Innehållsförteckning för November 13/December 7, 2020 från The Nation

“A knotty, charismatic exploration of the intersection between ideas and lived experience.” —Jo Case, Sydney Morning Herald The Thinking Woman Julienne van Loon “…Deeply personal and thoughtful, Apel explores what it means to recall terrible events and what is at stake in forgetting them.” —Coco Fusco, Cooper Union Calling Memory into Place Dora Apel “A call to arms to elevate our thinking to the species level or, Schuller cautions, the species will face extinction.” —Cynthia McKinney, activist and former Congresswoman Humanity’s Last Stand Confronting Global Catastrophe Mark Schuller “1962 was the greatest AND most important year in movie history!” —Philip Kaufman, award-winning director of The Right Stuff and Invasion of the Body Snatchers Cinema ‘62 The Greatest Year at the Movies Stephen Farber and Michael McClellan Combining both scientific and historical perspectives, this book…

ON THE MORNING OF ELECTION DAY, ASHLEIGH Strange was ready for trouble. As the regional organizer for Lehigh Valley Stands Up, she and her team had spent months doing deep canvassing here. Working in close coordination with the immigrant rights group Make the Road and the young climate justice campaigners of the Sunrise Movement, they’d been talking—and more important, listening—to voters. These long, frequently sprawling conversations might start with anxieties about rent or child care or worries about immigrants taking away jobs, but they ended, surprisingly often, with people who’d long ago given up on voting deciding to take a chance on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They did this work against the backdrop of the president’s fearmongering about election fraud. On my way northeast from Reading, I saw a…

In his latest book, Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson presents a vision of the coming decades that straddles dystopia and utopia, horror and hope—revealing a near-future Earth of increasingly severe climate effects and humanity’s radical responses to them. With exacting detail, Robinson not only evokes conditions of extreme heat, socioeconomic turmoil, and other grim developments but also synthesizes scientific, economic, and social research to explore solutions that could enable rapid decarbonization. The novel’s warming skies are filled with solar aerosols and zeppelin-like airships while “invisible revolutions”—legal, technological, and otherwise—exercise less conspicuous but no less profound effects on life. The result is arguably Robinson’s most urgent novel yet: a road map to avoiding worst-case scenarios and a clear-eyed call to action. LG: In a 2017 essay for Commune, you…

For colleges and universities this year, back to school has been tumultuous. At the University of North Carolina, administrators defiantly brought students to campus, only to send them home within days as Covid-19 outbreaks ravaged the commons. The University of Wisconsin pushed ahead with in-person reopening despite outcries from faculty, staffers, and even county health officials; within weeks, the campus had to shift all instruction online. Students at the University of Georgia staged die-ins, unwilling to sacrifice their lives for their education. Notre Dame’s student newspaper published an editorial begging not to have to print classmates’ obituaries. Big Ten football was canceled—and then it wasn’t. By July, more than 51,000 campus workers in the United States had been laid off, furloughed, or did not have their contracts renewed. Meanwhile, the…

AS A YOUNG MAN, I JOINED A GUERRILLA INSURGENCY AND WENT TO war, but I didn’t really know why I did so. Just six years after the Vietnam War ended, my family and all other Salvadorans started facing the profound consequences of the Reagan administration’s decision to begin spending billions of dollars to bolster the universally condemned Salvadoran government and military in their war against the leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front. The FMLN was the Salvadoran embodiment of what Reagan referred to as the “evil empire” of communism. By the end of the war, some 80,000 people had been killed in a country of just over 5 million that’s the size of Massachusetts. Most of the innocents were slaughtered by their own government, according to the…

FROM THE 1940S TO THE ’60S, THE ONITSHA MARKET IN southeastern Nigeria was the center of a burgeoning movement in self-help literature. Known as Onitsha Market literature, these cheap, locally published booklets were at once moralistic and titillating. With titles like Why Harlots Hate Married Men and Love Bachelors, How to Avoid Corner Love and Win Good Love From Girls, Money Hard to Get but Easy to Spend, and Drunkards Believe Bar as Heaven, they were sold at market stalls and were intended to appeal to a class of newly literate Nigerians interested in advancing themselves professionally and culturally. Reading for self-improvement was something the British had encouraged in their mission schools, but the advice and moral guidance of the Onitsha Market pamphlets had much in common with the tenets…

CHARLIE KAUFMAN’S I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS IS A claustrophobic film. Adapted from Iain Reid’s horror novel of the same name, much of it takes place in the front seat of a small car in the midst of a cross-country road trip as a horizon of nothing but flat, monochrome frontier rolls by out the windows. The passengers—an unnamed woman and her boyfriend, Jake, with whom she’s considering ending things—seem hemmed in by each other, their conversation dissipating once they approach the boundaries of what they can’t say or know the other can’t stand to hear. The couple is driving to visit Jake’s parents at a remote farmhouse, their first long trip together. Things seem strange from the moment they arrive. Instead of going inside, Jake shows his girlfriend the…

GETTING DONALD TRUMP OUT OF OFFICE WAS UNIQUELY IMPORTANT BECAUSE HIS reality TV stardom allowed him to go from acting like a jerk on The Apprentice to playing a real-life authoritarian strongman. People bought into his “drain the swamp” and “I tell it like it is” rhetoric while he and his family engorged themselves on the hard-earned taxes of the working class. Joe Biden was not the first choice of most progressives, but when the full might of the national Democratic Party leadership converged to anoint him, he became our only hope. Tens of thousands of grassroots activists lost sleep and relationships, any sense of day or night, weekend or weekday; together they pushed a not-great candidate over the finish line. No matter how uninspired people felt about Biden, there…

THE RUSHED CONFIRMATION OF JUSTICE AMY Coney Barrett has, for the first time in decades, made Democrats think seriously about progressive reforms to the Supreme Court. Today, conservatives hold a 6-3 majority on the court, illegitimately engineered by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. This stark reality has radicalized the base. It has even made some Democratic senators consider using their power to achieve deep structural change, as opposed to cosmetic bipartisan redecorating. Unfortunately, those senators are likely to be in the minority until at least 2023. And as long as McConnell remains the majority leader, he is unlikely to allow any reforms (or legislation or democracy) to go forward in the Senate. But Democrats must continue to plan for the day when they have enough seats in the chamber to…

So much depends on the runoff Senate elections in Georgia. If the Democrats can win those two seats, Joe Biden has the chance to pass transformative legislation that will shape the economy for decades to come. But before the party gets into the policy weeds, there’s a major mental hurdle that needs to be cleared. Even if the Democrats don’t control the Senate, Biden’s administration should do everything it can to spend money rapidly and maintain deficits not seen or even debated in decades. To rebuild our economy, we must enter what I’m calling the Era of Large Numbers: massive spending, giant deficits, a high debt-to-GDP ratio. It is important to understand why this is necessary and why we must defend it. To start, let’s look at Biden’s original plans.…

ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1955, THE INDOMITABLE WALTER REUTHER, A towering figure in the labor movement and the head of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), began his Labor Day message to Americans by commemorating all that unions had achieved, from higher wages to greater dignity on the job. Reuther, who’d been an architect of the sit-down strikes that unionized the auto industry and who became an important ally of Martin Luther King Jr., then turned to another subject: the conditions facing the nation’s small-business owners. “Big corporations are getting more and more of the market,” he lamented. The CIO intended to fix this problem. Its legislative platform during these years called for easing the tax burden on small businesses, extending them more credit, and stepping up antitrust enforcement. In 1957…

AMONG THE MORE UNPLEASANT mythemes that one group of humans has devised about another is the blood libel: the claim that Jews murder Christian children, often around Easter, and use their blood in Passover rituals. Bits and pieces of this myth date back to ancient times. The Greek world produced some sinister stories about Jews annually fattening a Greek in their temples for sacrifice. And the New Testament (Acts 7:51–53) and the Quran (2:87) have cast Jews as persecutors and murderers of prophets. But the specific ingredients of the blood libel— innocent children murdered by conspiratorial Jews for blood rituals—were not baked into narrative until a child’s corpse was discovered in 12th century England and an enterprising monk accused the local Jewish community of murder. That first accusation sputtered out,…

What used to bea rope descendingmy vertebrae to the basementof my spinegrows thin. In solidarity with my chemotherapy,our cat leaves her whiskers onthe hardwood floor,and I gather them, each purewhite parenthesisand plant themin the throat of the earth. In quarantine,I learned to trim your barbarianhair. Now it stands always on end:a salute to my superior barbary skills. In the eventof my death, promise you will find my heavy braidand bury it— I will need a ropeto let me down into the earth.I’ve hidden othersstrategically around the globe, a netto catch my bodyin its weaving.…

Hofstadter’s Legacy Re “At Liberalism’s Crossroads” [October 19/26], Jeet Heer’s review of Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays 1956–1965, edited by Sean Wilentz for the Library of America series: Heer takes the collection to task for ignoring Hofstadter’s earlier and, in Heer’s view, more radical work, arguing that it offers a purposefully skewed account of Hofstadter’s thought and career. Readers of The Nation should know that the volume is the first in a long-planned multi volume Hofstadter series. The next volume, also edited by Wilentz, will gather Social Darwinism in American Life and The American Political Tradition, which Heer singles out for praise, along with The Age of Reform and Hofstadter’s uncollected essays from 1938 through 1955. MAX RUDIN President and Publisher,…

AS HE PREPARED TO CLAIM THE PRESIDENTIAL VICTORY he secured by more than 4 million votes, Joe Biden said, “What is becoming clearer each hour is that record numbers of Americans—from all races, faiths, regions—chose change over more of the same.” But his ability to deliver that change is still to be determined by the voters of Georgia. Because the Democrats did not gain control of the US Senate on November 3, the defining moment for Biden’s presidency will come January 5, when a pair of runoff elections in Georgia could displace GOP incumbents and position Vice President–elect Kamala Harris to end Republican Mitch McConnell’s destructive tenure as Senate majority leader. The Georgia runoffs give the Democrats a rare opportunity to finish the essential work of elections in which they…

MY UNCLE HARRY HAS SEEN IT ALL, AND HE HAS THE years to prove it: He turned 100 on November 1. (In case you were wondering, he attributes his longevity to family, love, curiosity, and ice cream every day.) When Donald Trump was elected, Uncle Harry predicted that the next four years would be awful but there would be only two things that couldn’t be undone even if the Democrats won in 2020: the destruction Trump would wreak on the environment and the justices he would put on the Supreme Court. Trump has more than fulfilled Uncle Harry’s predictions. On the environment, Trump has taken the United States out of the Paris climate accord—it seems so long ago!—which he called a “disaster.” He scrapped Obama-era carbon emissions cuts, relaxed regulations…

15 States that have voted to legalize recreational marijuana 35 States that have voted to legalize medical marijuana 450K People incarcerated in the US for nonviolent drug offenses on a typical day 1M Estimated arrests for drug possession in the US every year 80% Approximate proportion of people in federal prison for drug offenses who are Black or Latinx $100 Fine that people in Oregon could pay if they are found with illegal drugs and decide not to attend a free addiction recovery center funded by tax revenue from the state’s marijuana industry 59 Average number of months in federal prison a Black person serves for a drug offense; the average sentence a white person receives for a violent crime is 62 months…

Almost every man I know talks too goddamn much. All myfavorite poets are women & gods. What I really miss is thepavement at midnight, my elongated shadow. There aremornings when the hunger pulses through me, when I justwant to see a man die like an ox in a flooded field, whereevery witness is swallowed at once by a minute of silence,then continues the work of living. It’s not that I’m thirstyfor blood. I just want to be alone & with you at the sametime. G told me long ago she thinks I’m cold & I respondedfor years by writing on shreds of paper, my mind is on fire.She slipped them into her mouth & waited for the wetgrass of a man she could love. On my sternum there is athumbprint…

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…

Portland, Ore. This city has spent the past several months uncomfortably thrust into the national spotlight. After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protests erupted here, as they did across the country. Thousands of people flooded the streets to demand police accountability and racial justice. When federal agents began clearing the streets around a downtown courthouse in July by launching waves of tear-gas canisters, Portland became a hot spot in the battle over police brutality and the freedom to protest. I started photographing the demonstrations in May, and I wasn’t alone. The protests have been documented by the professional news media and by amateur photographers, YouTubers, indie filmmakers, and smartphone-wielding activists sporting homemade press badges. At times it seems half the people at events are carrying cameras as they…