Innehållsförteckning för August 24-31, 2020 från The Nation

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…

45M Number of people in southern Africa who lack sufficient access to nutritious food—up nearly 10 percent from 2019 8.4M Children who are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition across southern Africa this year; some 2.3 million of them will require lifesaving treatment 820M Number of people worldwide who suffered from hunger in 2018—up from 784 million in 2015 60% Share of food-insecure people who are women or girls 2B People who are unable to access safe, nutritious, and sufficient food year-round 132M Additional people who could become chronically hungry this year because of the Covid-19 pandemic…

As a politician, Jesse Jackson has seldom enjoyed the full fruit of his labors. Running for president in 1984—building on Shirley Chisholm’s pioneering campaign in 1972—he won just three states and the District of Columbia. In 1988 he won 11 contests but never recovered from his defeat by Michael Dukakis in Wisconsin. Yet without Jackson, there would’ve been no President Barack Obama; without the Rainbow Coalition, Bernie Sanders’s campaign would’ve struggled to get out of Vermont. As a prophet, though, Jackson has no living rivals. Readers depressed during this summer’s conventions by the decline in American oratory could do far worse than console themselves with Keeping Hope Alive, a new collection of his speeches and sermons. Some will be struck by his superb sense of occasion: Preaching in New York’s…

In a little-noticed move at the end of July, the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the Republican Party’s most reliable allies, announced that it is preparing to sue Donald Trump’s administration over its anti-immigration orders and regulatory changes. This marks an extraordinary moment. The lobbying group has long regarded the GOP as the party of low taxes, deregulation, and anti-unionism but also of free trade, internationalism, and a relatively open immigration system. The Chamber’s almost unstinting support has been a boon to the Republicans for decades. Now US business interests are beside themselves with anger over the Trump administration’s recent efforts to shred the H-1B visa program, end protections under the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative, and deny visas to international students whose colleges have moved…

ALBERT P. DIED ALONE IN A NURSING HOME FROM COVID-19. BECAUSE OF NEW SAFETY REGULATIONS, HIS DAUGHTER, Gita, was not allowed to visit. In the days before his death, she told me, the nursing home staffers “spoke to my mom at length about how great my dad was doing…. [They] said, ‘He’s eating. He’s drinking water. He’s smiling. He’s doing really well.’” Gita wasn’t so sure. She said there were previous issues with her father’s care: hours spent sitting in soiled bedsheets, medication mismanagement, and missed meals. On May 6, a staff member called to tell her that Albert, 79, had died. She had never been told that her father was even ill. Then she was asked, “When are you going to come to claim the body?” Gita remembered hanging…

Now the love poems that aren’t about being devouredAre about being executed.One can see the naturalnessOf the line, how it extends, how it was thoughtInto the holes of the future by an unruly wishUnder pressure. Which is to say: You do not wantTo share a language, lover.You want to do something.You want to constitute an enemy.You want to organize. You wantTo learn. You want to work. This punctured tire, the chairsFalling apart, the de-articulated toys around us.The fixable is here, now, slow, waiting,Violent and curledOn the tongue of an impossible language.And when you kiss me you say see We don’t need it. We don’t need any of it. NotThis tired love, not someone else’s future.Not another poem about the lover’s body, howeverBloused in coastal light or tenderly partedInto new forms.…

When Nick Hakim sings, it’s as if he were talking to you and no one else. There’s a certain comfort to his music, and across two EPs and his first full-length album, his songs impart the feeling of an intimate, closed-door conversation with a dear friend. In his earlier work, like the 2014 EP Where Will We Go, his sound was more traditional, veering toward straightforward R&B cuts about heartbreak, sensuality, and romance. Three years later, on the LP Green Twins, his music took on a psychedelic aura. “Roller Skates,” “Miss Chew,” and “Slowly” borrowed the sounds of ’70s soul, down to the analog cassette hiss. In the best way, Green Twins played like a warped vinyl record you’d find in a cardboard box in your parents’ house or evoked…

An Ounce of Prevention Kudos to Sonia Shah [“How to Define a Plague,” July 27/August 3] for pointing out the need to tell a new story about the coronavirus. As she notes, germ theory doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t address genetic, epigenetic, nutritional, economic, and geographic factors or the influence of medications and other diseases. If the problem is seen only as the presence of a pathogen, then the solution is to kill the germ rather than change other circumstances that enabled it to cause illness. The medical community would do well to adopt a broader perspective on illness using the model of integrated pest management, in which the first approach to dealing with insects in a building is not to pull out a poisonous spray but to remove…

On July 28, a couple hundred protesters in Manhattan watched helplessly as an 18-year-old trans woman named Nikki Stone was snatched off the street by plainclothes officers, shoved into an unmarked van, and taken who knows where. Protesters were met with pepper spray to the face. Shortly afterward, video of the kidnapping was posted on Twitter for all the world to see. The “crime” that warranted a literal kidnapping? Stone was accused of damaging police cameras with spray paint. In the months since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police sparked nationwide demonstrations against systemic racism and unjust policing practices, we’ve witnessed, in person and on video, federal and local law enforcement officers terrorize and brutalize protesters with impunity, making it ever clearer that we’re moving away from democracy…

In 1981, Ben Bagdikian, a veteran journalist and former dean of the University of California, Berkeley, journalism school, tried to explain why The Wall Street Journal published an opinion section dominated by an almost lunatic fringe. “Executives and stockholders really do want to know the unpleasant truth about corporate life when it affects their careers or incomes. At the same time, however, most of them are true believers in the rhetoric of free enterprise,” he noted. Therefore, by “singing the grand old hymns of unfettered laissez-faire on the editorial pages” while reporting the truth in its news pages, “the Journal has it both ways.” This was only moderately problematic when US politics was played on a field with center-left and center-right goalposts, though media critics often amused themselves by suggesting…

In recent weeks, just after the umpteenth round of media reports about the president’s purported change in tone, Donald Trump resumed stoking white people’s fears of Black people. This time, his racist outbursts were directed at “all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream,” who he indicated would find themselves living in a multiracial nightmare if Joe Biden is elected. “People have gone to the suburbs. They want the beautiful homes. They don’t have to have a low-​income housing development built in their community…which has reduced the prices of their homes and also increased crime substantially,” Trump stated during a virtual rally with supporters. A day later in Texas, he picked up right where he left off. “I’ve seen conflict for years. It’s been hell for suburbia. We rescinded…

IMAGES OF BLACK DEATH HAVE BECOME INESCAPABLE, YET FOOTAGE OF MOMODOU LAMIN SISAY’S DEATH REMAINS elusive. Sisay was killed in Georgia on May 29 in an altercation with officers from the Snellville and Gwinnett County police departments. Here is the story, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation: A Snellville police officer attempted to stop Sisay’s car on Skyland Drive for a vehicle tag violation. Sisay reportedly did not stop. A chase ensued. Officers eventually forced his car off Temple Johnson Road. They approached the car, giving “verbal commands.” Sisay did not comply. As they prepared to enter the car, he pulled out a handgun and pointed it at the officers. They fired and took cover behind their cars. Sisay started his engine. A SWAT team was called in. He…

Once upon a time, many American women looked forward to a euphoric 100th anniversary celebration of the 19th Amendment, which belatedly granted us the vote, to be led this month by the nation’s first woman president. We still celebrate, though that much-anticipated president lost to a confessed sexual predator whose administration is dedicated to rolling back women’s rights. As I write, we are also preparing to celebrate the Democratic Party’s second nomination of a woman for vice president, though I don’t know who she is yet. (Readers probably will when they read this.) But we know that Joe Biden, who might have skipped a third run for president to back one of the four women senators who ran in 2020, promised to pick a female running mate before he sealed…

Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) cast the sole vote in Congress against the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution that launched what would come to be known as America’s forever war. But she’s not alone anymore. In July, 93 House members and 23 senators supported a proposal by Lee and Representatives Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) to cut the Pentagon’s budget by 10 percent and shift the money to tackling Covid-19 and mass unemployment. After the vote, Lee and I spoke about reordering our priorities and reimagining politics in 2020. Here are some highlights from our conversation. JN: You’ve worked for decades to change our budget priorities. Suddenly you’ve got a lot of allies. What happened? BL: [With Covid-19 and mass unemployment], it’s clear that people are…

Many of us are committed to preventing four more years of Donald Trump by any means necessary: mailing ballots, voting early, or braving in-person polls in November if we have to. As John Lewis recently reminded us, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part.” While Joe Biden’s basement campaign may have given him a lead in the opinion polls, it has done nothing to inspire young progressives to embrace a compromising—and deeply compromised—candidate whose reflexive bias toward the center misses both the urgency and the desperation of the current moment. Their frustration would have been all too familiar to the 23-year-old Lewis, the revolutionary firebrand who at the 1963 March on Washington was prevented by the organizers from asking, “Which side…

THEY ARRIVED AS IF FROM ANOTHER AGE, AS IF THEY REMEMBERED WHAT HAD BEEN THERE BEFORE THE ROADS and buildings and cars. Ducks walking in the empty streets of Paris, a herd of fallow deer grazing on lawns in East London; buffalo walking along an empty highway in New Delhi. Over the past few months, the Covid-19 pandemic has frozen the world’s economy and forced half of humanity into confinement. Amid the calamity—over half a million deaths, untold economic and social dislocation—some pointed to unprecedented opportunities: to try degrowth strategies, end predatory tourism, or curb emissions. The animal resurgence, in particular, captured the public imagination. Many of us, clinging to the possibility of anything resembling a silver lining, were quick to share on social media these images of wildlife reasserting…

I am safe. I am here! I’ve survived the shooting,bombing, hurricane, flood of numbers streaming across a screen in Silicon Valley where some kidcodes We are safe. All’s well, we buzz from our train seats, offices, stalls; the bills all canceled, the olddebts wiped clean. I shall go gently into that good night on a Tuesday in spring surrounded by booksand those I love, a smile bright as silver spread across my face. I am safe—what’s dangerous iselsewhere!, breathing down someone else’s neck, a bat hovering over the baby in the bassinet.We must love ourselves where we lie! I am safe on the coast, in a church, hung out to dry.I am safe in the field, salt-parched, gut-drunk, overdue to call home. I am safe, my loved one,my sweet, dear…