Innehållsförteckning för July 27/August 3, 2020 från The Nation

A Family Legacy Re “The Outrage Must Not End” by Elie Mystal [June 29/July 6]: I recall growing up in the 1960s and ’70s in central Texas and hearing conversations about equality, the NAACP, and civil rights. My father believed in speaking out for what was right. He taught his children the same. On June 9 my 16-year-old granddaughter and I went to downtown Atlanta to protest police brutality disproportionately against people of color—and not just brutality but death. Her protesting and standing up for equality with me has made civil rights a family legacy, one that I hope all my grandchildren pass on to their children. We must have the sincere belief that all people are entitled to live without the fear of being targeted because of the color…

On June 29, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the Supreme Court’s liberal justices to defend abortion rights in a case called June Medical Services v. Russo. That surprise ruling followed his decision to temporarily uphold the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and his decision to uphold gay and transgender rights under the Civil Rights Act. Even in the big end-of-term decision in which he sided with conservatives, Roberts ruled that the president could fire the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but he did not rule that the CFPB was unconstitutional, as conservatives had hoped. Is Roberts becoming a moderate? Is he turning into another “failed conservative,” like former justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Anthony Kennedy, three Republican appointees who ended up siding with…

In the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in June Medical Services v. Russo, five justices struck down an abortion restriction that would have made the procedure almost impossible to obtain in Louisiana. The law—which was, as Justice Stephen Breyer put it, “almost word-for-word identical” to a law struck down by the court in a 2016 decision, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt—required abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. In its 5-4 decision, the court held that the Louisiana law must also be struck down because the requirement, which would have closed all but one clinic in the state, was a significant obstacle to people seeking abortions. Breyer, writing for himself and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, found that the Louisiana law provided…

Milton Glaser, the world-famous graphic designer and longtime friend of The Nation, died last week at the age of 91. As The New York Times noted in its obituary, he was someone who “changed the vocabulary of American visual culture” over the course of his storied career. Luckily for me, when I became editor of The Nation in 1978, I lived on West 67th Street in Manhattan, right down the block from Milton, and we knew and liked each other. And luckily for The Nation, as Milton told an audience in London many years later in a talk titled “Ten Things I Have Learned,” his first rule was “You can only work for people you like.” We invited Milton to redesign the magazine so that every issue had some articles…

Trump says he will fight efforts to remove Confederate statues and to change the names of military bases named after Confederate generals. —news reports No matter that they fought to keep folks slaves,He says they are our heritage, our genes.It’s true about his heritage at least:He is the rare Confederate from Queens. Now Mississippi’s dropped Old Dixie’s flag,Acknowledging just what that symbol means.He still will always fight for what is white.He is the rare Confederate from Queens.…

IT’S LOOKING PRETTY GOOD FOR JOE BIDEN. POLLS HAVE BEEN PUTTING THE PRESUMPTIVE Democratic nominee well ahead of President Trump in the 2020 campaign, and a New York Times survey in late June saw Biden opening up a comfortable lead in each of the half-dozen battleground states that will decide things in November. But before Democrats start making too many plans for undoing the damage done by four years of Donald Trump, let alone for the “big structural change” that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and other progressives propose, they need to consider an unfortunate truth. If Biden is elected but Republicans maintain control of the Senate, he will enter office as a lame-duck president. After the inaugural celebrations are done, Biden will settle into a dysfunctional…

When accusing powerful men of sexual assault, women of color anticipate a higher burden of proof and a slimmer margin for error. On the Record seethes at this plight. In frank detail, the documentary recounts the multiple sexual assault and rape allegations against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and his accusers’ struggles to go public. Codirected by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, documentarians who previously chronicled sexual assault on college campuses (The Hunting Ground) and in the military (The Invisible War), the film uses the harrowing accounts of Simmons’s accusers to examine Black women’s double jeopardy when it comes to making such accusations. Drew Dixon, who once worked as an A&R executive at Simmons’s famed Def Jam label, serves as the film’s lodestar. She was interviewed before, during, and after she…

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…

1.5M Number of people in the US who are cared for in nursing homes 54K Minimum number of nursing home residents and employees who have died from Covid-19 in the US, as of June 30 43% Share of US Covid-19 deaths that took place in nursing homes by the end of June 24% Share of nursing home workers who were tested or presumed positive for Covid-19 in New York state from March to early June 24 Number of states in which the majority of Covid-19 deaths are linked to nursing homes $13 Median hourly pay of a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home 70% Share of nursing homes in the US that are for-profit…

You’d have had to be some kind of evil genius to imagine something as terrible for the world as Facebook. With an estimated 2.6 billion users and $70 billion in annual profits, it is the most effective purveyor in history of right-wing hate, lies, and incitement against vulnerable people and the planet. Is Facebook’s malevolence driven by a thirst for profit or politics? As with Fox News, alas, that’s a false choice, as the two reinforce each other. Facebook makes its money—as newspapers used to—by selling eyeballs to advertisers. But before local news started collapsing, thanks partly to the advertiser exodus to Facebook and Google, newspapers used this model to fulfill their responsibilities to educate readers and hold those in power to account. Facebook does the opposite: It narrows its…

In June 2011, a Black transgender woman named CeCe McDonald was walking with friends to a grocery store in her Minneapolis neighborhood when a group of white bar patrons began hurling racist, homophobic, and transphobic slurs, calling them “bitches with dicks,” “faggots,” and suggesting they “go back to Africa.” A white woman in the group became physically violent, throwing a glass at McDonald’s face that sliced open her salivary gland, requiring 11 stitches. When a male attacker lunged at her as she attempted to flee, McDonald, fearing for her life, grabbed a pair of scissors from her purse to defend herself, fatally stabbing her assailant in the chest. Despite a clear claim to self-defense, McDonald was the only person arrested at the scene. A Minneapolis court—after ruling her white male…

IN THE SUMMER OF 1832, A MYSTERIOUS SCOURGE THAT HAD COME ALL THE WAY FROM ASIA LOOMED OVER THE CITY OF NEW YORK, HAVING ravaged London, Paris, and Montreal. Medical officials collected data showing that the disease—cholera—was spreading along the newly opened Erie Canal and the Hudson River, heading straight to New York City. But New York’s leaders did not attempt to regulate traffic coming down the waterways. The demands of commerce were part of the reason for their failure to act; officials knew that shutting down the routes would have disrupted powerful commercial interests. But no less powerful was the belief that they didn’t need to. According to the reigning paradigm, contagions like cholera spread through clouds of smelly gas called miasmas. Cholera, one expert said at the time,…

The astronaut told ushe didn’t look out the windowfor eight and a half minutesas the rocket launched himbeyond our atmosphere.Terrifying things happened—ground vanished, boostersexploded, day becamenight—and he did not look.He was focusing,he said, on his job. He was up therea long time. He learnedto sleep suspended. He learnedhow the sunrise lookswhen you watch it every morningfrom the soft dark mouthof space. Many things,he told us, were differentthan he’d once expected.There’s no space ice cream,he said. That’s a big hoax.His vision blurred.His body became a study:blood, appetite, cognitive function. He took many pictures.All of them were beautiful.None of them showedwhat it was like to float. When the astronaut returnedto earth, more tests were run.Scientists discovered thatseven percent of his geneshad changed in space.He left the planetas himself. He came backas himself,…

Let’s face it. We’re on a Covid-19 Republican death march heading into the rest of the summer and fall. We cannot wait for January 2021 to shift course. Our lives depend on disruption now. Indeed, our survival hinges on making it impossible for our leaders to ignore us: We have to shift the political terrain ourselves. We have to be the earthquake. We simply cannot “live with” the virus—as the Trump administration suggests—nor simply accept the hundreds of thousands of cases coming over the next six months. There are tactics like the ones we used years ago in ACT UP to fight HIV/AIDS—like swarming institutions from New York’s City Hall and the New York Stock Exchange to the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the offices…

The coronavirus crisis has pushed state and local governments to the edge of a budget cliff; some have already started their tumble into the abyss. State tax revenue dropped by almost 50 percent in April compared to a year earlier as businesses shuttered and people delayed paying taxes. Meanwhile, these governments are spending vastly more to meet residents’ increased health and economic needs. The hole left by a loss in revenue coupled with higher spending is going to be very, very deep. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that the recession caused by the pandemic will create a $615 billion shortfall over this fiscal year and the next. The most difficult year will be 2021, as states face a $315 billion deficit. That’s worse than in 2010, the…

Over the July 4 weekend, President Donald Trump shamelessly claimed that 99 percent of coronavirus cases were “totally harmless.” This lie could—and almost certainly will—have devastating consequences. Anyone who follows the news should know that Covid-19 has killed more than 133,000 people and that many sufferers need hospitalization, often in ICUs and sometimes on ventilators; many also face long-term diminution of their lung function and other serious health complications. Anyone who follows the news should also know that even individuals with “totally harmless” asymptomatic cases can still spread the virus to more vulnerable people. The president’s attempt to score political points is made worse by the inability of the government’s scientific advisers to hold the line against his mendacity. When CNN asked Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn…

After 23 years behind bars for a crime he says he did not commit, Jonathan Irons is a free man. Irons, 40, was sentenced in 1998 to 50 years in prison for a burglary and assault he was accused of committing when he was 16. Despite a lack of evidence linking him to the crime, an all-white jury in St. Louis convicted him as an adult. What makes this also a sports story is that WNBA All-Star, MVP, and champion Maya Moore gave up two years in the prime of her career to fight for his freedom. Their connection came through a member of Moore’s family, her great-uncle, who had been doing prison ministry for close to 30 years. As a first-year student and star hoopster at the University of…

THIS WILL DEFINE YOUR LIFE,” MY ATTENDING PHYSICIAN SAID. IT WAS THE middle of an April night in the intensive care unit. Covid-19 was surging through New York City, overwhelming hospitals. Earlier that evening, another of our patients died. Our team had worked desperately to save his life. When I called his wife to give the news, she wailed into the phone in horror and disbelief. “During a rare lull in our work, my attending, a pulmonary and critical care physician, asked how I was holding up. I’m a resident physician in internal medicine, still training to practice medicine independently. I rely on my attendings to guide me through uncertainty. “I’m OK,” I told him, hoping that saying it would make it true. Before Covid came, I had accepted a…

Popular protest has been raging around the world for years now, but the streaming services and networks are still churning out shows about monarchs. Absolute power never loses its appeal, at least where television is concerned. The Last Czars, The White Princess, Victoria, The Spanish Princess, Versailles, Reign, The White Queen, Wolf Hall—take your pick. Female rulers have proved especially alluring, giving screenwriters a chance to hash out contemporary anxieties about women and politics against a palace background. Catherine the Great, one of history’s most accomplished and longest-reigning female monarchs, is the imperial star of the moment. In 2019, HBO released Catherine the Great, a Helen Mirren vehicle that focused on Catherine’s long relationship with her minister Potemkin. The show had lots of sex—in one scene, Catherine watches Potemkin get…