Innehållsförteckning för October 14, 2019 från The Nation

Unrecognized Labor Many thanks for Melissa Range’s fine poem “The Grimké Sisters at Work on Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery as It Is (1838)” [September 30]. The powerful book that was born from the sisters’ work, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, was published by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839. Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimké’s husband, is generally credited as the author (though the book was published without any authors listed) because he was the head of publications at the society at the time. However, the book was really coedited by Angelina Grimké Weld, her sister Sarah Grimké, and Theodore Weld. While he shaped the structure of the book, internal evidence suggests that Grimké Weld wrote the introduction. And when the sisters clipped the articles, notices,…

Fishing, Gone? 126 Pounds that a Chinook salmon, Alaska’s state fish, can weigh $595M Estimated value of Alaska’s commercial salmon harvest in 2018 $3.3B Average annual export value of Alaska’s seafood 55°F Warmest water temperature a salmon can handle before its health starts to decline 81.7°F Water temperature recorded in July in the Deshka River, a major salmon stream north of Anchorage 1M Number of pink salmon in the Shaktoolik River threatened by warming waters…

This year three people on The Nation’s masthead have been long-listed for a National Book Award. Columnist Laila Lalami has been nominated in the fiction category for The Other Americans, her novel about the mysterious death of a Moroccan immigrant in a small suburb in Southern California. The Guardian wrote that her book “accumulates a kind of revelatory power.” One of our two poetry editors, Carmen Giménez Smith, was nominated in poetry for Be Recorder, an urgent poetics of queerness, immigration, and motherhood. Booklist said that the “collection is everything poetry needs to be in our age of hateful, anti-​ intellectual race-baiting: deeply thoughtful, urgently provocative, and endlessly imaginative.” And finally, frequent contributor and editorial board member Greg Grandin was long-listed for nonfiction for The End of the Myth: From…

Trump Says Ukraine Call Was ‘Perfectly Fine and Routine’ Yes, of course, I discussed Biden’s son,And, like everything else I have doneAs I manage this well-oiled machine,It was perfectly fine and routine. Yes, of course, Stormy Daniels was paidTo stay hushed on which candidate strayed.And that kept her from making a scene.It was perfectly fine and routine. Use this office to feather my nest?Cage the children described as oppressed?Those are some of the habits of mineNow considered routine—and they’re fine.…

“I AM UNDOCUMENTED, AND I HAVE THREE KIDS. ONE LIVES IN PALMDALE, two with me. They’re citizens. I’m from Nayarit, Mexico. I’ve been in California 33 years.” The speaker, a middle-aged woman I’ll call M, who used to take under-the-table cleaning jobs, has found it ever harder in recent years to find employment. These days, she makes a few dollars here and there by picking up bottles off the streets to recycle. M lives in the San Fernando Gardens public housing complex in Pacoima, in the northern reaches of Los Angeles. Because she is undocumented, she is ineligible for public assistance, but as long as she pays the rent, she is allowed to live with her family in the public housing that her children legally qualify for. Currently, the family…

You might know the story of Justin Vernon’s first album as Bon Iver; it’s been repeated so often that it reads like hyperbole. A man, disillusioned with life, retreats to a cabin in the dead of winter and writes songs about a lost love. That was in 2006, and the resulting record, 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago, has been credited with giving new life to contemporary folk music. Twelve years later, Bon Iver is a full-fledged band with a growing list of collaborators and two Grammy Awards to its name. Vernon has become a star, lending his voice to collaborations with rappers Kanye West and Travis Scott and experimental singer-producer James Blake, among others. Yet as Vernon has ascended, there’s a sense that he would rather be off somewhere alone—plucking…

In August 2018 a photographer snapped a shot of a girl sitting alone outside the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. Next to her lay a sign in Swedish that said, “School strike for climate.” The girl skipped school for three weeks and each Friday after that, heading to Parliament and handing out leaflets that read, “I am doing this because you adults are shitting on my future.” Greta Thunberg is no longer striking alone. The climate activist, now 16 years old, was joined on September 20 by millions of others in a wave of strikes that rippled through cities and towns around the world. Enormous crowds marched and sang and chanted through the streets of Jakarta and Johannesburg, Warsaw and Brisbane, Athens and San Salvador, led mostly by kids and teenagers.…

Dear Liza, I am the editor of an alumni magazine that is sent to a diverse alumni population. I strive to be inclusive in my coverage and usually succeed. A recent issue did not contain any African Americans except in the athletics section, and an African American faculty member complained to me about it, ignoring the many editions that show excellent diversity. I feel it is my job to go where the story is first and worry about diversity second. To me, her criticism that the African American athletes we featured were stereotypical discounts the very real accomplishments of these students. She believes in representation in every issue in what she considers an acceptable way. How would you respond to this complaint and this instruction? —Flummoxed Dear Flummoxed, It is…

It was not a kind thought that flitted across my mind while I was waiting in the airport in Montreal. The weather was bad, my flight was late, and I was having lunch on the “American side” of the terminal, listening to a big, jovial man talking about his son’s wedding on a plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. The man was discussing ordinary things—the weather, the bride, the wine served, what music they played. Everyone, he said, was dressed in antebellum clothing. “So much fun!” is how he summed it up. “Dancing on graves!” is what went through my mind. Was I being uncharitable? I am the third generation in my family whose body is not legally owned by others—the carnal issue of a legal fiction and a political proof…

For the past several months—and the past three Democratic presidential debates—the party’s two progressive standard-​ bearers, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have been making love, not war. As Warren told Anderson Cooper in the first debate, “Bernie and I have been friends forever.” During the second debate, with both of them on the stage the same night, Warren made a point about the disastrous effects of US trade policy—and Sanders chimed in, saying, “Elizabeth is absolutely right.” When Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney attacked Warren on security policy, Sanders tweeted in the Massachusetts senator’s defense, while Warren has resolutely refused repeated media entreaties to disavow her support for Medicare for All, the Vermont senator’s signature initiative. This absence of infighting on the left—or at least between these two left candidates, since…

The most basic question that the Trump presidency raises is: How the hell did this happen? There is, obviously, no single answer for why this particular miscreant became president of the United States. Were it not for the Russians or WikiLeaks or James Comey, etc., etc., we might still resemble a normal nation. But these isolated explanations do not speak to the larger question of how this jerk got anywhere near the White House in the first place. In the past few months, three authors have sought to address that larger question, and with them, we can begin to see an outline of how the GOP allowed itself to be taken over by people with only a tenuous grasp of reality. In his book American Carnage, Tim Alberta, a former…

More than one in 16 women—or over 3 million women across the United States—were raped the first time they had sex, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That alone is upsetting, but it gets worse: Since the study surveyed only women 18 to 44 years old, the estimates are likely “just the tip of the iceberg,” said Laura Hawks, the main author. “You can imagine that if we asked this of women of all ages, the absolute number would be many millions higher.” The average age these women were assaulted for the first time was 15, and the average age of their assailants was 27. These women were more likely to be immigrants and live below the poverty line. Regardless of how they…

I was born and grew up mostly in Japan, the second of four children of missionary parents who went there in 1955 to convert the Japanese to Lutheranism. Instead, the Japanese converted my family to better eating. Japan’s luscious fruits seduced us first (loquats, persimmons, nashi, the ubiquitous mandarin oranges), but we children fell hard too for its “diner” foods (donburi, ramen) and fishy snacks, especially dried squid and those delectable tiny spicy fish whose bones crunched so satisfyingly when we bit into them. My parents were Western Canadians, so we mostly sat down at dinner to what I still think of as “Lutheran food”—meatloaf, scalloped potatoes, casseroles—but here too Japanese habits slowly transformed our table. Feeding four children on a missionary’s pay is no easy business. Meat was expensive,…

ACROSS 8 Reed concealing sheep left a smoky hole in the ground (8) 9 Operator with tractor trailer in the beginning (6) 10 Rip off HarperCollins’s chief (6) 11 Believing in God and the self, be loyal almost to the end (8) 12 Assuming a flute (4) 14 Roots transformed into trunk (5) 16 Loudly supplicate for the hunted (4) 17 At first, experiments yield redesigned something to keep out the light (6) 18 Marine struggling to stay put (6) 21 50 start to unclog duct (4) 23 Feel bad about decapitated bird (5) 24 Designer employed by Mother Teresa (4) 25 Look for this below—it’s not too complicated (8) 27 Someone aiming for improvements rioted recklessly (6) 29 Wild, wild rice (6) 30 Unbreakable, like 14 entries whose extremities…