Innehållsförteckning för October 7, 2019 från The Nation

Sold Out, Again I recently downloaded your magazine from the Braille and Audio Reading Download website produced by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. I found Mara Kardas-Nelson’s article about St. James Parish [“To Stay or Go?” Sept. 9/16] to be the sad same ol’ same ol’. I live in Louisiana, should have had the sense to get out a long time ago. I do not understand why our politicians give away so much—so much in taxes that businesses do not pay, so much in natural resources—and yet Louisiana is so often found at the bottom or near the bottom in so many metrics, whether in education, income, working conditions, etc. Texas has a bigger petrochemical industry but seems not to give so much away in…

To earlier generations of Nation readers, the phrase “Speak for yourself, John,” was what we’d now call a meme. In Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” it’s Mayflower passenger Priscilla Mullins’s retort to John Alden, who courts her on behalf of his friend Standish (while secretly in love with her himself). Though the story is likely apocryphal, Mullins and Alden did marry, producing a host of descendants, including Longfellow himself and, according to his new memoir—The Nation’s exclusive excerpt begins on page 12—Edward Snowden. Even for those of us who’ve followed the Snowden revelations closely, Permanent Record is full of surprises. Far from the low-level IT drone depicted in most early press accounts (and even further from the naive, possibly traitorous Putin pawn trashed by his critics), the narrator of…

The essays collected in Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, come together around a central verdict: that the climate crisis cannot be separated from colonialism, indigenous genocide, and slavery. These historical processes established not only the extractive industries that have led to climate change but also an extractive mindset, “a way of viewing both the natural world and the majority of its inhabitants as resources to use up,” Klein writes. For her, the best way to fight both is with the Green New Deal, which offers a way to “get clean” as well as to “begin to redress the founding crimes of our nations.” LF: Many of the essays focus on what you call the “deep stories” that are interfering with people’s…

I WAS JUST SHY OF MY NINTH BIRTHDAY WHEN MY family moved to Maryland. We lived in Crofton, halfway between Annapolis and Washington, DC, where the developments all have quaint names like Crofton Towne, Crofton Mews, The Ridings. Crofton itself is a planned community fitted around the curves of the Crofton Country Club. (The fact that a country club is at the center tells you everything.) Our street was Knights Bridge Turn, a broad, lazy loop of split-level housing, wide driveways, and two-car garages. I had a Huffy ten-speed bike and delivered The Capital, a venerable newspaper published in Annapolis, whose daily distribution became distressingly erratic, especially in the winter, especially between Crofton Parkway and Route 450, which, as it passed by our neighborhood, acquired a different name: Defense Highway.…

IN APRIL A GROUP OF OIL COMPANIES—INCLUDING BP, EXXONMOBIL, and Chevron—made a $4.3 billion bet off the coast of Azerbaijan, in the Caspian Sea. The companies approved a plan to expand deepwater drilling operations there, boosting oil production by as much as 100,000 barrels a day—taking advantage of “world-class assets,” in the words of one executive. But according to a recent analysis by the think tank Carbon Tracker, the Caspian Sea investment, along with a number of fossil fuel projects approved by major energy companies in 2018 totaling $50 billion, makes financial sense on one condition: if countries around the world fail to rein in carbon emissions enough to meet the goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to limit the rise in average global temperature to well below…

Why should we be in favor of socialism? Many thinkers—philosophers, economists, sociologists, political theorists—have labored over this question and advanced arguments of various kinds. Some appeal to fairness: Only a fundamental change in the distribution of property and social goods will arrange society in such a way that capital and inherited wealth do not award advantages mainly to a privileged few. Others invoke the idea of human flourishing: People can realize themselves and achieve true happiness only if they have the freedom to pursue their individual and collective goals, and they can do that only if they do not find their life paths obstructed at every turn by economic need. Then there is the instability claim: As an economic system, capitalism is intrinsically unsound and, quite apart from any moral…

A year ago, inspired by Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg, young people around the world began climate striking—walking out of school for a few hours on Fridays to demand action against the global warming that darkens their future. In March, when 1.4 million kids around the world walked out of school, they asked for adults to join them next time. That next time is September 20 (in a few countries, September 27), and it is shaping up to be the biggest day of climate action in the planet’s history. Everyone from the members of big trade unions to over 1,200 workers at Amazon’s headquarters, and from college students to senior citizens, will be setting the day aside to rally in cities and towns for faster action from the world’s governments and…

It was only a matter of time. By all accounts, national security adviser John Bolton had long alienated many of the key players in the Trump White House. The flap over the Afghanistan peace agreement, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo favoring a deal with the Taliban and Bolton opposing one, was merely the final straw, leading to his abrupt dismissal on the evening of September 9. While personal antipathy—Bolton was widely reviled for his brash manner and self-serving ways—and discord over Afghanistan were the immediate causes of his ouster, it was a deeper rift over US foreign policy that doomed his tenure at the White House. Though aligned on certain issues, Bolton and Donald Trump possess very different visions of America’s role in the world, and with Bolton out…

When I first read The Handmaid’s Tale decades ago, I thought Offred was a wimp. She’s living in a violent, misogynist Christian theocracy, raped and impregnated, forbidden to read, and sees hanged corpses on her mandatory daily walk—and she misses hand cream? In fact, Offred’s lack of obvious heroism was one of the novel’s strengths. It let the reader identify with her and see daily life in Gilead in all its grinding, mundane awfulness. It’s the source of the novel’s strange, indelible aura of eerie depression. Besides, was Offred really so wimpy? If you had to live as a reproductive slave, thinking about small lost comforts might help you avoid the fates of feistier characters: mutilated, executed, or shipped off to die in a radioactive wasteland. The wonderful TV series…

It felt unfair, being forced by my parents to go to sleep—before they went to sleep, before my sister went to sleep, when I wasn’t even tired. Life’s first little injustice. Many of the first 2,000 or so nights of my life ended in civil disobedience: crying, begging, bargaining, until—on night 2,193, the night I turned six years old—I discovered direct action. The authorities weren’t interested in calls for reform, and I wasn’t born yesterday. I had just had one of the best days of my young life, complete with friends, a party, and even gifts, and I wasn’t about to let it end just because everyone else had to go home. So I went about covertly resetting all the clocks in the house by several hours. The microwave’s clock…

ACROSS 1 and 14D At the 11th hour, securing bishop left in the custody of libertine singer-actor (6,10) 4 Excerpt from “Essay on a Radish” —this might be the last word (8) 10 Assembled blue blanket with front trimmed (5) 11 Political dealings in Nixon/Reagan era (9) 12 In the absence of leadership, gender pride muddled through (7) 13 Make a mistake stuffing dessert in state capital (6) 15 Divide and draw these bananas (9) 17 Classic movie (King and I) about alpha male (5) 18 Said, “Uncle, do mire mire?” (5) 20 The author dines irregularly with long-suffering man—that’s a crime (6,3) 22 In Milan, you committed to one suit from the tarot cards (6) 24 Coach in chaotic terrain (7) 26 Showed the last thing to happen in…

52 Years Israel has occupied the Jordan Valley in the West Bank 8,775 Number of Palestinians living in the areas of the Jordan Valley that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to annex 22–30 Percentage of the West Bank that will be annexed if Netanyahu proceeds 85 Percentage of land in the Jordan Valley that Palestinians are already barred from using or entering 20 Average available liters of water per day per person for Palestinians in the Jordan Valley 50–100 Minimum liters of water per day per person recommended by the World Health Organization…

Student debt is transforming the lives of young adults, and the evidence of its damage is piling up. Student debt drives people away from public service jobs toward higher-paying ones with no civic purpose. It is linked with lower rates of entrepreneurship, which is deadly for our economy that already has too few new businesses. And it is associated with a delay in all kinds of markers of adulthood: buying a car, purchasing a home, even starting a family. As the number of people carrying student debt into their late 30s and early 40s increases, these effects will drag on, with ripple effects across the economy. But student debt affects not just the student debtors themselves. It is reworking the lives of parents and families. In her new book Indebted,…

Uber and Lyft have long been dogged by criticism over their drivers’ working conditions, and state governments have done little to bring the companies’ practices in line with existing labor standards. That is set to change with the passage of Assembly Bill 5 in California, which Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is expected to sign. The law will make it harder to misclassify employees as independent contractors and could give more than a million California workers labor protections like the minimum wage, health benefits, and sick leave. This will apply to workers in many industries, but AB5 is receiving international attention because it could require Uber and Lyft to consider their drivers as employees. Yet Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer (and presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law), insists that Uber does…

If the Me Too movement exploded with a reported story, its backlash began with an apology. “I so respect all women and regret what happened,” the disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein wrote in a long-winded response to The New York Times’ article. “I cannot be more remorseful about the people I hurt.” Weinstein’s apology, which veered between subjects like the National Rifle Association, Jay-Z’s album 4:44, and his mom (“I won’t disappoint her”), was too ridiculous to be taken seriously. But it marked the beginning of a genre: Like accursed clockwork, it seemed that every man who found himself facing even minor consequences for his mistreatment of women was suddenly issuing an apology. These letters ranged from semi-self-exonerations, such as the one composed by Matt Lauer—“some of what is being…