Innehållsförteckning för August 23/30, 2021 från The Nation

IN JULY 27, THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION CHANGED ITS guidance on masking, suggesting that those who are vaccinated, particularly in areas with substantial or high viral transmission, resume wearing masks in indoor public settings. Within hours, competing choruses of disgruntlement were proclaiming loudly and clearly either that the CDC should never have relaxed its mask guidance for vaccinated people, as it did in May, or that the CDC was overreacting and that expecting people to mask up again was a bridge too far. Over the next few days, the rationale for the CDC’s new guidance began to take shape, and by the end of that week, a slide set had been released on the website of The Washington Post that outlined the reasons for the CDC’s alarm. Central…

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER IN THE EARLY 1960S, I LEARNED about the civil rights activist Gloria Richardson in the pages of Ebony, Jet, and the Call and Post, Cleveland’s Black newspaper. Although I had no concept of sexism or gender politics at the time, Richardson made an impression on me because I had rarely seen a Black woman out front leading. Richardson died in Manhattan on July 15 at the age of 99. She achieved national prominence during the civil rights era but was often overlooked in later years. In the hours after her death, The Hill tweeted, “Civil rights activist Gloria Richardson dies.” Astonishingly, it posted a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. Substituting an image of King for one of Richardson is particularly ironic considering what occurred…

AS A FORMER CAREER POLICE OFFICER, I know that good police want the same things that most abolitionists do: safe, healthy, and empowered residents and investments in programs that prevent crime from occurring in the first place. The question is: How do we get there? We will always need some police, because there will always be serious crimes that require an armed response and professional investigation. But today, police spend most of our time responding to low-level issues that do not need an armed officer. In fact, our presence often makes these situations more dangerous. While the media features polarizing debates—“abolish the police” versus hiring more of them—many officers want to hand low-risk calls to trained “community responders” and to prevent those cops fired for misconduct from disgracing the badge…

ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1877, MOST LIKELY AFTER DARKNESS SET in, a man named Hing Kee was murdered in his bed in the lumber mill town of Port Madison in the Washington Territory. His assailant slit his throat and slashed his face and fingers “with some sharp instrument,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer surmised, “like an ax or a cleaver.” One blow was so forceful it hacked through his skull. We know little else about Hing Kee: how old he was, what he had done that day, who his family was, and whether they grieved. There was no picture of him in the paper, just three single-paragraph reports, the longest of which was devoted to the mill’s rather revealing (and suspect) statement that neither Hing Kee nor any “Chinamen” had been in…

CLIMATE CHANGE AMOUNTS TO AN UNDECLARED, deeply unjust war against the global poor. Though they have emitted almost none of the heat-trapping gases that have raised global temperatures to their highest levels in civilization’s history, it is the poor—especially in low-income countries in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and South America—who suffer first and worst from an overheating planet. For more than a decade, perilous, climate-driven events in wealthier nations have been preceded by similar changes in the Global South. The deadly heat that has brutalized the American West—and rightly attracted headline news coverage—this summer? That kind of heat has been killing and immiserating people across the Sahel in Africa for many years. Rising seas have been slashing rice yields in Bangladesh for years, as salty ocean water intrudes farther and farther…

IF THEY ARE SHREWD, THE SIX ANTICHOICE JUSTICES on the Supreme Court will resist the urge to overturn Roe v. Wade when they decide next term on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. At issue is a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks of gestation in explicit defiance of Roe, which protects abortion rights until around 24 weeks. Why hand the Democrats an issue that has worked well for them in purple states like Virginia? An attempt in 2012 to force women seeking abortions to have transvaginal ultrasounds backfired against Republicans so powerfully the state is now entirely under Democratic control. Despite Roe, states where antichoicers are strong have succeeded in drastically limiting abortion access by passing measures that force clinics to close—five have only one—and heap up obstacles…

NEARLY ALL LIBERALS, PROGRESSIVES, and radicals now acknowledge the existence of policing inequalities in this country. Nonetheless, too many on the left push for policies that expand the presence of law enforcement in poor communities. Well-meaning reformers often argue that instead of abolishing the police, we should focus on eliminating racist tactics and preventing unnecessary brutality. They propose solutions like body cameras, ending qualified immunity, and more training. Many progressives also endorse civilian review boards, community control of police, increasing police pay, and no longer having police enforce traffic violations or respond to mental health calls. Some claim that if society invests in solving the root causes of crime while maintaining, or even increasing, funding for law enforcement, we can keep our neighborhoods safe while not costing Democrats electorally. This…

Join the conversation, every Thursday, on the Start Making Sense podcast. 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…

THE RHETORIC AROUND THE FIRST AMENDMENT TENDS TO be incredibly misinformed. On one side are the First Amendment absolutists who act like proscribing any speech—even hate speech, or even when the prohibition is made by a private company—is tantamount to an assault on the very concept of freedom and liberty. Usually, these absolutists are screaming at people on the other side who haven’t actually thought through how wide-reaching government restrictions on speech—“Ban Fox News!”—would lead to an utter dystopia. Invariably someone shows up to say, “You can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater” (which is not true—you absolutely can shout fire in a crowded theater, so stop quoting this line), and everybody turns off the television less informed than when they started. The reality of our First Amendment freedoms is…

By the Numbers 9K–17K Number of people killed by US military or CIA drones since 2004 2.2K Estimated number of children killed 14K Number of confirmed US drone strikes in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan since 2004 90% Approximate percentage of the more than 200 people killed in Afghanistan by strikes during one five-month period of a Special Operations campaign who were not the intended targets 45 Number of months ex-NSA analyst Daniel Hale could spend in prison for leaking information about US drone attacks, including the previous fact 17 Minimum number of documents Hale leaked to reporters 8 Number of people prosecuted by the US government for leaking to journalists since 2017 —Jarod Facundo…

THE TITLE OF JULIA CAGé’S THE PRICE OF DEMOCRACY WILL prompt Americans to think of the obscene cost of their elections. The amount spent on the 2020 federal races is said to have been a staggering $14 billion (more than twice the price tag for 2016). State elections consumed close to $2 billion. Almost 90 percent of the House candidates who spent the most money ended up winning. Cagé, a French economist affiliated with the elite university Sciences Po in Paris, has plenty of critical things to say about campaign finance in the United States, but her main point goes further. Democracy, she writes, is never free—not in the United States, and not in the rest of the world. But we have yet to figure out who should pay for…