Innehållsförteckning för July 26/August 02, 2021 från The Nation

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY LIKES TO THINK OF ITSELF AS THE PARTY OF LABOR, ONE that represents minimum-wage workers, the so-called white working class, unionized labor, and employees from vulnerable communities attempting to overcome structural hurdles. But the party has done little to stop one of the most persistent anti-labor forces in American society and politics: the current Supreme Court. The Roberts Court—this era of jurisprudence presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts—has been the most anti-labor court since the New Deal, and every term it gets a little bit worse. This term saw a particularly devastating attack on labor rights in the case Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid. Not only did Roberts and his conservative brethren and sister justices use the case to vitiate the ability of labor to organize…

Gattaca DAVID M. PERRY A LITTLE LESS THAN HALFWAY THROUGH the 1997 film Gattaca, Irene (Uma Thurman) steals a strand of hair from the desk of a coworker she knows as Jerome (Ethan Hawke), and takes it to an all-night DNA testing booth, passing a woman who is having her lips swabbed just five minutes after kissing her date. A few seconds later, the technician gives Irene her answer: “Nine-point-three—quite a catch.” But 9.3 of what? How does her printout of amino acids translate to a scale of 1 to 10, a “genetic quotient” that leads the technician to think her boyfriend is a catch? After nearly a quarter century, Gattaca has aged disturbingly well. The New Zealand writer and director Andrew Niccol crafted a noir dystopian thriller of a…

TO THE UNTRAINED EYE, VIDEO GAMES CAN look like violence pornography for frustrated youths. Most games revolve around killing and gunplay (“combat” in the parlance of the industry). You can slay monsters, massacre aliens, or find a game that gives you a very big gun and very many cops to mow down if they stand in your way. The more cerebral “strategy” games revolve around concepts of war and battle. And even “kid-friendly” hits like Minecraft still have modes that give the player lots of enemies to kill. To some, video games can look like a dystopian mirror that reflects all of the ills of our violent, decaying culture. To me, video games are an escapist utopian fantasy. That’s because they give me something I can’t get nearly enough of…

UTOPIA PARKWAY. IT’S A NAME THAT sounds like an oxymoron, so impossible, so perfect it shouldn’t exist. Yet it does, a 5.1-mile gash—four lanes of asphalt, sometimes two—running through New York City’s largest borough, Queens. The roadway begins, if a line can be said to begin, in Beechhurst in the north. From there it runs past the Long Island Expressway, down through Clearview, Flushing, and Hillcrest to Jamaica Estates in the south, where it fragments just before reaching the behemoth of Grand Central Parkway. This intersection is one of the most dangerous in the city, a place where bodies, bikes, and sometimes lives meet the harsh reality of the pavement. For much of this route, the road is banal, an endless procession of squat brick houses broken up by the…

RECENTLY I READ AN EXCELLENT BOOK: THE SOVIET NOVEL, by katarina Clark. In it she observed that the USSR’s socialist realism suffered from what she called “modal schizophrenia,” because the writers were supposed to stay true to the situations they described while also evoking the better world socialism would bring. They were caught trying to bridge that gap between what is and what ought to be. Clark’s diagnosis made me laugh. I’ve been writing utopian novels for a long time, and I recognized all too well the syndrome she described. The novel is usually regarded as a realist art form, and I’d go even further: By telling the stories we use to understand our lives, the novel helps create our reality. In novels, things go wrong—that’s plot. People then cope.…

IS AN ANIMAL A BEING OR A BOUNDARY? Is it a kind of living organism or a threshold that anyone might cross—if pushed far enough? As the scholar Jack Halberstam argues in his latest book, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, many of our associations with animals and their natural habitat are rooted in colonial practices of categorization that distinguished “the domestic/tame/civilized” from “the foreign/wild/barbaric.” However, far from urging us to dismantle this binary, Halberstam asks us merely to reorganize the judgments we attach to it so that the wild and animalistic might not be something we fear descending into but rather something we might actively embrace. Much as queer theory seeks to recuperate the word “queer” itself, Halberstam notes, so too should we reclaim “wildness” as not a disparagement…

Last night, I let in all the birds.I told my grandmother to stay awhile.I said, stop disguising yourself as wind.You are not the only one who can fly. I told my grandmother to stay awhile.There is something in the wind. I recognize your voice.You are not the only one who can fly.Have you seen Montezuma’s aviaries—still green, full of breath? There is something in the wind. I recognize your voice.You talk to me all at once with your mouth full.Have you seen Montezuma’s aviaries—still green, full of breath?Cuídate, I thought you were blessing me. You talk to me all at once with your mouth full.I don’t believe in god but I do believe in Mexicans.Cuídate, I thought you were blessing me.I am sorry I picked all your red tulips. I…

THE CREATORS OF HBO’S MARE OF EASTTOWN, A MURDER mystery set in a small Pennsylvania town, aimed for verisimilitude. Its main cast studied the phonics and cadence of the Delaware County accent—all the downturned O’s and “water” pronounced to rhyme with “rudder”—which Kate Winslet (who plays the titular Mare Sheehan) described as “amongst the top two hardest dialects I’ve ever done.” The costume designer sent snapshots of people in line at Wawa, the legendary Pennsylvania convenience store, to director Craig Zobel for inspiration. Clothes were distressed with scrubbing brushes, holes added. In terms of its content, the show can occasionally feel like a primer on the problems facing suburban and rural America. Its characters contend with the opioid epidemic, insufficient health care, precarious and low-paying jobs, a lack of support…

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI HAS SERVED AS DIRECTOR OF THE National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. His salient qualities would seem to be a genial concern for our well being and a fund of practical wisdom informed by expertise. Still, 37 years in a position of enormous power is probably too long not to nurture delusions of infallibility. Fauci confirmed that impression when, in a June 9, 2021, interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, he said, “A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” The reason his critics resent him, Fauci added, is that, throughout the Covid siege, he has been a source of “inconvenient truths.” Just how inconvenient have his statements been, and how truthful? Testifying before the Senate…

121ºF Temperature reached in the town of Lytton, British Columbia, on June 29, the highest ever recorded in Canada 90% Estimated percentage of Lytton destroyed by wildfire on June 30 99.8% Percentage of the world that was cooler than Portland, Ore., on June 27, when the city hit 112°F, a record that lasted one day 108ºF Temperature in Seattle on June 28, an all-time high 56% Percentage of homes in Seattle without air conditioning, the highest of any US city 59M Number of people affected by drought in the western US 45% Percentage by which greenhouse gas emissions must be cut from 2010 levels by 2030 to hold temperature rise to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels…

IMAGINING BETTER WORLDS CAN HELP US IMPROVE our own, but literary and cinematic utopias often exclude those who don’t fit into what are usually racially and culturally homogeneous societies. And whether it’s 1516 or 2016, utopian thinkers are especially prone to leaving out one group whose experiences and insights should enrich our dreams of the future: the disability community. For centuries, utopias have presented disability as a personal shortcoming to be remedied, not as an identity to be supported and celebrated. A disability in a utopia is socially undesirable—a cause of suffering that does not belong in a place where wholeness of body and spirit is prized. The disability community, however, has a very different view of itself. And understanding what a more inclusive utopia entails shouldn’t just inform attitudes…

THE MOST INFLUENTIAL UTOPIAN THINKER in American history did not write futuristic novels or imagine perfect worlds in which evolved humans dined on honeydew. He was a gritty political agitator who responded to the news of his day with manuals designed to inspire politically and economically disenfranchised people to immediate action. Yet even now, more than two centuries after his death, there is no mistaking the utopian promise of Thomas Paine’s declaration that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine, like so many other utopian thinkers, past and present, broke down religious, political, social, and literary boundaries in order to achieve “a renovation of the natural order of things” so sweeping that his 18th-century generation might be recognized as “the Adam of a new…

Holiday Spirit Re “Democrats Should Create More Federal Holidays,” by Ed Burmila [June 14/21]: Those who work for private businesses often don’t get federal holidays. Instead of making up new holidays, require that businesses provide paid days off for the existing ones. BARBARA MEYER I think a president could add, at most, one federal holiday to the calendar as a matter of political reality. Joe Biden should add Election Day. As a federal holiday, it might lessen, but by no means eliminate, the impact of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts. ROBERT HAINING The Other Greenhouse Gases Re “Junk” [May 31/June 7]: Bill McKibben reviews Mark Bittman’s food history, Animal, Vegetable, Junk, without a single mention of how factory farms emit massive amounts of methane and nitrous oxide, two of the…

WITH INEVITABLE REGULARITY, RACIAL INJUSTICE AND VIOLENCE lead to moments of national conflict when even white Americans can no longer ignore the issue. And just as inevitably, instead of addressing this country’s pervasive racism and anti-Blackness, white Americans locate the problem somewhere within Black people themselves. We’re in yet another of those moments, as last summer’s promised “racial reckoning” turns out to be a white lie. Black demands for full citizenship and equality are being treated as entitlement, calls for white racial accountability redefined as white persecution, and anti-racism falsely construed as anti-whiteness. To reestablish unchallenged white dominance, a movement of white resistance, or anti-anti-racism, is working tirelessly to blot out what it sees as a problematic presence—purging Black folks from democracy by stripping voting rights, erasing Black struggle…

UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA ARE TWINS, BORN AT THE SAME MOMENT from the shared ancestry of social critique. Although remembered as the first modern attempt to systematically imagine an ideal society, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) began with a stark portrait of a Europe torn apart by war and crushing poverty, with the shocking prediction that if the enclosure of farmland continued, soon sheep would be eating people. This horrifying prospect made it urgent to look for an alternative, which More sketches out as an egalitarian, communal society of shared property. More’s utopian hopes were balanced by his dystopian fears, with a new sense of human agency in the making of history leading to possibilities both hopeful and dire. In the half-millennium since More wrote, countless others have trodden both paths, painting…

BRANDON WILL HAD A LIFE PLAN: go to grad school for creative writing in New York City and eventually get a job in publishing. But then his mother, Janice, came to visit. She had lost a “startling” amount of weight, he said. At 62, she wanted to take cabs for short distances. He noticed a stiffness in her facial muscles that made it difficult for her to express emotion. “I’d be taking selfies and she couldn’t smile,” he recalled. Within a year she would be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. “It got real serious real quick,” Will said. He decided to sublet his room in New York and move home to Detroit for three months. “I thought we’d get her back to where she’d been before the spiral happened.” It’s now…

“Toby Miller offers bold governing principles to secure the rescue, perhaps even the thriving, of humans and the planet. However one might amend his charter, it is impossible to reject its premise, which positively screeches from Miller’s accounting of how the pandemic was lived in four nations: we cannot go on like this.”—Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism “Miller makes a cogent argument for the need to change course in economic and social policy, both nationally and globally. The COVID pandemic has made it possible for many to see that the current economic system and the legislation that it promotes do not work.”—George Yúdice, author of The Expediency of Culture Humanity’s Last Stand Confronting Global Catastrophe Mark Schuller “An electrifying work that dissects a range of interconnected…