Innehållsförteckning för December 13/20, 2021 från The Nation

THE SCIENCE TELLS US THIS IS THE DECADE TO TAKE ACTION TO AVERT THE IRRE-versible impacts of climate change. That’s the urgency behind the United Nations’ climate conferences, which bring together 197 members each year to make a commitment to emission reductions, provide funding to developing nations for mitigation and adaptation, and find other ways to address the crisis. Since the first climate conference in 1992, activists have been frustrated by the slow pace of the negotiations. This year’s conference in Glasgow, Scotland, which ended on November 13, was no exception. Yet there is no doubt that the strides made by the resulting agreement reflect, in part, the growing power of climate activism worldwide. Over the past decade, climate activism has changed and grown, often reflecting shifts brought about by…

WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO TALK ABOUT THE WAY female politicians dress. After generations of mostly male journalists writing with breathless fascination about the fact that women don’t look like men, it’s a welcome reprieve. But something radical is happening. As more women run for and reach executive positions, the evolving standards for what leadership actually looks like are breaking the mold. Beyond just clothes, we’re talking about upending the male-coded image-making of power, those visual cues politicians use to inform our unconscious biases and the bedrock of most political legitimacy. It feels almost taboo to examine the choices women in politics are making for their public image, but if we can’t describe them, we won’t be able to codify women as leaders. Take the new era of governance under New…

72 Number of times the United States attempted to overthrow another country’s government during the Cold War 390K Minimum number of people killed in Latin America from 1945 to 2000 in anti-communist extermination programs, many with the US government’s backing $650M Amount Saudi Arabia will pay for US missiles in its first major arms deal with the Biden administration 36% Percentage of “democratic backsliding” since 2010 attributable to the 41 US-aligned countries, according to the Swedish nonprofit V-DEM 44% Percentage of respondents in a global survey who believe that US influence is a threat to democracy in their country 17% Percentage of respondents who believe that American democracy is a good model to follow…

AS THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN DREW TO A LONG-OVERDUE end, a veteran of that conflict campaigned to represent Staten Island and South Brooklyn in Congress. At a street fair in the Bay Ridge neighborhood in August, Brittany Ramos DeBarros, 32, wore a white skirt over dark leggings, light blue Asics, big hoop earrings, and a T-shirt adorned with her new campaign logo. She talked to her potential constituents about housing, Covid-19 relief, and registering to vote. Her staff ran a bubble machine and handed out candy to the kids. At one point, DeBarros was approached by an elderly man who was so soft-spoken it was difficult to hear him amid the hubbub of the crowded block party. The two had something in common: Both had faced court-martial for speaking out…

IN DECEMBER OF 1944, ON THE PHILIPPINE ISLAND OF Leyte, the soldiers of F Company of the 128th Infantry Regiment, 32nd Division, dug in. Stationed just outside the town of Limon, they were attempting to take a strategic ridge overlooking the town. In the face of fierce Japanese resistance, it was all they could do to hold their position. A first lieutenant who was also a Lutheran pastor addressed the company and gave words of encouragement by means of a brief sermon. God guides the US Army’s bullets toward the Japanese, the lieutenant assured his fellow soldiers, while protecting us from theirs. These words failed to lift the spirits of at least one young soldier in F Company; instead, they infuriated him. Years later, he described this incident as one…

DUNE, DENIS VILLENEUVE’S ADAPTATION OF THE SCIENCE fiction novel by Frank Herbert, begins with an ambush. Armed figures patrol a desert devoid of human life, guarding machines that mine swirls of sand for a rare and mysterious commodity called “spice.” Then attackers emerge from the sand beneath their feet, and the desert erupts in gunfire and explosions. The ambush is part of a campaign that is not successful; in voiceover, an enigmatic character named Chani (played by the actor Zendaya) reveals that “our warriors couldn’t free [the planet] from the Harkonnens,” the occupying force responsible for the mining operation. But the scene establishes a motif that recurs throughout the film: a landscape that appears static and unchangeable shifts under one’s feet. Dune is, by almost any set of criteria, a…

LIKE A LOT OF JOURNALISTS, I’VE LONG HAD A love/hate relationship with The New York Times. The paper’s enormous reach and influence, and the powerful lens it can train on people and events, so often seem wasted on the trivial and the transitory. Then there’s its longstanding role as cheerleader in chief for gentrification—not just in New York City, where the Times has been on the wrong side of nearly every fight dating back to the days of Robert Moses, but nationwide. There is nothing the Times likes better than a “rising housing prices” story—even if it has to go to Texas to find it. Although I’ve written for it—even, for a few years, worked for it—the Times has always seemed to me the embodiment of the mainstream media: self-important,…

ON NOVEMBER 12, WHILE PROMOTING HIS NEW BOOK, Betrayal, ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl released an audio recording of a conversation with Donald Trump. Responding to a question about the Capitol rioters who’d chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” Trump said those words were just “common sense,” given the fraudulence of the 2020 election. Two days later, Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso, who ran as a moderate but has since swung to the right, was asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about Trump’s comment. Despite repeated prodding, Barrasso kept dodging the issue, emphasizing the need to move on and suggesting that there had been voting irregularities in the 2020 election that merited further investigation. Barrasso’s dismal performance was even more ominous than Trump’s initial comments. Trump is Trump, a known quantity. But Barrasso’s…

AS A STUDENT IN PARIS IN THE FALL OF 1990, MY LODGINGS were the envy of my peers—even if the means by which I came about them were not. While fellow language students from my university in Edinburgh were stuck in soulless suburbs, I was ensconced in Rue des Fossés Saint-Jacques, a short walk from the Jardin du Luxembourg and around the corner from the Panthéon. I had been lucky to find anywhere at all. Flat hunting in Paris is tough for anyone; being Black made it considerably tougher. People would ask about your “origins” when you called. If they didn’t, you’d turn up and find that the apartment was mysteriously no longer available. All the other students were white and had found housing; I was still in a youth…

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THE AMERICAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM IS A NOTORIOUS disaster. On the one hand, even “good” private employer-based insurance is often a nightmare to actually use, while tens of millions of people have much worse coverage or none at all. At the same time, our system is also incredibly expensive—eating up 17 percent of the US gross domestic product, or nearly twice what peer rich nations spend on average. Our Rube Goldberg mishmash of public and private programs is simultaneously miserly when it comes to people getting the care they need and a colossal pain in the neck to use, and somehow it still costs an arm and a leg. If we count insurance premiums as taxes—which makes sense, since they are basically mandatory—American workers are the second most highly taxed…

Months of negotiations over the Democrats’ agenda in Congress keep boiling down to one thing: What will Joe Manchin agree to? Since his vote is necessary to pass the party’s Build Back Better package, which includes funding on climate change, health care, housing, and caregiving, the conservative West Virginia senator has been calling many of the shots. Manchin has steadfastly insisted that social programs separate the deserving from those who supposedly aren’t. The expanded child tax credit payments, which currently go to all low-income parents whether or not they have a job, have been a particular target of his ire. “Don’t you think, if we’re going to help the children, that the people should make some effort?” he argued recently. Apparently raising children is not enough effort to deserve financial…

UPON ITS PUBLICATION IN 1975, GAYL Jones’s literary debut, Corregidora, was met with great acclaim. Jones’s mentor and teacher, the poet Michael Harper, had introduced her work to his friend, the editor and novelist Toni Morrison, who published Corregidora and also Jones’s second novel, Eva’s Man, the following year. Still in her mid-20s, Jones was immediately heralded for her genius by readers as diverse as James Baldwin and the New York Times critic Raymond Sokolov. Part of what drew them was what Sokolov referred to as her “nonchalance” and “ease” of style, which served as her fiction’s “consummate deception.” Writing with a clarity and matter-off-actness that quietly understated her work’s difficulty, Jones often relayed moments of intense brutality with a kind of quotidian ordinariness. This was evident in her first…