Innehållsförteckning för December 27, 2021/January 03, 2022 från The Nation

ON DECEMBER 1, THE SUPREME COURT’S CONSERVATIVE JUSTICES SAT DOWN TO CONSIDER how, exactly, they might overturn Roe v. Wade. During arguments over Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed to suggest that being forced to give birth is no big deal, because you can drop the baby off at a designated “safe haven” for adoption. Justice Brett Kavanaugh rattled off a list of times the court has overturned precedent, suggesting he is considering doing just that when it comes to abortion. Outside the court, abortion rights advocates like Jessy Rosales were already thinking beyond Roe. Five years ago, as a low-income student at the University of California, Riverside, Rosales had an abortion. At the time she had no car, struggled to find…

IN 1973, I WAS FEELING DESPERATE, SEARCHING for the next songs to record and not sure I was on the right track in my career. One afternoon, I got a call from Nancy Bacal, a dear friend, who said, “I’m sending you over a record I want you to listen to.” The song, on the cast album of A Little Night Music, was Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns.” Hearing it was an extraordinary experience. I was shaken to my toes, weeping and laughing at the same time, because this song said everything. Here on my turntable was the answer to my prayers. I called Hal Prince, Sondheim’s producer, and told him that I had heard “Clowns” and that it was a very good song. He said, “Yes, it’s a…

Raise Taxes, Later DOUGHEN WOOD INFLATION IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM FOR the first time in decades. Starting in the late 1960s, the rate of inflation began increasing; 1965’s 1.6 percent rose to a peak of 14.8 percent in 1980. Paul Volcker, then chair of the Federal Reserve, reversed that trajectory in the early ’80s by driving interest rates into the high teens. He created what was then the deepest recession since the 1930s. Unemployment spiked, unions were busted, social spending was cut, and by 1986, inflation was back below 2 percent. The working class, restive throughout the ’70s, was rendered passive and scared. But inflation stayed low, averaging under 2.7 percent from 1983 through 2020 (when it was just 1.2 percent). That changed earlier this year. In the latest reading…

IF IT WEREN’T SO DAMN SERIOUS, IT WOULD BE FUNNY In early December, Stephen Colbert riffed on the travel bans inflicted on South Africa and neighboring nations after the South Africans alerted the world to the emergence of a new variant of SARS-CoV-2: “We’re all lucky that South Africa alerted us to the dangers of Omicron. Thanks to them, the White House has issued a ban on travel from eight countries in southern Africa. Well, that’s good: You’ve got to contain the virus. So far, it’s only been found in the southern African countries of Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.” Once again, our comedians are our truth-tellers. The Biden administration’s travel ban, with its…

I WROTE MY LAST COLUMN ABOUT QUALIFIED IMMUNITY which is the doctrine that government officials, including law enforcement, cannot be held personally liable for the harm they cause while doing their jobs. Lawyers and activists have noted that the doctrine essentially shields police officers from accountability when they violate people’s constitutional rights, allowing them to do things like shoot people without cause and face no consequences whatsoever. But courts have steadfastly upheld qualified immunity—a fact that led me to argue that congressional action is the only hope for rolling back the current rules. It turns out I was wrong. Last month, I found a case in which a court, not Congress, stripped away qualified immunity from a cop, allowing him to be sued for his violent behavior. The problem with…

334 Number of strikes in the US in the first 11 months of 2021 636 Number of labor protests during that time 25K Approximate number of workers in the US who went on strike in October, compared with around 10,000 in each of the previous three months 10K Number of workers at John Deere who went on strike in October 10.8% Percentage of US workers who are part of a union—about half of what it was in 1983 6.3% Percentage of workers in the private sector who are unionized 2.9% Percentage of workers in South Carolina who are unionized, the lowest rate in the nation 19% Percentage more that unionized workers earn than nonunionized ones…

STARTING ANY FARM IS A CRAPSHOOT, BUT REGINALDO AND AMY Haslett-Marroquin went the hard way right from the start. In the fall of 2020, they bought 75 acres south of Minneapolis to expand their chicken-farming operation. Rather than take a guaranteed contract with one of the corporate brands, like Tyson or Pilgrim’s Pride, they’re raising organic broilers in an agroforestry system and marketing them under their own label, Tree-Range. It seemed a foolhardy move. In the tightly concentrated US chicken industry, where just four companies account for about 55 percent of all the meat sold in the country, it’s tough for a solo farm to get its products into grocery stores. Most commercial chicken farmers raise birds under a contract with one of the big brands, which supply the chicks,…

SUCCESSION IS A SHOW ABOUT FOUR SIBLINGS TRYING TO decide whether to kill their dad. Justly celebrated for its savvy casting, evocative score, clever writing, luxurious (if claustrophobic) set design, and crafty (if rarely beautiful) cinematography, Succession—which returned for a third season this fall on HBO—has nonetheless been fueled primarily by this perpetual oedipal edging: Will they? Won’t they? Can they? The show did not begin in this place, exactly, but instead with the question suggested by its title: To which of his variously unworthy heirs will Logan Roy, the Rupert Murdoch–like media mogul played by Brian Cox, entrust his business empire? By the end of the pilot, however, this King Lear plotline has been scrapped. Despite his diminishing health, Logan refuses to relinquish power. Quickly, the real conflict becomes…

Value Proposition In “Do We Need Faith?” [Nov. 15/22], Barbara Sostaita notes that the faith of many victims of injustice helps them to survive and emboldens them to confront the powers that be. Phil Zuckerman admits that religion sometimes serves social justice, but contends that reason, when “wedded to humanist values,” has produced results “better than what religion can muster alone.” Both debaters make valid points, which is possible because they refer to different segments of the religious spectrum. Zuckerman apparently thinks of the religious right and those whose otherworldly faith shuns political engagement. His indictments of these groups are well-deserved, but his qualifying words are telling. Yes, religion alone is impotent—if we mean religion divorced from the realities of earthly existence. But in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the original function…

Whose Truth, Whose Creativity? is an expert analysis of neuro-science and art theory — this new book delves into the source of all art and creativity, from ancient cave paintings to contemporary art. It explores why postmodern art theory has had a damaging impact on the art world and explains how neuroscience can prove this. Does talent spring from the unconscious mind as Paul Cézanne believed? Or does it, as Marcel Duchamp theorized, come from conceptual thinking at the conscious level? Cognitive neuroscientific psychology, a fairly new field of psychology, explains a natural, mental basis for human creativity. This book exposes the many falsehoods and distortions of postmodern reasoning to demonstrate how, by following this disturbing, unnatural direction for decades, the art establishment has been responsible for initiating an era…

THE FINGER LAKES REGION WAS SETTLED JUST AFTER the Revolutionary War by a person with long dark hair, eyes of startling intensity, and the voice of a man. Jemima Wilkinson, dubbed the Public Universal Friend, was stoned by an angry mob in Philadelphia and went north with a group of followers to an area of deep blue lakes and agricultural land richer than anyone had ever seen. Within a hundred years, the Finger Lakes had become host to the reform Quakers, the Underground Railroad, the abolition movement, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. When Stanton was barred from an abolitionist meeting because she was a woman, she started the women’s rights movement in Seneca Falls. The young people—especially young women—protesting climate change in the streets might want to highlight the environmental travesty…

IT’S THE HOLIDAY SEASON, AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT means: latkes with mistletoe sprinkles, the great debate over “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and this column’s traditional recommendations for donations. Republicans are on the move, and so are Covid and climate change—give now, before things get even worse! 1. National Advocates for Pregnant Women. Did you know that more than 1,600 women have been arrested—most of them low-income, and disproportionately minorities—for everything from smoking pot to attempting suicide while pregnant, as well as for having or attempting an abortion? There are even women in prison for having miscarriages and stillbirths. Women are still being coerced into undergoing C-sections and other medical procedures. NAPW is the premier organization fighting these flagrant injustices. If you believe that you should not lose your constitutional…

ON SEPTEMBER 19, A GROUP OF CAB DRIVERS ORGANIZED by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance rolled up to the corner of Broadway and Murray Street in downtown Manhattan, parked next to City Hall, and declared they would not leave until the city fixed the crushing debt that had driven many of their fellow drivers to suicide. They held a press conference, hung an SOS banner from the nearby Beaux-Arts subway entrance, set up some folding chairs, and sat down to wait. I stopped by the encampment at midnight to find eight drivers trading jokes on the lonely concrete of the Financial District. Augustine Tang invited me to join them. Thirty-seven years old, with the characteristic swagger of a native New Yorker, Tang had inherited his father’s taxi medallion—the badge…

TOM STOPPARD HAS LONG BEEN AVERSE TO weaving explicitly autobiographical material into his plays, so it’s only appropriate that one of his more revealing lines about himself would be voiced by a 19th-century liberal literary critic. The speech, which appears in Voyage, the first of Stoppard’s trilogy on the Russian intelligentsia, is delivered by Vissarion Belinsky to a small gathering of friends that includes a young “Michael” Bakunin and his aristocratic father. “I am not an artist,” Belinsky says. My play was no good. I am not a poet. A poem can’t be written by an act of will. When the rest of us are trying to be present, a real poet goes absent. We can watch him in the moment of creation, there he sits with the pen in…

There was a meeting.They had an agenda. It was time to talkabout loving a man in the supermarket,how that might affect sales ofimported candy and levels of lightin the produce. It was the best meetingthey’d ever had. Everyone wanted itto last forever, like it had seemed Aprilwas going to last year or was it the yearbefore that. People at the meeting hada lot in common. Not only were theyall employed by the same company,but also most of them drove to the meetingin a car, sometimes the same car, sothere was barely a meter between them.They could all vote and they could all hold forthon the beauty and danger of poisonous berries.It was a perfect meeting. They each had one blue eyeand two green ones.…