Innehållsförteckning för November 15/22, 2021 från The Nation

NEW YORK CITY’S RIKERS ISLAND HAS LONG BEEN A HELLHOLE AND A NATIONAL disgrace. For decades, the jail complex has been plagued by violence and chaos, but conditions have deteriorated dramatically in the past year as the Covid-19 pandemic has raged across the nation. Calls to close Rikers have continued to grow, but the timeline city officials have proposed stretches into the distant future, with mass decarceration completely off the table. But mass decarceration is exactly what’s needed to ensure that people aren’t simply being shuttled from one inhumane situation to another. As of October 25, Rikers incarcerated 114 people serving sentences of one year or less. Under the city’s 6-A program, Mayor Bill de Blasio could authorize them to serve their sentences at home under supervision. At the start…

QUALIFIED IMMUNITY IS A LEGAL CONCEPT THAT sounds wonky but is not difficult to grasp. Put simply: Government workers, including members of law enforcement, cannot be sued in their capacity as private individuals for actions they take as part of their official responsibilities. The doctrine was invented by courts to limit the liability of people who execute the law in good faith, even if it’s a law some people don’t like. While some form of qualified immunity is probably necessary to have a functioning society—we can’t have employees at the IRS sued for theft every time they garnish someone’s wages—applying it to law enforcement officers creates a different problem: The police are able to operate with apparent lawful authority even when their actions are flatly illegal. Over the past two…

533M Number of Facebook users who had their personal information leaked, as reported in April 38% Percentage increase of Internet traffic to news sites at the peak of Facebook’s five-hour-plus outage $14M Amount paid by Facebook to settle claims that it discriminated against US workers 8 Minimum number of whistleblower complaints filed by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen 17% Percentage of teenage girls who say Instagram makes eating disorders worse 3.2M Number of hours spent searching, labeling, and removing problematic content on Facebook in 2020 13% Percentage of those hours spent on content posted outside the US…

DEMOCRATS ARE TIRED. I GET THAT; I’M TIRED TOO. LEFT ies made fun of the woman—yes, blond and white—carrying a sign at the 2017 Women’s March that read “If Hillary was president we’d be at brunch.” How bourgeois can you get! Imagine wanting to have pancakes and mimosas out with your friends instead of demonstrating, going to meetings, door-knocking, leafleting, fundraising, and all the fun things so many of us spent so much time doing in the Trump years. In fact, women like that sign-holder geared up for action and became the much-mocked “Resistance,” which did so much to deliver the House, the Senate, and the White House to Democrats. For some, activism became a way of life. But it’s not surprising that a lot of people would like to…

Born in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, Mohammed El-Kurd has witnessed the brutality of Israeli occupation his entire life, including the invasion of his family home by settlers when he was a boy of 11. As a poet his voice is powerful, penetrating—and impossible to ignore. And that makes him a dangerous man. His debut poetry collection, Rifqa, just published, is named for his grandmother, who as it happens shares the name of my grandmother—only hers was in Yiddish. Nearly 20 years ago, one of the first pieces I wrote for The Nation from London looked forward to “the day when the Palestinians themselves can also be heard, and when the lives of Palestinian children count as much as those of Israeli children, or Americans.” The Nation’s decision to…

Mohammed El-Kurd is a Palestinian poet, writer, and activist who grew up in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. When he was 11 years old, settlers carrying rifles and backpacks, and supported by the Israeli army, took over half his house. This spring, El-Kurd returned to Palestine from the United States, where he had been studying for his MFA, to fight a renewed push to expel his family and neighbors from their homes. In the process, he helped spark what has come to be known as the Unity Intifada. He has since been named one of the 100 most influential people of 2021 by Time, and The Nation recently tapped him as our inaugural Palestine correspondent. In October, he published a book of poetry, Rifqa. NE: You grew up…

Yes BARBARA SOSTAITA I’M WRITING THIS WHILE ON THE road with the Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants, a collective whose children were disappeared on the migrant trail by cartels, government agents, or traffickers. For these women, the world has already ended. It ends every time they wake up and confront life without their children. The mothers credit religion as the reason they survive the end of their worlds. As they travel, they carry laminated images of their kids around their necks—forming an iconography of forced migration. When they gather in schools, churches, and public squares, they engage in a devotional ritual of sorts, placing these photos in tidy rows, inviting passersby to stare into the eyes of the disappeared and invoke their presence. They share testimonios, which are part…

IN 1883, LESS THAN 20 YEARS AFTER EMANCIPATION, CURTIS Gentry bought nearly 1,500 acres of undeveloped land in Shiloh, a rural community in the Alabama county where he had once been enslaved. Alongside his brother Turner, with whom he was able to reunite after emancipation—unlike the members of so many other Black families—Gentry cleared that property, uprooting trees, brush, and undergrowth. Once the land was arable, he planted and harvested an array of crops, including ribbon cane, corn, and peas. “He was a hard worker,” Bernice Atchison, Gentry’s granddaughter-in-law, told me. “Not only did he clear his own land, but he took jobs helping white people clear their land.” He taught his family how to take care of the farm while he worked on other people’s farms, bringing in extra…