Innehållsförteckning för April 19/26, 2021 från The Nation

SHORTLY AFTER A MAN KILLED EIGHT PEOPLE, SIX OF THEM ASIAN WOMEN, IN Atlanta, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced the violence, saying it “has no place in America or anywhere.” Blinken made the comments during his first official trip to Asia with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, where Blinken warned China that the United States will push back against its “coercion and aggression” and Austin cautioned North Korea that the United States, following its military exercise with South Korea was ready to “fight tonight.” Yet such hawkish rhetoric echoes accusations that Donald Trump and other Republicans made against China and directly contributes to rising anti-Asian violence in the US. In fact, it is part of a long history of denigrating Asians to justify endless wars and US militarism. And…

SHUT OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE AND REDUCED TO A minority party in Congress, Republicans think they have found a path back to power in the unlikely form of The Cat in the Hat. On March 2, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it was taking six books written and drawn by the late Theodore Seuss Geisel off the market because “these books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” Republicans were quick to jump on the story. “Now 6 Dr. Seuss books are cancelled too?” Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted. “When history looks back at this time it will be held up as an example of a depraved sociopolitical purge driven by hysteria and lunacy,” he proclaimed. A slew of other Republicans rose to defend the allegedly threatened author.…

7% Pandemic-driven decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in 2020—the largest drop ever observed 20% Reduction in global nitrogen dioxide concentrations from February to November 2020 3.2ºC Projected rise in global temperature above preindustrial levels if countries meet their emissions commitments 2ºC Limit to the rise in temperature above preindustrial levels targeted by the Paris Agreement 2050 Year by which President Biden has pledged that the United States will reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero 25% Portion of global emissions produced by the United States historically…

WHEN I ASK HEATHER WILSON AND JACOB WELLS, THE founders of GiveSendGo, the “#1 Free Christian Crowdfunding Site,” whether they would host a fundraising campaign for the Ku Klux Klan, the call goes dead for a few seconds. “Some of these campaigns are situational,” Wells finally offered. “It would depend on what they were raising money for,” Wilson said. The pair are siblings in their 40s, just two in a family of 12 children who grew up in Salem, N.H. Along with their sister Emmalie, they founded GiveSendGo in 2014 because, as a 2017 blog post put it, “Gofundme has taken a stance against Christians and has been taking down campaigns that they did not agree with.” The idea, Wells said, was not just to run a profitable business but…

IN MARCH 2021, KENYA ANNOUNCED ITS COVID-19 vaccination plan. The government, according to its own documents, aims to inoculate just 30 percent of its 48 million residents: citizens over 50, those who work in health or in hospitality, and those with comorbidities. There is no proposal for the rest of us—no aspiration even to achieve herd immunity. This would be egregious even if it weren’t happening against the backdrop of perhaps the worst display of national selfishness in modern history. The European Union, the United States, and Canada are hoarding the vaccine, prepurchasing doses for up to six times their population in some cases. Moreover, because of national agreements with the pharmaceutical companies, they are buying the vaccines at preferential prices. The European Union, for example, is paying $2.15 for…

NEVER MIND DR. SEUSS’S SIX DISCONTINUED BOOKS. FOR the record, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street is a work of considerable genius, despite the offending cartoon of a Chinese man eating rice, and McElligot’s Pool is pretty great too, despite its use of the outmoded word “Eskimo,” complete with clichéd depiction of an Inuit in fur-lined parka. How hard could it have been to replace the few offending pictures and words? Many other classic children’s books—Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, for example—have been quietly edited to remove racist content, and that’s good. However, as many have pointed out, the rights are owned by Dr. Seuss Enterprises, and if it doesn’t want to keep the books in print, that’s its privilege, just the way Amazon is…

WHEN PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN FINALLY TOOK THE OATH OF office on January 20, he inherited not merely the White House, the nuclear codes, and the reins to the most powerful government on earth, but also a mess. The fact of that mess wasn’t altogether unusual. It’s become something of a trend in recent decades for Republicans, who don’t think government can work, to spend their years in power breaking it in order to fulfill their own prophecy; it then falls to Democrats to spend their years in power fixing what Republicans destroyed. But Biden’s mess is somewhat bigger than the messes inherited by his Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, after other disastrous Republican administrations. The enhanced difficulty stems in part from the Covid-19 pandemic and the multiple crises…

THE INTELLECTUAL LEFT REACTED TO Donald Trump’s election in 2016 in two very different ways. One group, like so many in the general public, immediately fell into full panic mode. The historian Timothy Snyder, for instance, rushed into print with a book called On Tyranny and in an interview declared it “pretty much inevitable” that Trump would follow Adolf Hitler’s example by declaring a state of emergency and staging a coup. Others urged caution. Snyder’s Yale colleague Samuel Moyn and Oxford’s David Priestland insisted in a New York Times opinion piece that “there is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally, and there is no reason to think he could succeed.” Trump, they claimed, was in reality a weak leader, despite his ability to exploit populist…

ONE DAY IN 2012, A YEAR INTO MY FIRST REAL JOB, at the Innocence Project, my phone rang. It wasn’t uncommon for intake calls to accidentally find their way to my line. For desperate family members advocating for a loved one in prison, it didn’t always matter whom they spoke to—they just needed someone to hear them. On this day, it was a far more unlikely caller: a retired New York Police Department detective from Long Island named Pete Fiorillo. Fiorillo told me at length about a case in Queens that he was certain had resulted in a wrongful conviction—and not just of one man but of three: George Bell, Gary Johnson, and Rohan Bolt. All three were Black; all three had been convicted of a botched robbery and murder…

Yes OLIVER MORTON GOVERNMENTS SHOULD CONSIDER solar geoengineering for two reasons. The first is that other ways to avoid the worst effects of climate change may not prove achievable in the world as it really is. The other is that, if there is a risk that another government might attempt to transform the atmosphere, it would be delinquent not to have thought through how to react. That means trying to understand what the effects of such engineering might be on your own country and the world. There is little doubt that lacing the stratosphere with particles that reflect sunlight back into space would decouple Earth’s surface temperature from greenhouse gas levels, allowing for cooler temperatures than otherwise would occur. On a planet with greenhouse gas levels expected to deliver 2.5…

Rio de Janeiro WHILE MANY IN THE WEST LAMENTed Jair Bolsonaro’s stunning ascension to the presidency of the world’s fifth most populous country in 2018, the election outcome was sealed roughly a year earlier. That was when Brazil’s two-term center-left president, Lula da Silva, who had been legally barred from a third consecutive term in 2010 despite an 86 percent approval rating—and who was leading in all the polls for a comeback in the 2018 presidential race—was convicted on dubious corruption charges and then declared ineligible to run. With his primary obstacle out of the way, Bolsonaro cruised to victory. The stench of those events intensified greatly when Bolsonaro appointed the judge who’d found Lula guilty, Sergio Moro, to the newly enhanced position of minister of justice and public security.…

Long before becoming a published writer, Mariame Kaba had already left an imprint on contemporary prison abolitionist thought. As the founder of Project NIA, which works to end the incarceration of young people, and as an organizer of the reparations campaign for Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Kaba helped make Chicago a hub for abolitionist organizing. Over the past decade, Kaba has argued in her blog, Prison Culture, and in articles in The New York Times and other venues that prisons do not end violence; they simply concentrate it among the most marginalized members of society. Her new book, We Do This’Til We Free Us, collects a number of her essays, interviews, and more. —Elias Rodriques ER: Many people know you as one of our foremost abolitionist thinkers, but you’ve also…