Innehållsförteckning för June 14/21, 2021 från The Nation

ON APRIL 27, A CALIFORNIA STATE SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE passed a bill to return oceanfront real estate stolen from a Black couple by white city officials in 1924 to the living descendants of its original owners. The vote brings the Bruce family one step closer to a restoration of their rightful inheritance. “This will be a precedent for this country,” Duane Yellow Feather Shepard, a Bruce family descendant and spokesperson, told me. “It needs to be studied by young people as to how they should proceed in trying to get justice for their families and their people in the African American nation within this white nation.” Shepard’s ancestors, Willa and Charles Bruce, left New Mexico in the early 1900s, resettling in the California township now known as Manhattan Beach. In 1912,…

SHORTLY AFTER THE GEORGE W. BUSH ADministration started bringing so-called “enemy combatants” to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba in 2002, Michael Ratner, a lawyer in New York City, gathered a group of colleagues at the Center for Constitutional Rights to discuss filing a suit on the prisoners’ behalf. When I asked him, some years later, what chance he thought he had of prevailing, he answered, “None what-soever. We filed one hundred percent on principle.” Michael Ratner did everything “one hundred percent on principle.” And much of it seemed, at least at the time, hopeless. He filed more impossible-to-win lawsuits than perhaps any other major lawyer of the past 50 years. With the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he worked for over four decades, he went to court to…

Notes of a (Minneapolis) native son. LAST YEAR, AS I SAT IN MY STUDY IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AND WATCHED videos of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct station on Lake Street burning in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, a memory eddied up in the flames. It’s one or two in the morning. Lake Street runs like a deep scar down the southern arm of the city. I’m idling in my parents’ green station wagon at a stoplight with a couple of teammates from the football team. Marcus, Ray, and me; three Black, intrepid, rusty-butt boys out looking for a thrill. Curtis Mayfield croons “Freddie’s Dead” on the eight-track player. A blunt passes from Marcus to me, in the front, then to Ray in the back seat. Soon, a contender…

IN HER INTRODUCTION TO THE UNDOCUMENTED AMERICANS, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio reveals that some names and physical descriptions have been changed to protect the vulnerable. Or maybe, she adds playfully, they haven’t. Readers are thus forewarned when, midway through the book, she offers “Macondo” as the name of a pharmacy that sells prescription drugs to uninsured immigrants. The name of the pharmacy, the same as that of the famous fictional town in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, hints at an underlying goal of Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut: In order to capture—and protest—the ways that the press and politicians misrepresent undocumented Americans, she has sought to tell their stories in a radically new way that fuses journalism and creative writing. On one level, Cornejo Villavicencio’s mission is straightforward: She wants…

$236B Total US military aid to Israel from 1946 to 2018 $38B US military aid pledged to Israel from 2019 to 2028 under a 2016 memorandum of understanding (MOU) 0 Number of countries set to receive more US military aid than Israel between 2019 and 2028 59% Share of US foreign military aid in 2021 set to go to Israel 50 Number of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, the US’s most advanced stealth aircraft, purchased by Israel from Lockheed Martin with US funds 51:1 Ratio of US military aid received by Israel to US humanitarian assistance received by Palestinians in 2021 1 Number of countries that are allowed to use US military aid for their own domestic weapons industry…

DEMOCRATS TEND TO LEAVE EASY POINTS on the playing field out of a misguided sense of modesty, the term Joe Biden used recently when recounting his experiences in the Obama White House. By refusing to take a “victory lap” and crow about his accomplishments, President Biden argued, Barack Obama failed to maximize the political benefits from the things he did. Political scientists call this the art of credit claiming: convincing voters that you are the reason something good has happened. Biden himself missed an opportunity when he declined to put his name on the $2,000—er, I mean $1,400—economic relief checks sent out earlier this year, as Donald Trump had done. Liberals tend to see that kind of poli-ticking as tacky, which of course it is. It’s also important and necessary.…

AS I WALKED ALONG MANHATTAN’S 11TH AVENUE ONE DAY IN LATE April, the wind seemed as if it were trying to blow the plywood outdoor-dining huts over and rip the spindly trees from the ground. I arrived early to the Gotham West Market food court. My date, Andrew Yang, showed up unfazed by the violent weather, as buoyant as he appears on TV. A candidate for mayor of New York City, Yang is a businessman and failed nonprofiteer with no experience governing and a hodgepodge of centrist, liberal, banal, and just plain quirky opinions. He has some potentially interesting ideas—a public bank, for instance—but he also loves solutions involving philanthropy and public-private partnerships. And right now, although Eric Adams, an ex-cop and a more conventional politician, has been pulling ahead…

IN 1993, STEPHEN BREYER, THEN THE CHIEF JUSTICE FOR THE FIRST CIRCUIT Court of Appeals in Boston, was hit by a car while riding his bike. He suffered a few broken ribs and a punctured lung. Despite the accident, Breyer left his hospital bed just a few days later and traveled to the White House to interview with President Bill Clinton about an opening on the US Supreme Court. The interview didn’t go as Breyer might have hoped. Clinton ended up choosing Ruth Bader Ginsburg to fill the vacancy left by Byron White’s retirement. But a year later, another Supreme Court justice retired: Harry Blackmun. Blackmun, of course, was the conservative Nixon appointee who famously became a liberal stalwart on the bench. It was Blackmun who wrote the majority opinion…

In the grip of a nor’easter,you come bearing grief,have in pieces not comein peace. You arrive bladedwith certainty. You slam shutthe car door and smolderbefore the locked cabin, roughtrip up the Hudson as you distractedyourself with a list of flowers awaitingdeft penmanship to groom themtight and blow them clean.News of your brother’s deathintercepted your drive to thisresidency, fellowshipamong the crude Madonnasof empty mailboxes draped in robesof days-old ice. You have not writtenabout the passing of familybefore, their antagonistic absences.Intrusive their teethingtombstones in the brain. Pillafter pill to sleep, to create,to erase, you swallow and scratchinto a notepad what the frozen earthrefuses: bougainvillea, lilac, burningbush. Another close kin addedto the Bible’s kept obituaries.You hated your brother’s lefteye, unruly wanderer settlingaway from you and observinga world you could not sense. Glossy ivyin…

“HOW DO I KNOW WHAT I THINK TILL I SEE WHAT I SAY?” was a maxim of E.M. Forster’s—and a fine one. But the Simon & Schuster workers who petitioned to break their company’s contract with former vice president Mike Pence were sure they knew what he thought before he said it. To publish his memoir would be “legitimizing bigotry,” since Pence was the tool of Donald Trump, and Trump had “unequivocally advocated for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism, islamophobia, antisemitism, and violence.” Anti-Semitism? Many Israelis, grateful for Trump’s go-ahead to change their capital to Jerusalem, might disagree. Trump’s son-in-law and worldwide minister without portfolio, Jared Kushner, is Jewish; so is the man who served as his main presidential speechwriter, Stephen Miller. But Pence was accused of…

DEAR PRESIDENT BIDEN, YOU KNOW AND I KNOW THAT YOU COULD LEARN A lot from Jimmy Carter’s presidency. You are 18 years younger than our longest-living ex-president, but he was your friend and political ally in the 1970s, when you were a senator in your 30s. You were the first senator to endorse Carter’s miraculous run for the White House from complete obscurity. And when he won in 1976, you found yourself on the same political wavelength with the former Georgia governor. You both started out in politics as pragmatic populists: Democrats, but fiscal conservatives. You both opposed school busing and supported a woman’s right to choose—but opposed using federal funds for abortions. In January 1978, just one year into Carter’s presidency, you dropped by the White House to warn…

WHAT IS THE PERFECT place to live? If a year ago you thought you’d found it, you probably reconsidered as lockdown dragged on. Back then, it didn’t really matter if the paint was flaking and the furniture was shopworn and the kitchen was long in the tooth. You could always step outside, go to a restaurant, take a trip. After only a few weeks of confinement, we realized how important it is to be able to step into other rooms. For many of us who’ve been able to work from home—or whose jobs simply disappeared during lockdown—the only “other rooms” we’ve had are in our phones. And while the lockdown may be ending in some places and for some people, the pandemic is not over, no matter how close we…

IN “THE FOUR LOST MEN,” an elegiac short story written in the 1930s about his dying father’s memories of life in post–Civil War America, Thomas Wolfe memorably conjured up the era’s presidents: “My father spoke then of the strange, lost, time-far, dead Americans…the proud, vacant, time-strange, and bewhiskered visages of Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and Hayes…. Who was Garfield, martyred man, and who had ever seen him in the streets of life?… Who had heard the casual and familiar tones of Chester Arthur? And where was Harrison? Where was Hayes? Which had the whiskers, which the burnsides: which was which? Were they not lost?” Wolfe’s words are frequently quoted to illustrate the seeming irrelevance of national politics in what Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner called the Gilded Age, when it…

You Don’t Say Re “Yes We Cant” [May 3/10]: Thanks to David Bromwich for his sly critique of words and phrases that he calls “shiny, slippery word-fruit that we pluck, eat, and send into the world without second thought.” I’ve been collecting my own stash, perhaps less highbrow but equally, I believe, frustrating. When college administrations claim “budget transparency,” I ache for the old days when honesty was valued. Those “robust conversations,” which pairs one of my verbal irritations with a Bromwich selection, propel me down the hall screaming and craving a complete and deeper consideration of the subject. I guess “authentic” folks are those people Holden Caulfield, who railed against “phonies,” would have praised. Or not. Then there’s that strategy which counsels us to “pivot” from the thornier path…