Innehållsförteckning för May 31/June 07, 2021 från The Nation

ON MAY 5 THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION DID THE TRULY UNEXPECTED. BUCKING the gigantic pharmaceutical lobby in Washington, it sided with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) by supporting a waiver provision to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that would set aside some intellectual property rights in order to expand the production of Covid-19 vaccines, which are now manufactured primarily by only a handful of companies in the world’s richest nations. While this TRIPS waiver alone will not be sufficient to ramp up vaccine production to immunize everyone on the planet, it is a crucial first step. We also need tech transfer; companies like Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson must step up and help manufacturers in LMICs set up facilities and processes to make the vaccines…

I CAME TO THE NATION AS AN INTERN AT THE START OF THE Reagan years, and edited the magazine from 1995 to 2019. I am deeply committed to my role as steward of this remarkable institution, and I am determined to bring it into the 21st century. But that task has proven increasingly challenging. Not that being at the helm of The Nation has been without exciting opportunities. Digital publishing and social media have given us the chance to reach vastly larger audiences at home and globally. We’ve embraced enormous changes: from the computer to the in-box to the cell phone to the social media feed. We’ve grown with savvy—and humility—as we’ve found new ways of expanding our voice. But the playing field is not level. Like other publications, we…

Yes ALEX HAN A CONSISTENT THEME OF THE POST-mortems on the failed union drive at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., is that the organizers just weren’t ready to take on the tech behemoth. If the labor movement is going to beat a corporate giant, the argument goes, it needs to be smarter and more strategic. It must provide organizers with new and better skills and more carefully pick and choose the sites of its campaigns. To win a single-site union vote or even a broader one against a regional employer, this may be true. But organizing Amazon is taking aim at the core of the global economy. It’s the kind of campaign in which victory could spark a labor surge that brings millions of people into unions and shifts the…

TO HEAR TAHANIE ABOUSHI TELL IT, A COURTROOM CAN BE A STRANGE PLACE for a Muslim woman lawyer. “I’ve had judges call me Tahini. I once had a judge, in open court, look at my name and say, ‘Farsi? Egypt? Pakistan?’ I said, ‘Tahanie Aboushi?’” She laughed, shaking her head. It was late March, and I was in Lower Manhattan with Aboushi and a few of her colleagues. We had just been among the thousands at a rally in Columbus Park protesting the disturbing rise in anti-Asian violence across the country. Afterwards, we walked to Canal Street and sat, Covid-style, outside a Chinatown eatery. The sidewalk thrummed with energy. As what felt like the world walked by our table, Aboushi, in her characteristic deadpan, continued describing her experiences as a…

CERTAIN CITIES IN THE UNITED STATES have developed a claim to fame for representing some vital aspect of America. New York City has often been hailed as its financial and cultural capital. Chicago, the “big shoulders” of the nation, has been depicted as its boisterous center of industry. Berkeley, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass., serve as symbols of American liberalism, and Atlanta as the political and economic capital of Black America. According to historian and native son Walter Johnson, St. Louis can serve as a symbol of US imperial expansion and racial formation, a “crucible of American history…[at] the juncture of empire and anti-Blackness.” Throughout its existence, Johnson argues, St. Louis has been a microcosm of America’s long-standing compulsion to subvert its own high ideals for the sake of white supremacy…

Facing Global Challenges Thank you for launching a debate in your pages on geo-engineering as a tool to avert climate catastrophe [“Should Governments Consider Engineering the Atmosphere?” by Oliver Morton and Amy Westervelt, April 19/26]. The fundamental problem becomes evident in the first two words of your title. Although global warming is the greatest global challenge we have ever faced, we have nothing like a global government, or Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1835 “Parliament of man,” to confront it. Both Morton and Westervelt recognize that virtually any kind of geoengineering will affect different nations in wildly different ways. In our world of separate, sovereign states, it seems far from unlikely, perhaps even inevitable, that individual nations will pursue geoengineering projects which might benefit that nation today but harm both the rest…

FLAILING REPUBLICANS ARE HAVING A HARD TIME figuring out how to oppose President Joe Biden’s popular proposals. They couldn’t stop the American Rescue Plan, targeted at helping the nation recover from the pandemic. Now Biden is pushing a big infrastructure bill that includes some old-fashioned priorities Abraham Lincoln would have recognized, especially rail, but also some things, like broadband and long-term care, that Lincoln, bless him, might not have imagined. Dwight Eisenhower built out the interstate highway system, but he couldn’t see broadband coming either. Republicans tried to make the argument that the bill goes beyond its proper scope as an “infrastructure” measure. But polling shows that the pushback hasn’t worked very well. The proposals are popular, some measures more than others, some even with Republicans. So are the proposals…

IN 2005, BRETT JONES, A 15-YEAR-OLD WHITE kid from Mississippi, was convicted of murder. Jones claimed self-defense, but a jury found him guilty of murdering his 67-year-old grandfather, with whom he lived. Jones was sentenced to life without parole, the mandatory sentence in Mississippi at that time. Later, in the 2012 case Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles were unconstitutional. Jones appealed his sentence, but the judge again sent him away for life without parole, this time noting he was doing so despite the option of offering a lighter sentence. In 2016, the Supreme Court issued a follow-up decision making Miller retroactive for those who had been sentenced before the case was heard. The justices reiterated that “a lifetime in prison is a…

$3.8M Amount Colombia will pay for riot control gear for ESMAD, a police unit accused of using excessive force and sexual violence against demonstrators 17K Number of police officers in Latin America trained since 2013 through USCAP, a joint US-Colombian program 47 Minimum number of protesters killed by state forces in Colombia since protests began at the end of April 60K Number of people who have graduated, across 85 countries, from one of five US International Law Enforcement Academies over the past 20 years $37M Amount the US allocated from 2014 to 2017 to train officers in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, countries where security forces have been accused of human rights abuses and corruption 367 Number of people killed by police in the US in 2021…

AT 7 AM ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8, KAITLIN MCCANN, A SEVENTH- and eighth-grade history teacher at the General George A. McCall School in Philadelphia, arrived at work. The temperature was in the teens and snow covered the ground, but McCann didn’t go inside the building where she’s taught for a decade. Instead, decked out in snow pants, boots, and gloves with hand warmers nestled inside, she set up a portable power generator and a circle of socially distanced tables and chairs in the schoolyard. Then she and 30 of her colleagues—about two-thirds of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers members in her building—spent shifts teaching in frigid temperatures all day from their computers outside the school, tangled power cords plugged into the generator, Wi-Fi more or less holding steady. McCann stayed…

RICHARD WAGNER WAS AN ANTI-SEMITE. THIS WASN’T just ugly, of-the-times bigotry or part of a sad and private hang-up, but a blood-and-body-consuming dimension of his being. As per the usual pageantry that comes with hate, his loathing took on enduring and complicated expressions, was pathetically pseudoscientific, a product of some combination of transference, projection, and fear, and is, in hindsight—but also was, during his lifetime—a character trait that left his name and work rank with the spice of rot. the artist so many credit with ushering For the uninitiated, let me be clear: Wagner was a lot of things. He was a fop—a dandy who died in a room tailored in plum satins and whose last words were allegedly “My watch!” His fundamental rewiring of the ideas of harmony and…

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…

TO PREPARE FOR WRITING ABOUT JORDAN PETERSON, I asked numerous people I know what they thought of him. They all gave the same answer: “Who?” Friends, where have you been? Peterson’s 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, sold 5 million copies and has been slated for translation into 50 languages. His YouTube channel has 3.68 million subscribers. According to the man himself, he is so famous that a waiter recognized him in a restaurant and thanked him for changing his life, which cannot be said, I’m guessing, for any other clinical psychologist in the world, or possibly any other Canadian. This is quite an achievement for one whose work is crammed with references to Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, the Bible, ancient Mesopotamian deities, Jesus, and Jung, and which,…

“POLITICS IS OFTEN DEFINED OR UNDERSTOOD AS THE ART OF MAKING a deal. But I think, at its best, it’s the art of making possible tomorrow that which we can’t even imagine today,” says Chesa Boudin, the district attorney of San Francisco County. The son of two members of the Weather Underground sentenced to long spells in prison, Boudin was narrowly elected in 2019 under San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system. He talks of the pain of growing up with imprisoned parents; of the collect calls he still receives every Saturday from his incarcerated father; and of his belief, inculcated in him from childhood, that simply locking people up is a failure of the political imagination. “My personal experience shapes me—my worldview, my fears and hopes, my dreams and aspirations,” he…

This story involves mass death, religious zealots, and the worst case of government malpractice to facilitate what was deemed a business opportunity in the history of the United States, so I’ll choose the biblical opening: In the beginning, there was the State.And the ideologues said, “Let It Be Smashed.”And so it was smashed. ATLANTAMarch 6. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).Early days in the shit show. AMERICANS ARE JUST STARTING TO DIE. INFECTED CRUISE SHIPS ARE stranded at sea around the world. No one in Trump’s administration has decided what to do—or if they have to do anything. Nobody in this great edifice of American public health that is the CDC—the gold standard for the whole world, journalists will write and write again—is yet wearing a mask. The president of the…

MARK BITTMAN WRITES THE WAY HE COOKS: THE INGREDI-ents are wholesome, the preparation elegantly simple, the results nourishing in the best sense of the word. He never strains; there’s no effort to impress, but you come away full, satisfied, invigorated. From his magnum opus, How to Cook Everything, and its many cookbook companions, to his recipes for The New York Times, to his essays on food policy, Bittman has developed a breeziness that masks the weight of the politics and economics that surround the making and consuming of food. In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, his latest book, he offers us his most thoroughgoing attack on the corporate forces that govern our food, tracking the evolution of cultivation and consumption from primordial to modern times and developing what is arguably his most…