Innehållsförteckning för October 04/11, 2021 från The Nation

WHEREVER YOU WERE IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS OF WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, is where you were when Roe v. Wade was overturned. That is when Texas’s flagrantly illegal abortion ban went into effect, turning the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision—which recognized and protected a pregnant person’s right to bodily autonomy prior to fetal viability—into little more than a suggestion, a thought bubble that Republican-controlled states are free to ignore. Such states are now free to force people to bring a pregnancy to term, against their will, even when the pregnancy was caused by the violence of men. The right to choose has been under attack for some time. Over the years, Republican-controlled states have come up with all kinds of insidious ways to whittle away at abortion rights. TRAP laws,…

I TITLED MY FIRST BOOK OF ESSAYS REASONABLE CREATURES, after Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous remark “I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes but reasonable creatures.” I’d never use that title now. Women are as rational as men, sure, but that’s not saying much. If Wollstonecraft came back to life, she’d have a heart attack. By comparison with her 18th-century day, we live in paradise, yet people seem as willfully ignorant and blinkered as ever. The lack of progress has become staggeringly apparent since the onset of the pandemic. Is there anything less rational than people refusing vaccines that have been proved time and again to prevent a deadly disease? Well, yes—believing that the disease does not exist. If you’re feeling flu-ish, just follow the advice of noted medical experts…

AFROPESSIMISM IS ALL THE RAGE AMONG MILLENNIAL BLACK ACADEMICS and activists—most notably among Black feminist critical race theorists, who themselves are now the prime targets of the MAGA crowd. Black intellectuals haven’t enjoyed this much pop currency among the right wing since Black Power took over buildings to demand Black studies in state universities and the Ivies 50 years ago. Afropessimism’s recent emergence in the mainstream of Black political conversation could not have been better timed. Particularly for that critical race sistren group, given their issues with suddenly woke white America—especially their bête blanche, white academic feminists. Here the grounds for suspicion are not gratuitous but experiential and statistical: 48 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump. Beyond that tempestuous internal struggle between feminists of different hues, though, just…

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…

LIKE MANY OTHER ABORTION ACTIVISTS IN TEXAS, Amanda Beatriz Williams stayed up most of the night of August 31 and awoke to a terrifying silence. Her organization, the Lilith Fund, helps people pay for abortions in Texas. On a typical shift, they hear from 30 to 50 people. But on September 1, as a near-total ban forced clinics across the state to stop providing most abortions, the fund heard from fewer than 10. “This is a huge drop in the number of people that we normally hear from, and that just tells us that those people are out there, pregnant against their will,” Williams said. “It is absolutely devastating.” The law, Senate Bill 8, bans abortion after embryonic cardiac activity can be detected, which usually happens five to seven weeks…

The Debate Anarchist NATASHA LENNARD IT FEELS MOST APT TO MARK THE 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street by reviving a debate that is resistant to resolution, open to endless disagreement, and primed for messy expressions of political ideology. How very Occupy! If you had asked me at the time whether Occupy was more anarchist or socialist, I would have answered, without missing a beat, that it was an anarchist movement. Though I most likely wouldn’t have said “movement”—I would’ve said “moment,” out of respect for Occupy’s anarchistic departures from traditional organized politics. Of course, I would have also said that socialists were among the many thousands of people who participated in Occupy with great commitment. Some of my best friends today are socialists from Occupy! I still believe Occupy…

OCCUPY WALL STREET WAS CRITICIZED AT THE TIME FOR RAILING AGAINST SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS without offering a concrete list of solutions. Yet protesters did speak out about policies they saw as unjust and about others that would address the ills they stood against. The movement has left an indelible mark not just on the national conversation about inequality but on the laws and structures that enable it. The rampant inequality Occupy decried has been perpetuated through decades of policy choices—and can be undone by the same. Below, we identify eight policy areas in which activists and lawmakers have, since 2011, tried to work toward a fairer America. —Research by Katrina Janco and Gloria Oladipo $15 MINIMUM WAGE Occupy Wall Street shined a bright light on the vast amounts of money hoarded…

PROTEST SPEAKS A LANGUAGE OF FORCEFUL insistence. “Defund the police,” “Build the wall”—the unyielding demands go back to Moses’ “Let my people go.” So it was curious when the July 2011 issue of the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters ran a cryptic call to arms: a ballerina posing atop the famous Charging Bull statue on Wall Street, with the question “What is our one demand?” printed above her in red. The question wasn’t answered; readers were only told, “#OccupyWallStreet. September 17th. Bring tent.” In retrospect, it’s astonishing that such a vague entreaty worked, especially since Adbusters declined to organize the action. After issuing the call, the magazine had “almost nothing to do with it,” its cofounder admitted. Instead, an unaffiliated group called New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, composed largely of socialists,…

AFTER 18 MONTHS OF BEING STUCK IN OUR HOMES—if we were lucky enough to do so—and being surrounded by death and suffering, we are all ready to move past this pandemic. The vaccines offered hope for this in the spring—it seemed that by summer the virus would be at low levels and people could safely gather again. Then the Delta variant, combined with lackluster vaccination levels and a disastrous CDC guidance that told vaccinated people they could remove their masks indoors and dispense with social distancing, led to major setbacks. These factors combined to create a perfect storm of rising infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. As a result, despite having plentiful supplies of vaccines, as of early September, the United States is seeing more than 1,000 deaths a day. As we…

TEN YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, OCCUPY WALL STREET UNEXPECTEDLY inaugurated a new wave of protest. The domestic manifestation of a worldwide explosion of digitally networked social movements, it scaled up rapidly, attracting enormous public and media attention. But the protesters were evicted from New York City’s Zuccotti Park and other occupied spaces after only a few months, and Occupy dissipated soon afterward. Some commentators have dismissed it as a meteoric flash in the pan, while others have criticized its “horizontalist” structure and lack of concrete demands. After speaking recently with more than 20 activists who were centrally involved in the movement, we beg to differ with such negative assessments. “Occupy wasn’t a blip, it was a spark!” declared one, veteran organizer Nastaran Mohit. “It was a turning point, a spark…

THE THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WHO FLOCKED TO NEW YORK CITY’S ZUCCOTTI Park 10 years ago this fall to protest capitalism run amok were far more diverse than the media let on. “It’s true there were a lot of white people, but in the NYC encampment there were many BIPOC people and women of color, like myself, who had very visible leadership roles,” says Sandy Nurse, a carpenter and local organizer who recently won the Democratic primary (and effectively the election) for the 37th District of the New York City Council. In the fall and winter of 2011, I interviewed dozens of women at the encampment—mostly queer and BIPOC—who led marches and demonstrations, got kettled and arrested, facilitated contentious meetings, and participated as fully as their white male counterparts. Some had…

WHAT ROLE DID WHITE WOMEN PLAY IN THE STORY OF Donald Trump? In the months after his election, pink-pussyhat-clad white women positioned themselves as the paradigmatic victims of a misogynistic president, even as commentators pointed out that 47 percent of them (or, I should say, 47 percent of us) voted for him. By the end of his term, news-making “Karens” showed that white women not only voted for Trump in large numbers but were often active participants in the racist state violence he championed. Pink pussyhats recalled the moment when Trump was caught on tape bragging about his ability to assault women with impunity; now white women were caught on video, bragging about their ability to deploy the police against people of color. Dana Spiotta’s fifth novel, Wayward, is set…

Take, get, catch—catch the lining of soft tissue, catch itand grow. Gives us: think it up, imagine.Gives us: you get what you get. Takeit again, receive— seize, grab hold,welcome, draw into the fold, the hold.Offer it up, recover what was stolen. Receiver is what you are now, recipient.Here it comes again: what if she wonderswhy you didn’t come? When her hair caughtthe brush you stood over her, untangled itstrand by strand, held one hand at the rootso it wouldn’t hurt.…