Innehållsförteckning för September 30, 2019 från The Nation

This September 11 marks the 18th year since hijackers seized four US airliners, plowing three into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fourth into a field in southern Pennsylvania. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and deranged our politics. In the fraught months that followed, US leaders declared one war after another, miring this country in conflicts from Central Asia to the Middle East. There is still no end in sight. The longest of these conflicts—in fact, the longest war in US history—is the one that George W. Bush launched against the Taliban less than a month after 9/11. The mission, he claimed, was “to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” He…

Three years ago, Ady Barkan, then 32, had a flourishing career as a progressive activist; a wife, Rachael, who’d just landed a dream job as a professor; and a chubby baby boy named Carl. The two had just bought a beautiful house and were picturing the decades they would spend there together. They were, Ady writes in his new memoir, Eyes to the Wind, “the happiest and luckiest people we knew.” Then in the fall of 2016, after Ady felt some weakness in his left hand, a neurologist gave him a death sentence: a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Since then, Ady Barkan has become arguably the most influential activist in America. Many people first heard about him when he happened to be on the same plane as…

Four days before the shooting, my husband asked me whether I’d ordered guns online. This story takes place in the United States, which means I need to be more specific about the shooting. As a matter of fact, there were two that week—one in Gilroy, California, and one in El Paso, Texas. We had this conversation after Gilroy but before El Paso. “What are you talking about?” I asked, a chuckle forming in my throat at the absurdity of the question. My husband was looking at his phone, squinting as he tried to decipher an e-mail alert about a package from a gun dealer. “It says here that your delivery was redirected. It’s waiting for you at the UPS facility in downtown Los Angeles.” Someone was shipping me guns? What…

WHEN PATRICIA DISCOVERED SHE WAS PREGNANT, SHE TRIED INDUCING AN ABORTION WITH REMEDIES SHE READ ABOUT on the Internet: rue tea, aloe, and unsalted bean soup. None of them worked. Weeks earlier, the 16-year-old was raped by a taxi driver rumored to control the marijuana trade in her neighborhood on the outskirts of Guadalajara, a bustling city in the state of Jalisco, in Mexico’s conservative heartland. Finally Patricia, who asked us not to use her real name, told her mother, Alma. Years earlier, Alma’s mother ignored her daughter’s reports of sexual abuse, and Alma resolved not to make the same mistake. Alma sat her daughter down, and as they talked, Alma took notes. She stressed that whatever happened next was Patricia’s choice, writing “your decision” in a loopy scrawl and…

Letters and pamphlets are good. Petitions, better:Ye who have pens, prepare to use them now.We’re going to need all of you to gohouse to house to collect signatures.We’ve been called impertinent intermeddlers,incarnate devils—and that is how we knowour petitions are at work. No names are too few.A name is a truth: sometimes like a hammer,sometimes like a fire. A name is a voice.We must do with our might what our hands findfor our sisters’ deliverance. We are boundwith them; remember their bonds. It’s not a choice.Now, who is ready to knock on her first door?Who is ready to be Christ’s agitator, Christ’s martyr?…

ACROSS 1 Parts of article used and reused in parallel (6,6) 9 Senior Department of Justice figure in the Obama administration loses face (5) 10 Sound happy about bank customer (9) 11 That Italian in pretentious gym is a classic example (9) 12 In the company of a little bearded man, largely in withdrawal (5) 13 Yes, a stew is like pie (4) 14 Not fully grown, Bob interrupts upward movement (10) 17 Where a shoemaker might vacation if all else fails? (4,6) 19 Lying back, sleeps for a stretch (4) 22 Beg to start a trick after pass (5) 23 Absence of content as Times pens medley (9) 26 Goal: Put one in operation after camping? (9) 27 Texas city’s 15th-best option? (5) 28 For nothing, like old batteries?…

Recently, the Democratic National Committee rejected calls for a presidential primary debate dedicated to climate change. DNC chair Tom Perez argued that focusing on climate change alone would be unfair to those whose campaigns are more focused on other issues—which might be a compelling argument if experts said those matters had the potential to lead to civilizational collapse. This was a missed opportunity to demand that the candidates who have not authored or signed on to an ambitious proposal to transform our economy and energy infrastructure over a relatively short time frame—like the Green New Deal—explain how they would pay for their more moderate approaches. “How will we pay for it?” is rarely asked in discussions of the military budget or trillion-dollar corporate tax cuts. But the media consistently demands…

Over the first week of September, while much of the media’s focus on President Trump concerned whether he Sharpie-adulterated a map detailing Hurricane Dorian’s likely trajectory, his administration was on a wrecking-ball tear, introducing shocking attacks on environmental regulations and further corroding the rights of immigrants. Twice a week, in my new online column “Signal:Noise,” I’ll be separating the important stuff from the omnipresent distractions of Trumpland, the wheat from the chaff. Oftentimes, of course, the significant developments are covered by major news organizations, but too briefly, getting speedily drowned out by the surrounding noise, the fluff, the entertaining diversions. Other times, important changes largely escape public scrutiny; instead they get buried in the Federal Register, appear in obscure policy briefs, or are reported only by local news outlets. I…

NO ONE HAD PLANNED TO HOUSE REFUGEES IN KASSEL DISTRICT IN western Germany. But then, no one had seen this many refugees arrive all at once, either—at least not since the aftermath of World War II. “Essentially, we were told we needed to find housing for a thousand people from one day to the next,” Hermann-Josef Klüber, the vice president of the Kassel district government, told me. “All of a sudden, the buses started arriving every hour.” It was the late summer of 2015, and Chancellor Angela Merkel had made the decision not to close the border to asylum seekers but rather to process their applications in Germany, helping to relieve a desperate situation in countries to the south and east. The choice was made in Berlin, but the work…

4 Consecutive years with at least one Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic—a record set this year 2017 Year when three of the five costliest US hurricanes occurred: Harvey, Maria, and Irma $1.7T Total cost of the 250 weather and climate disasters with damages of at least $1 billion that the US endured since 1980 185 mph Hurricane Dorian’s wind speed at landfall—tied for an Atlantic record with the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 76K Number of people left homeless on Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands as a result of Dorian 1 Number of news segments (out of 216) on ABC, CBS, and NBC from August 28 to September 5 that linked climate change to hurricanes like Dorian, according to Media Matters…

WARNING TRUMP IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH Since Donald Trump took office, his administration has worked tirelessly to make it easier for businesses to destroy the environment and taint our food. A recent New York Times analysis found that his White House has killed, stymied, or targeted 84 environmental rules. Among the regulations the administration has set its sights on are those regarding chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide linked to neurological damage in children. Chlorpyrifos was once widely sprayed on crops. But after a series of studies confirmed its ill effects, the Environmental Protection Agency banned the substance from homes, schools, and day cares in 2000. Yet the agency allowed farmers to keep using chlorpyrifos on crops as long as it was sharply limited on staples of children’s food, such as…

Mistaken on the path the storm might take,Unable to acknowledge a mistake,He got a map of Dorian, and thenHe fixed it with his trusty Sharpie pen. So, soon will he show pictures of his wall,Which stretches now not many miles at all,And, using this same strategy again,Extend it with his trusty Sharpie pen? Will he—for Kim, to whom he’s been attracted—Show photos that have missiles all redacted?With ink will he display AfghanistanAs if we’ve disappeared the Taliban? Will he, this most duplicitous of men,Now weaponize his trusty Sharpie pen?…

BERNIE SANDERS’S GREEN NEW DEAL IS NOTHING SHORT OF REMARKABLE. It faces the climate challenge more honestly and comprehensively than any other proposal yet. It calls for government action on a heroic scale—committing the United States to do its fair share to cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, in line with the findings of the landmark scientific report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last October—and outlines a set of bold policies to achieve that extremely ambitious goal. The plan’s 10-year, $16.3 trillion price tag raised eyebrows among the usual inside-the-Beltway suspects, but the Democratic presidential candidate isn’t backing down. “The fundamental question is do we respond to the degree that the scientific community tells us we must, or do we not?” Sanders…

Somebody had to be the firstto amass the proof from slaveholders’ mouths:twenty thousand newspapers from the South,the unthinking testimony parsed,scissored carefully into strips. Lips pursed,the sisters cut out words as if words were clothfor dresses, their fingers dark with the newsprint’s truth,though it was not half the truth, or the worst.“I burnt her with a hot iron.” “Has one ear slit.”“Ran away—has two or three scars made by a knife.”“Has no toes on his left foot.” “Has buckshot in his calf.”The scissors lisping, I have seen it. I have seen it.Their path from Charleston the path the scissors traversed—Let it be accursed. Let it be accursed.…