Innehållsförteckning för October 18/25, 2021 från The Nation

MASS OPPOSITION TO DONALD TRUMP BEGAN WITH IMMIGRATION. HIS RACIST rhetoric and barbaric policies around immigrants and asylum-seekers are what first fueled outrage among liberals, as well as among people who were otherwise apolitical. Politicians, pundits, and rank-and-file Democratic voters alike rightfully decried Trump’s migrant policies, with some going as far as to compare the administration to the Nazi regime. Now, as the Biden administration prepares to carry out the biggest mass expulsion of asylum-seekers in recent history, the liberals who demonstrated in airports to protest Trump’s Muslim ban and circulated Facebook posts about “kids in cages” are nowhere to be found. There was more outrage over Trump’s description of Haiti and other developing nations as “shithole” countries than there is over President Biden’s around-the-clock efforts to deport desperate families,…

A STAPLE OF THE FEEL-GOOD NEWS CYCLE—ALONG with pieces about skateboarding dogs and friendships spawned by misdialed texts—is the story of human suffering overcome through community, charity, and old-fashioned pluck. There is the 14-year-old who spent his summer vacation selling homemade popsicles to help his mother pay for food, rent, and a motorized wheelchair. In Utah, a couple crowdfunded $20,000 for their Papa John’s delivery guy, an 89-year-old retiree who returned to working 30 hours a week delivering pizzas because his monthly Social Security checks don’t cut it. Before shuttering his office and retiring, an Arkansas oncologist wrote off the medical debts of some 200 cancer patients, which totaled nearly $650,000. And a group of FedEx employees raised the money to buy a car for their 60-year-old coworker, who had…

BEFORE HE BECAME A CELEBRATED AUTHOR AND THE FOUNDING father and first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Eustace Williams was an adroit footballer. At his high school, Queen’s Royal College, he was a fierce competitor, which likely led to an injury that left him deaf in his right ear. Yet as Williams’s profile as a scholar and national leader rose, so did the attempts by his critics to turn his athleticism against him. An “expert dribbler” known for prancing downfield with the ball kissing one foot, then the other, Williams was now accused by his political detractors of not being a team player. Driven by his desire to play to the gallery—or so it was said—he proved to be uninterested in whether his team (or his nation,…

WE HAVE NAMED THE ERA OF RUNAWAY CLIMATE CHANGE the “Anthropocene,” which tells you everything you need to know about how we understand our tragic nature. Human beings are apparently insatiable consuming machines; we are eating our way right through the biosphere. The term seems to suggest that the relentless expansion of the world economy, which the extraction and burning of fossil fuels has made possible, is hard-wired into our DNA. Seen from this perspective, attempting to reverse course on global warming is likely to be a fool’s errand. But is unending economic growth really a defining feature of what it means to be human? For the longest part of our history, humans lived as hunter-gatherers who neither experienced economic growth nor worried about its absence. Instead of working many…

“Goodall’s infectious optimism and stirring call to action make this necessary reading for those concerned about the planet’s future… Goodall’s rousing testament will resonate widely.”PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW “With candor and insight, Judge LaDoris Cordell puts a human face on the judges who make life-changing decisions on a daily basis… An inspiring and hopeful book.”ROBERT REICH, FORMER SECRETARY OF LABOR AND AUTHOR OF THE SYSTEM “A heart-stomping, heart-stopping read. Unsentimental. Unforgettable. Astonishing. Brothers on Three captures the roar of a community spirit powered by blood history, loyalty, and ferocious love.”DEBRA MAGPIE EARLING, AUTHOR OF PERMA RED…

BUSH AND CHENEY SOLD THE WAR, OBAMA normalized it, Trump disowned it, and Biden had the courage to end it. Cecil Rhodes once said he would annex the planets if he could, and the United States, over the past four decades, has nursed an ambition quite as otherworldly. Everyone (we believed) would choose our way of life if only they had the chance. It followed that we should try to get them there through arts and manners and commerce and, if necessary, through wars. The wars would, of course, be fought against the enemies of freedom, even if the enemies were their neighbors and compatriots. Tony Blair put the case memorably, just three weeks after September 11, 2001: “The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, soon they…

ON THE FIRST MONDAY IN OCTOBER, THE Supreme Court, the most powerful government body controlled by conservatives, returns to work. Democrats have the White House and both chambers of Congress; Republicans, who have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections, are currently confined to the unelected, unaccountable branch of government. However, because that one branch claims sole authority to nullify the actions of the other two, Republicans can do a lot of damage. Indeed, the ability to stop the actions of branches that Republicans cannot control without voter suppression is a big reason Senator Mitch McConnell spent so much energy stacking the Supreme Court. From stealing a seat from Barack Obama in 2016 to giving a third appointment to Donald Trump in 2020, McConnell has…

“Elegant, passionate, and powerful… This book expands the boundaries of the Black radical political and intellectual tradition, and re-centers a voice that is too prescient to be ignored.”—BARBARA RANSBY author of Making All Black Lives Matter Told through his perspective as an activist, acclaimed commentator Solomon Jones tells the stories of real people whose lives and deaths pushed the Black Lives Matter movement forward, and offers 10 demands to rectify racial injustice. “A searing indictment of the US immigration restrictions from Chinese Exclusion through the Trump presidency… powerful and meticulously argued.”—IBRAM X. KENDI “Cashin is one of the most important civil rights scholars of our time, and White Space, Black Hood is her magnum opus, the searing culmination of decades of research about the devastating consequences of segregation.”—BARBARA RANSBY author…

NEAR THE END OF “THREE WOMEN OF CHUCK’S DONUTS,” the first story in Anthony Veasna So’s posthumous collection Afterparties, something unexpectedly violent happens at a doughnut shop. It’s not a murder, exactly, but there is blood. “Help me clean this up,” Sothy, the shop owner, instructs her two daughters, who are helping run the store through the late-night shift. “Customers can’t see blood so close to the donuts.” The moment is emblematic of So’s short fiction: There’s one generation, then another, rebounding off each other in a crackle of humor on the heels of a moment of absurd yet totally reasonable violence. And all of it is embedded in a distinctly Cambodian American immigrant experience, which is so closely bound to the texture and structure of the stories that it’s…

KIRKPATRICK SALE “If it’s radical and leading edge, Sale probably wrote about it sooner and better than anyone else.”—Utne Reader “Kirkpatrick Sale is one of those writers whose pen will always set the imagination alight regard less of his topic.”—Fourth World Review “There is one overriding fact about government that condemns it to being forever wrong: it is a contrivance abhorrent to nature, including human nature, and cannot be formed in any such way to prevent it being so…. For the longest time that we have been humans, say for about a million-and-a-half years, we have lived without anything that could be remotely considered government.” ”If humans lived for the first two million years without a state, and most of them for the next 8,000 years without one, and the…

OVER THE LAST YEAR, DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS HAS FACED A MAJOR scandal, as more than 1,000 current and former employees signed on to a letter accusing the Nobel Peace Prize–winning humanitarian organization of institutional racism, citing a colonial mentality in how the group’s European managers view the developing world. Such an allegation would be serious in any field, but it deserves another level of scrutiny in the context of global health and humanitarianism, two fields built on a paternalistic premise: rich white people from wealthy nations setting themselves up as saviors of poor people of color. The assumptions embedded in this model have provoked increasingly popular calls to “decolonize” the sector, and many organizations have responded by invoking social justice rhetoric, claiming, for instance, that their work intersects with the…

ART ISN’T MEANT TO BE ONE-SIZE-FITSALL, and a book’s popularity is always less about its worthiness than its marketing budget. We all know this. But the problem—particularly for Sally Rooney, whose two novels and two TV deals have sent critics scrambling to theorize her success—is that hype is easily mistaken for claims to pree-minence or universality. Which leads people to blame the hyped novelist, rather than the hype itself, for not living up to their highly personal tastes or expectations. Like all popular books, Rooney’s novels have been critiqued through the lens of their author’s various public identities. She has been called both “representatively millennial” and “not really engaging with any of the social issues that might make her truly relevant to the millennial moment.” Her works are “an…

1. The Spirit of Inquiry in the Age of Jefferson The American Philosophical Society (editor) Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Volume 110 Part 2 $37 978-1-60618-102-7 2. What Ever Happened to the U.S. Congress’s Portraits of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette? Retracing the Events that Led to the Conflagration of the Capitol and the Loss of the Pictures on 24-25 August 1814 T. Lawrence Larkin Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Volume 110 Part 5 $37 978-1-60618-105-8 3. Benjamin Franklin, Swimmer: An Illustrated History Sarah B. Pomeroy Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Volume 110 Part 1 $37 978-1-60618-101-0 4. The Power of Maps and the Politics of Borders The American Philosophical Society (editor) Transactions of the American Philosophical Society Volume 110 Part 4 $37 978-1-60618-104-1 5. The Art of…

SOME 20 YEARS AGO, IN BEYOND THE SHADOW OF CAMPTOWN, a book about Korean military brides in the United States, the historian Ji-Yeon Yuh devoted considerable attention to food. The women brought stateside in the first decades after the Korean War found themselves in “the proverbial land of plenty,” she wrote, yet they wasted away, complaining that “here, there was nothing to eat.” They “not only longed for Korean food, they also searched for it, invented ways to replicate it, and gave it an emotional loyalty they never developed for the American food they ate out of necessity.” her family cooked and ate and refused to eat. Food is a clock by which Cho measures her mother’s life, from a youth dismantled The stories Yuh collected—of brides who transformed stale…