Innehållsförteckning för November 01/08, 2021 från The Nation

Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood hardcover • 528 pp. • $34.95 “Shaik’s rendition of her hometown is lyrical and mysterious and always captivating.”—the New York Times “Bearing witness to early Black American activism… Shaik aims to deepen our sense of Black American history.”—Library Journal In the face of an oppressive white society, the members of the Société d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle rejected racism and colorism to fight for suffrage and education for all. Built on exhaustive historical research, Economy Hall follows these civil rights pioneers through landmark events—from the Haitian Revolution to the birth of jazz—that shaped New Orleans and the United States. Follow @visit_thnoc on social media All THNOC publications in print are available from The Shop at The Collection, (504) 598-7147, hnoc.org/ourbooks, or…

WHEN NATION PUBLISHER KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL INVITED Dave Zirin in 2006 to become the magazine’s first sports editor in the publication’s then-141-year history, many readers scoffed. What a waste of valuable space! Sports were a diversion, people argued, banal escapism, not worth the time of a serious magazine. One reader denounced pro sports as the modern-day opiate of the masses. Fast-forward 10 years to NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who chooses to “take a knee” during the traditional pregame performance of the national anthem. After that protest, sports and politics seem irrevocably intertwined. What better venue for examining the gender, class, and racial inequities roiling society and the forces of resistance pushing back against traditional norms and mores? Athletic protests become frontpage news. ESPN starts a vertical on race. The Washington Post…

THE PANDEMIC HAS BEEN A CRASH COURSE IN HARDSHIP and downward mobility for millions of Americans. Whether they thought they had their lives “set” or were already struggling to get by, the arrival of the coronavirus suddenly added a lot of new households to the ranks of those scrambling to make the rent, pay the electric bill, or make three weeks’ worth of money stretch to the end of the month. Starting October 18, The Nation and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project are launching Going for Broke, a new podcast series I’m hosting that will bring you personal stories of prevailing through challenging times like these. For years I’ve told readers, listeners, and viewers that too much of American journalism consists of stories told by wealthy people to middle-class people…

AN AFRICAN AMERICAN FRIEND DESCRIBES THE FOLLOWING SCENARIO: “My son L. was invited to a neighbor’s seventh birthday party. When we arrived, the neighbor child introduced L. to the small circle of other children, all of whom were white; he did so in hushed tones, seemingly so that adults wouldn’t hear. ‘This is my friend L.,’ he whispered. ‘He’s Black!’ He said it with giddy pride, as though L. were an exotic prize, an unusual triumph, a trophy specimen.” What struck my friend most was not that the children were marveling at Blackness as something they had seemingly never encountered, but that the young host whispered it. “He was self-conscious,” she said. “He lowered his voice as though he had learned that he shouldn’t say it aloud, that it was…

MORE THAN TWO YEARS before George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer in Minneapolis sparked a national outcry for a crackdown on police violence, New Jersey Assemblywoman Britnee Timberlake was fighting to make the investigation of deaths in police custody fair and impartial, unclouded by the often intimate relationship between county prosecutors and law enforcement. At times it seemed like an uphill battle. Timberlake’s proposed bill, A3115, required the state to take charge of police-involved death investigations, moving prosecutions out of the counties where the killings occurred. It faced staunch opposition from the state’s powerful police unions and New Jersey’s attorney general. Because the attorney general was a high-profile appointee of Democratic Governor Phil Murphy, there was speculation that A3115 would be vetoed. But, Timberlake recalls, “Governor Murphy listened…

Downhill, a skeleton of an orcasuspended: a female beached; belly full, at that time, of seal and fish; the seal and fishfull, at that time of poison. The volunteer,white bob, soft face, knew too the desire to see a body—its echoes—suspended.Hope, the name given to a dead whale once located by clicks and whistles in echoin inlet in open sea. The volunteertells me she visited the Smithsonian Museum of African AmericanHistory—says, The saddest part, to me, the Emmett Till—do you know him?—exhibit.The whale, killer, weakened by a scaffoldof old poison: DDT, PCBs, which no prey can process but holds in its fatits tissues its soft parts. See her Southern scaffold: Mississippi, Alabama,Georgia. See, I hadn’t thought to thinkof him here, under the reconstructed skeleton I had come to see, and…

THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY IS IN A GOLDEN AGE OF reboots. Some stories, it seems, are compelling enough—after a few obligatory tweaks in style and tone—that an audience can be persuaded to make a repeat visit every five or 10 years. An incomplete list of such archetypes includes: A misanthropic clown commits crimes but has interesting reasons for doing so. Beset with bad health insurance, a chemistry teacher becomes a drug kingpin. Four female friends drink cosmos and have unrealistically large apartments in New York City. And on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, bloodthirsty cliques of teenagers party and scheme, surveilled by an anonymous blogger known as “Gossip Girl.” HBO’s Gossip Girl is a reboot of the 2007–12 CW show of the same name, which starred Blake Lively and Leighton Meester as…

Military recruits, oil-rig workers, killing-floor operators—some might say they have blood on their hands. But in his new book Dirty Work, Eyal Press turns the prevailing narrative on its head and looks instead at the psychological costs these workers pay and the moral injuries they suffer. Rather than place the most blame on those with the least power, Press asks, what if we collectively assumed responsibility for the violence? We discussed this and more in the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity. JL: Your book tells the stories of correctional psychiatrists, drone operators, slaughterhouse workers, and offshore oil-rig workers. What unites all these people under the category of “dirty workers”? EP: What unites them is that they are doing work that causes substantial social harm—sometimes to…

YOU’D THINK IT A REASONABLE ASSUMPTION THAT THE PEOPLE MOST INVESTED IN the idea of the nation-state would be the same people who lead them; that the men (and regrettably, it is mostly men) who go out of their way to run for president, weasel their way into a parliamentary post, or seize power by other means would want to maintain the facade that their borders, their anthems, and their founding myths mean something. You’d think that a figure whose rhetoric leans on national pride would put faith in his country and its people and that an individual charged with shaping policy would at least feign confidence in the bylaws of his own making. This moral consistency need not arise from genuine conviction, which is hard to come by in…

OVER A CENTURY BEFORE PRINCESS DIANA DIED AT the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, the physician Jean-Martin Charcot attracted toute la ville to his live demonstrations of neurological disorders on its premises. Charcot’s particular interest was hysteria, that mysterious, uniquely female complex—literally, “of the womb”—that seemed to afflict so many women of his day. His Tuesday lectures, featuring patients of the hospital on full display, were high spectacle, attended, according to one account, by “a multi-colored audience, drawn from all of Paris: authors, doctors, leading actors and actresses, fashionable demimondaines, all full of morbid curiosity.” Among them was Sigmund Freud, whose own deranged analysis of “the great neurosis” also made him famous. There are certain symmetries in history that lend the impression that all has been foretold, when in fact it’s…

It feels like eons ago, but as recently as March the Democrats took major action to address the ongoing Covid-19 recession with the American Rescue Plan. Yet ever since Congress passed the legislation, there have been critics, both conservative and centrist, who have attacked the plan for being too big and doing too much. Over the spring and summer, these naysayers made two dire predictions. Both proved wrong, but instead of pausing to reevaluate the policies they’d attacked, the critics continued at the same volume, moving the goalposts with brand-new claims. The first prediction was that expanded unemployment insurance would prevent people from seeking jobs. The CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan made unemployment insurance more generous through a lump-sum grant and by expanding it to include independent contractors…

MIGUEL FERNÁNDEZ DE CASTRO’S WHITE Toyota pickup truck rolled into the empty gravel lot outside the Santa Ana bus station a few minutes after 5 pm. We were two hours south of the Arizona border, in the desert state of Sonora, one of the most sparsely populated regions in Mexico. I had met Fernández de Castro six months earlier in Brooklyn, at a Japanese-inspired cocktail bar run by the art magazine e-flux, where he was screening his experimental film Grammar of Gates. Released in 2019, the video examines the plight of the Tohono O’odham, the Indigenous group from which he is descended and whose territory straddles the US-Mexico border. Pairing drone footage of the tribe’s ancestral lands with clips from the kitschy 1970 western Geronimo Jones, it’s an impressionistic portrait…

THE SINGLE BEST OPTION FOR REDUCING THE RISK OF nuclear war is hidden in plain sight. News outlets don’t mention it. Pundits ignore it. Even progressive and peace-oriented members of Congress tiptoe around it. And yet, for many years, experts have been calling for this act of sanity that could save humanity: shutting down all of the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. Four hundred ICBMs dot the rural landscapes of Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Loaded in silos, these missiles are uniquely—and dangerously—on hair-trigger alert. Unlike the nuclear weapons on submarines or bombers, the land-based missiles are vulnerable to attack and could present the commander in chief with a sudden use-them-or-lose-them choice. “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would…

ON MARCH 25, REPUBLICAN CONGRESSWOMAN CATHY McMorris Rodgers grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on whether social media platforms were doing harm to children. Zuckerberg’s first response was to sidestep the issue of children altogether and mutter vaguely about “people” instead: “Congresswoman, the research that I have seen on this suggests that if people are using computers and social—” Rodgers cut off this evasion and asked for a simple yes-or-no answer. Zuckerberg replied, “I don’t think that the research is conclusive on that. But I can summarize what I have learned, if that is helpful.” In his gloss on the scholarship, Zuckerberg highlighted the happy news that “overall, the research that we have seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental health benefits and…

464K Number of people expelled by the Trump administration under Title 42, a public health provision used to deny asylum seekers due process 700K Approximate number of people expelled by the Biden administration since February 2021 using Title 42 6k Number of Haitians deported by the Biden administration between September 19 and October 1 3.2M Number of people in Haiti facing food insecurity 19 Number of years that the US military occupied Haiti (from 1915 to 1934) 81% Percentage of migrants held in detention facilities owned or operated by private firms as of January 2020 2 Number of US officials who have resigned over the Biden administration’s treatment of Haitian migrants…

TO STATE THAT JONATHAN FRANZEN ranks among America’s best novelists reliably provokes ire—especially on the Internet, where such ire is never in short supply. Nevertheless, his work has long been discussed in these terms, at least since his third novel, 2001’s The Corrections, the rare work of literary fiction that was both a critical and a commercial hit. Whether or not he is any good, let alone one the best novelists in the country, Franzen’s tidiest trick has been to force us to litigate his own excellence every few years. Franzen began his career in 1988, with The Twenty-Seventh City, and followed that experimental novel about St. Louis a few years later with Strong Motion, which established the themes that have concerned so much of his work: the environment, capitalism,…

Sun on my face and the train slipsinto the tunnel. Dim reflection confronts.Perhaps I am lacking in something substantiallike iron, or virtue. How easy it is to hurtsomeone, how hard to face what comes after.My face, strangely lit, in the bathroommirror. Surrounded by friends, I felt a queasyaloneness, didn’t know whose lap to cry into.Someone spat out an olive pit. Someone torestreamers off the wall. I distortedthrough the stemmed glass. Already exhaustedin this angular year, where I hoverlike a stranger to my own life.No resolution in any of it.…

Our Carbon Bootprint Re “20 Years of Bloodshed and Delusion” [Special issue, September 20/27]: I am puzzled and increasingly alarmed by the absence of a robust and widespread public debate about the intimate connections between climate change and the military-industrial complex, along with corporate capitalism and the foundations of imperialism, racism, and patriarchy that feed and are fed by it. The recent US military “withdrawal” from Afghanistan and the torrent of mostly obfuscating finger-pointing and responsibility-dodging it has triggered presents the perfect opportunity to tackle this subject. SHARRY LAPPPITTSBURGH The Forgotten Forever War Danny Sjursen and Lawrence Wilkerson’s “Repeal the AUMF Now” [September 20/27] does a fine job of arguing that the United States should end its “forever wars” in Iraq and Syria. Unfortunately, Sjursen and Wilkerson forgot to mention…