those are fairly standard positions for a conservative appointment. But in 2012, Duncan joined the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which was called “God’s Rottweilers” by Politico. The Becket Fund is a nonprofit religious legal organization that seeks out cases through…

After the impossibility of the movementof any object through time was raised in lightof the fact that, in time’s smallest unit,no motion can take place (which is to say,that any given object in it is at rest, orif it isn’t, then the unit isn’t actuallythe smallest, because it can still be dividedfurther, specifically: into a time when the objectwas in one place, and then the timejust after, when it’s in another, and insofar as any length of time is composed of a finitenumber of such smallest unitsduring which, by definition, no motioncan take place, it follows that no motioncan take place in any aggregate of theseunits either—which is to say, the flying arrowis motionless, a paradox one mightbe inclined to dismiss with other oddnessesthat don’t immediately fit our senseof what…

The Supreme Court’s recent decision refusing to interfere with extreme partisan gerrymandering not only seriously undermines our already fragile democracy; it also brings to mind the court’s acquiescence more than a century ago in laws that denied the right to vote to millions of black Southerners. In particular, it is reminiscent of the court’s 1903 ruling in Giles v. Harris, a largely forgotten case in which the justices, as today, claimed they were not authorized to adjudicate “political” matters. In that case, Jackson W. Giles, the president of the Colored Men’s Suffrage Association, sued to overturn voting requirements openly designed to disenfranchise black voters in Alabama after Reconstruction. The state’s Constitution of 1901 allowed registrars to bar from voting those who lacked “good character” or did not understand “the duties…

For the first time in decades, the question of corporate power has become central to the US presidential campaign. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders have all emphasized the threat that monopolies pose to our politics and our economy. Still, there’s a basic fact that the public has yet to fully internalize: US industries are far more concentrated than they were 20 years ago, and the economy may even be as concentrated as it was during the middle of the 20th century. Consider the metaphors we use to understand how our economy works now compared with how it worked in the past. For many, the period from the 1940s to the 1970s was one of Big Business and large conglomerates. We think of the TV show Mad Men,…

From January to May of this year, approximately 3,000 journalists in the US were laid off or offered a buyout. The industry hasn’t seen a job market this bad since the height of the recession in 2009, and so far this summer, the news about the news hasn’t been getting any better. The only local paper in Youngstown, Ohio, The Vindicator, will close in August, and 144 full-time jobs will be lost. The Center for American Progress, a think tank aligned with the Democratic Party, is trying to off-load its news site, ThinkProgress, which faces a $3 million deficit this year, according to The Daily Beast. First Look Media announced it would shutter Topic, an award-winning online magazine, and stop funding The Nib, a progressive political cartoon site. The crisis…

Position: Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Age: 53 Hostile to: Civil rights, federal laws, gun regulations It makes sense that our Twitter president would nominate a Twitter judge. Nearly every story about Texas Judge Don Willett mentions his Twitter feed, mainly because he has one and it’s exceedingly rare for a judge to have any kind of presence on social media. Unlike Trump, Willett has tended to cop an “aww, shucks” Twitter persona, praising his mother and presenting himself as an affable, God-loving family man. Hidden among the dad jokes and puppy pictures, however, you’ll find a meaner streak that exemplifies his judicial opinions. In one tweet, Willett, a fierce opponent of marriage equality, joked that he could “support recognizing a constitutional right to marry bacon.” In another, he called…

Position: District Court for the Western District of Tennessee Age: 64 Hostile to: Islam, voting rights, reproductive justice, gay rights, evolution The US Supreme Court is, for the most part, an appellate court. So are the various circuit courts of appeals. The distinction between an appellate court and a trial court—or a district court, as they’re known in the federal system—can sometimes seem like legal mumbo-jumbo to nonlawyers, but it’s important to understand what these various courts do. An appellate court can only make rulings based on the law, while a district court is the finder of facts. Technically, when making rulings, appellate courts are almost always bound by the facts as defined by district courts, giving them crucial power to shape how legal cases proceed. (Granted, the higher courts…

Position: Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Age: 47 Hostile to: Reproductive rights, judicial precedent If Trump wins a second term and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turns out to be mortal, then Seventh Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett could be on the Supreme Court. As reported by Axios, the president has told members of his inner circle, “I’m saving her for Ginsburg.” It’s a prospect that makes the right wing positively giddy. The hard right wanted Barrett to replace Anthony Kennedy when his seat came open last year. At the time, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat tweeted that Barrett would “trigger the libs.” National Review’s David French argued that only someone like Trump could nominate her, writing, “Would another Republican have the guts to put forward a nominee who would…

18K Number of wasps in “super nests,” which have been proliferating across Alabama because of the warming weather 5.5M Low estimate of the additional number of people in Argentina, Chile, Canada, and the US who will be at risk of snakebite by 2050 as a result of climate change 20% Predicted increase in Lyme disease cases in the US by mid-century, assuming the average temperature rises by only 2°C 1B People who could be newly exposed to dengue fever, chikungunya, and the Zika virus between 2050 and 2080 as mosquitoes migrate to warming regions 60K Square miles of US pitch pine forests that will become vulnerable to southern pine beetles as a result of warming temperatures…

This is not an era of small-business competition. In the past two decades, 75% of industries have become more concentrated. There are fewer companies… Number of US public companies: …and they’re larger. Share of workers at companies with 10,000 employees or more: Lack of competition means businesses keep more 8% of the money. Sources: “Are U.S. Industries Becoming More Concentrated?” Grullon, Larkin, and Michaely; Federal Reserve Economic Data 2019 infographic: Tracy Matsue Loeffelholz…

In a recent New York Times editorial titled “Why We Should Stop Fetishizing Privacy,” entrepreneur Heidi Messer posited the ultimate list of techno-optimist clichés. Tech companies drive the economy, bringing health, wealth, jobs, and truth. Those who caution against a host of risks such as monopoly, hubris, and shortsightedness should be dismissed as ignorant “privacy evangelists.” Public regulation is bad because tech companies have “the talent and resources” to protect us against cyberwarfare and “foreign and criminal intrusion.” We should follow the example of “digital natives,” who “start with an awareness that their data isn’t private.” According to Messer, public oversight would only gum up the workings of all the utopian delights of this shiny new world. Given such blessings, why would we want to break up big tech companies?…

Position: Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Age: 46 Hostile to: Children, health care, immigrants, lung health Chad Readler is what happens when Democrats refuse to make judicial appointments a key factor in campaigns for the US Senate. Readler was nominated by Trump to fill a seat on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals before the end of the 115th Congress, when Republicans held just a one-vote majority in the chamber. His nomination was quietly sent back to Trump without the candidate receiving an up-or-down vote. Emboldened by the 2018 midterm results, which saw Republicans gaining seats in the Senate, Trump renominated Readler and 50 other unsuccessful Trump nominees in front of the current 116th Congress. This time, Readler squeaked by, 52-47, despite the decision by Republican Senator Susan Collins of…

Position: DC Court of Appeals Age: 46 Hostile to: Consent, women’s rights, regulation, disability rights, health care It wasn’t enough for Republicans to put an alleged attempted rapist on the Supreme Court. They had to double down by confirming a rape apologist to fill Brett Kavanaugh’s seat on the DC Circuit. Neomi Rao’s history of retrograde views on rape, sexual assault, and violence against women should disqualify her from a seat in the Game of Thrones writers’ room, much less a position as a powerful federal judge. That all the Republican senators saw fit to confirm Rao is an indictment of their entire party. As an undergraduate at Yale University, Rao was a conservative hot-taker. Here’s her view on date rape: “Although I am certainly not arguing that date rape…

Armando Iannucci is happy, he assures us, that he stopped making Veep when he did. The Scottish filmmaker left the show he created after its fourth season, in April 2015, citing the strain of commuting between Baltimore and London. A month later, Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy. “I’m so glad I don’t do Veep anymore because I don’t know how I’d respond to the situation in America now,” Iannucci said during a Q&A in Sydney in 2017. He confessed to IndieWire that he was “kind of relieved” to have handed Veep off to a new showrunner, David Mandel, just before the Trump era began. “What can you do and say that hasn’t already been said and done by him?” Iannucci asked. “Personally, I just find it difficult to be…