Innehållsförteckning för May 4/11, 2020 från The Nation

The Truth About Lies Susie Linfield warns us against “telling lies” [Letters, April 6], then proceeds to demonstrate her commitment to exactly that by claiming, falsely, that I have manufactured “entirely fictitious claims.” Linfield is referring to her central charge in the chapter on me in her book The Lions’ Den: that I invented a fairy tale about the 1976 United Nations Security Council Resolution, which very explicitly called for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along the internationally recognized borders, with guarantees for “the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in the area,” including Israel and the new Palestinian state. In fact, I discussed this resolution accurately, quoting its crucial words and pointing out that it was supported by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan; rejected by…

17.6% Percentage of the Latino population in the US that works in industries most at risk of a coronavirus-led recession—higher than any other demographic 78% Percentage of health care workers who are women 21% Percentage of US Postal Service employees who are black—nearly twice their share of the total workforce 61% Percentage of New York City’s urban transit employees who are black or Latino 25% Percentage of American Indians and Alaska Natives working in service jobs; 18 percent of the total population works in this field 36% Percentage of nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides who are black…

I’ve worked from home for seven years, but my workday is now punctuated by new sounds: the clamor of little feet and loud voices as my young upstairs neighbors learn from home. Every state has closed schools in response to the coronavirus outbreak; some are not resuming the academic year. That has sent at least 55.1 million students home. But many parents have come to count on school as a form of child care while they go to their jobs. Both parents work in nearly two-thirds of married couples with children under the age of 18, and about three-quarters of single mothers and 84 percent of single fathers do. That’s 22.6 million families that now have nowhere to send their children. If parents are lucky enough to have a job…

The catastrophe that is the Donald Trump presidency exceeds human imagination. It wreaks destruction in so many directions simultaneously that any attempt at even a reasonably comprehensive account strains both patience and credulity (to say nothing of column lengths). Hence the need for metaphor. And yet, here again, nothing really works. This inadequacy of language itself is a crucial factor in our inability to recognize the scope of the danger that Trump and his movement represent. Philip Roth has been earning prophecy points of late. He describes a scenario somewhat similar to a Trump presidency in his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, now an HBO miniseries. In its pages, he imagines an American strain of fascism, which he locates in a fictional Charles Lindbergh presidency. Having defeated Franklin Roosevelt…

What a privileged person I amto be relieved to no endand to have you backputting me in my place.Thank you for comingalong! Thank you for ordering me!We’re ending a crucial fewdecades of prime thinkingand doing and conditioningand humming alongwith our able-bodied heads.And now we’re coop-flownaccording to the actuarialsciences. The futureis comprised of supervisedhigh adventures. Those are the mattersof fact weighing downour stacked deck.You prefer the droneof being doneover being done overand I’m lying downwith arms across my chest.I can’t do anything.I can keep my mouthopen. I’m leveling my headwith a disheveled tableand you are above meand I need you to discussme by yourselfaway from this place,and with one of the biscuitsI made earlier, in your hand.We’ve just hadthe last civil disagreement.There will be no otherson this property so longas I’m…

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or go to TheNation.com/StartMakingSense to listen today. STACEY ABRAMS MARGARET ATWOOD CHARLES M. BLOW SHERROD BROWN NOAM CHOMSKY GAIL COLLINS MIKE DAVIS ELIZABETH DREW BARBARA EHRENREICH DANIEL ELLSBERG FRANCES FITZGERALD ERIC FONER THOMAS FRANK HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. MICHELLE GOLDBERG AMY GOODMAN CHRIS HAYES MARGO JEFFERSON DAVID CAY JOHNSTON NAOMI KLEIN RACHEL KUSHNER VIET THANH NGUYEN NORMAN LEAR GREIL MARCUS JANE MAYER BILL MCKIBBEN WALTER MOSLEY JOHN NICHOLS LAWRENCE O’DONNELL LAURA POITRAS KATHA POLLITT ROBERT REICH JOY REID FRANK RICH ARUNDHATI ROY BERNIE SANDERS ANNA DEAVERE SMITH EDWARD SNOWDEN REBECCA SOLNIT MARGARET TALBOT CALVIN TRILLIN KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL YANIS VAROUFAKIS JOAN WALSH AMY WILENTZ GARY YOUNGE…

Republicans have opened a new front in their war on American democracy, and it is the cruelest yet. Refusing to heed warnings that in-person voting in Wisconsin’s April 7 elections could spread the coronavirus, they worked with judicial allies to block a move by the state’s Democratic governor to postpone in-person voting and extend the absentee deadline so Wisconsinites could safely cast ballots by mail. “Wisconsin’s election offers a nightmare vision of what the whole country could see in the fall,” warned Ben Wikler, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s chairman. “A fight where Democrats struggle to balance democracy with public health, and the GOP remorselessly weaponizes courts, election laws, and the coronavirus itself to disenfranchise millions of voters who stand in its way.” If the coronavirus lingers or spikes anew…

Nineteen-seventy was a simpler time. (February was a simpler time too, but for a moment let’s think outside the pandemic bubble.) Simpler because our environmental troubles could be easily seen. The air above our cities was filthy, and the water in our lakes and streams was gross. There was nothing subtle about it. In New York City, the environmental lawyer Albert Butzel described a permanently yellow horizon: “I not only saw the pollution, I wiped it off my windowsills.” Or consider the testimony of a city medical examiner: “The person who spent his life in the Adirondacks has nice pink lungs. The city dweller’s are black as coal.” You’ve likely heard of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River catching fire, but here’s how New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller described the Hudson south of…

As coronavirus-related deaths in the US continued to soar and many of the planet’s people sheltered in place in their primary dwellings, President Trump was seized by an urge to think big—cosmically, even. There was no Covid-19 outside Earth’s orbit. Space suits could make for great personal protective equipment. And blasting off into outer space was the ultimate way to practice social distancing. With the economy in shambles and earthbound industry grinding to a halt, the solution was obvious. To reinstate US supremacy, the country should go where no extractive industry has gone before: the moon! An executive order, dated April 6, followed these other-worldly revelations, noting that the US never ratified a 1979 agreement not to colonize the moon and that to ensure the “successful long-term exploration of the…

Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico FOURTEEN MEN WERE SLUMPED ON MATTRESSES and chairs, smoking inside the warehouse, watching over the migrants. One of the men had a pistol tucked into his waistband; another had a pistol resting on his lap. The men were fussing with their phones, ribbing each other, killing the morning. A slight waft of marijuana smoke lingered in the air. Someone hocked noisily, spat. Arnovis, a thin, strong, hard-gazing 24-year-old Salvadoran man, nonchalantly grabbed his black knockoff Puma backpack—the one his mother had bought for him back in Jiquilisco—wove through the maze of sitting and slumped bodies, and walked out onto the patio. Hey, vato, where you going? one of the men called. Just to shower, Arnovis said. That OK? And your backpack? My clothes. The shower was…

Basketball was never Joe Biden’s sport. His football prowess helped get him elected president of his high school class. It also gave him the confidence to overcome the stutter that plagued him throughout his childhood. But to win in November, he’ll need to answer a question more often asked on the basketball court: Can he go to his left? His endorsement by Bernie Sanders ended a roller coaster primary campaign. Remember, this was the candidate who, after dominating the national polls for months, finished fourth in Iowa and, after placing fifth in New Hampshire, was reduced to pleading “It ain’t over.” Who staked his future on “overwhelming support from black and brown” voters, only to find in Nevada that Latinx voters preferred Sanders. Yet Biden’s faith in his African American…

Over the past few weeks, eight states have tried to implement—with varying degrees of success—measures suspending abortions, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Several more states are poised to include abortion in bans on nonessential procedures. Advocacy groups representing abortion providers filed suit in several states that have used the outbreak as a pretext to further restrict abortion access. So far, the litigation in Texas has taken the most tumultuous path: Last month a federal district court suspended implementation of a new policy banning all abortion care. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit then overturned that decision, allowing the state’s ban to take effect based on a “critical interest in protecting the public health.” In a stunning rebuke to the appellate court, the district judge reissued a narrowed…

Perry Rosenstein, a 94-year-old-victim of Covid-19 who died on April 3, was one of a kind. When asked why he joined the Navy during World War II (he saw action in Okinawa and Guam), he would say it was to fight fascism. As his son Neal said, had Perry been of age, he would have gone to Spain with the Lincoln Brigade. When, after the war, he was blacklisted from teaching because of his radical work against racism, he went into business for himself and made a fortune manufacturing metal fasteners. Among other philanthropic causes, he used that wealth to support the work of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. In 1983 he founded the Puffin Foundation, whose mission is to nourish activism, human rights, social justice, and cultural life. Over…

Reportless Subjects, to the Quick / Continual addressed— —Emily Dickinson if what etches into your eyes leaves a small canyon in its troughis there the chattering speechI don’t think it’s enough to say images seen the still Aleppo pine needlesa tarp billowing at the lower winds are a weather how long could you look in the foreground at a wet child who isn’t youthe two bits of peeling white light she tossed into us feel like a skeina weight water falling down your back in the bath a saltedsilver-edged negative pressing you to the steady light impulseneither of us will absorb winking in it all the while by its known wavesthe state’s cargo planes keep from folding into our street having lost a few peoples running in superfluity the sky…