Innehållsförteckning för February 7/14, 2022 från The Nation

PUNDITS DEPICTED IT AS A TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE OF THEIR FAVORITE STORYLINE, “Democrats in Disarray.” But the tension between Georgia voting rights groups and Joe Biden’s administration over the president’s belated trip to Atlanta on January 11 to tout federal voting rights legislation was a case study in the synergy of an inside/outside political strategy. Though it’s all but certain that the bills will ultimately fail, Democratic leaders’ decision to force a vote represents progress nonetheless. The move by four prominent Georgia groups—the Black Voters Matter Fund, the Asian American Advocacy Fund, the New Georgia Project Action Fund, and the GALEO Impact Action Fund, which organizes Latinos—to skip the visit by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris threatened to overshadow their trip to Atlanta. And while Georgia voting rights titan Stacey…

EVERY DECEMBER, THE CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME Court of the United States composes a “Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary.” Despite the apparent ambition indicated by its title, it is meant to be boring. It is meant to be anodyne. It is not supposed to be the judicial version of the State of the Union so much as a trite message about how “great” things are going on the bench, usually with some boilerplate stats that show how hard judges are working. On first read, John Roberts’s 2021 review does not disappoint. Opening with a history lesson about the Judicial Conference—an advisory body founded 100 years ago that oversees the administration of the courts—it has all the stylistic markings the media consistently praises Roberts for: It is good-natured, reassuring,…

BLAME THE COMIC BOOK. CHEAP AND TRANSPORTABLE, A trove of infantile fantasy and psychosexual Pop Art, often spiced with egregious stereotypes and nativist aggression, this humble medium was for a time the United States’ most ubiquitous cultural ambassador. Such is the thesis of Paul S. Hirsch’s Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism, an engaging account of the ways in which comics variously served or confounded official interests. Vividly illustrated and enjoyably hyperbolic, Pulp Empire tells its tale as a kind of horror comic. Recounting the emergence of comic books during the Depression, Hirsch details how the medium was drafted during World War II to play its own modest part in defeating the Axis, then cues the scary music: Having discharged their patriotic chore and more popular than…

At the end of the first week of January, as Covid-19 surged through the country’s newly reopened schools, a group of students at the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) came together to demand “a safe learning environment.” In a public letter, the students made it clear that they are “not comfortable going to school with the rising cases” and demanded that the district provide them with basic Covid protections—including KN95/N95 masks for every student, twice-weekly PCR and rapid tests, and more outdoor spaces so kids could eat safely —or let them return to online learning. “If these demands are not met, we will be striking by not attending school,” the letter reads. “We will be striking until we get what we need to be safe.” The letter has been signed…

PARENTS ARE NOT OK. NO CAREGIVERS ARE, REALLY. But parents of children who are too young to be vaccinated against Covid-19 are most certainly not OK at this point in the pandemic. Back in December 2020, when we were all 20 years younger, the Annie E. Casey Foundation reported that “one in five people in households with children (21%) have reported feeling down, depressed or hopeless in the previous week.” Today, I’d imagine that number is closer to five in five. It has always been a struggle for parents in this country. There is no safety net, no national standards for what constitutes quality (and affordable) child care, and, at a most basic level, no paid leave. Pile on a global health crisis, and it’s no wonder so many of…

Yes ANDREAS MALM SABOTAGING FOSSIL FUEL INFRASTRUC-ture is a form of self-defense, or perhaps humanitarian intervention. On the premises of climate science, fossil fuels should be classified as projectiles fired into humanity—primarily toward the Global South. The question is not whether we have a right to destroy them; it is why people haven’t yet acted on the imperative. Fossil fuel property destruction is central to the plot of two recent big novels: How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue, in which an African village rises up against an oil company wrecking its lands and killing its children with pollution, and The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, in which young Indians react to a hyper-lethal heat wave by attacking fossil fuel infrastructure worldwide. Both books seem to imagine…

THE UNITED STATES IS THE PRODUCT OF AN ACCOUNTABILITY MOVE-ment that was never fully realized. Thomas Paine called the country into being with Common Sense, a pamphlet that invited the beleaguered residents of 13 British colonies on the eastern shore of North America to indulge their fury at the imperial abuses of King George III. He ridiculed the “men of passive tempers” who “look somewhat lightly over the offences of Great Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, ‘Come, come, we shall be friends again for all this.’” Rejecting the prospect of reconciliation with “the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land,” Paine encouraged Americans to ask themselves pointed questions: Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on,…

AROUND 25 YEARS AGO, A YOUNG FRIEND OF MINE had an accidental pregnancy. What should she do? This was New York City, so abortion, with state Medicaid funding, was readily available. Adoption, private or through an agency, was another possibility—lots of people would want a healthy white newborn. But what if she wanted to have the baby and keep it? She had very little money, and her housing situation was untenable. Among many other fruitless queries, I tried the office of our local top Catholic, Cardinal John O’Connor, then in the news for his strong anti-abortion views. Did they know of a place where my friend could live while awaiting the birth? Sorry, I was told, all eight beds were filled. Eight beds? The Catholic Church is a fantastically wealthy…

5 Number of custom hunting rifles given away by West Virginia in a Covid-19 vaccine lottery $1.4M Value of an apartment awarded in a lucky draw for vaccinated people in Hong Kong 2 Number of laps around Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway people who got vaccinated could drive 2 Number of cartons of eggs some residents of Beijing could receive for getting a Covid vaccine 500 Number of live chickens distributed to vaccinated seniors in Indonesia’s West Java province 1 Number of free joints that cannabis retailers can provide to those who get vaccinated in Washington state 7 Number of times more likely a person will be to adhere to a vaccine regime if there are financial incentives…

Can she convince Massachusetts voters to put her ideas into practice? DANIELLE ALLEN, A PROMINENT SCHOLAR OF DEMOCRACY AND A POLIT-ical theorist at Harvard, has watched the American political system break down over time. For almost three decades, she has studied growing social and economic inequalities and declining trust among citizens in our political institutions. Yet when the pandemic hit, she was shocked anew by the realities it brought into sharp relief. By March 2020, Allen and her colleagues had retreated to the safety of their homes, relying on service workers who delivered groceries to their doorsteps. Some of her students, many of whom were on spring break, attended massive parties against the advice of health authorities. As Allen observed the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on already disadvantaged communities, she found…

DRIVING DOWN INTERNATIONAL BOULE-vard, East Oakland’s main inner-city thoroughfare, it’s hard to miss the Intertribal Friendship House. With its mural-rimmed courtyard featuring larger-than-life portraits of Natives, both famous and unknown, the community center, which some call the “urban rez,” stands apart from its surroundings in Oakland’s Little Saigon. And like pretty much everything involving Indigenous Americans, it’s been here a while. Founded in 1955, the Intertribal Friendship House is one of the oldest urban Indigenous community organizations in the United States. You’d think that in a city and region that gave birth to the Black Panther Party, the Free Speech Movement, and the United Farmworkers, people would know about institutions like this. The Oakland-born Cheyenne and Arapaho writer Tommy Orange, after all, set a whole chapter of his novel There…

SHORTLY AFTER THE SPECTACULAR COLLAPSE OF LEHMAN Brothers in 2008 and the global recession that came tumbling after it, an Italian playwright named Stefano Massini began working on a fictionalized account of the men who’d founded the eponymous firm a century and a half earlier. I Capitoli del Crollo, or Chapters of the Fall, saw its first productions in 2010 on Italian stages, followed by performances on national radio. And then the play took off in various translations across Europe, drawing acclaim throughout the 2010s in France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere. Despite its title, the play is mostly about the rise of Lehman Brothers; it follows three generations of Lehman men to tell a giddy tale about the growth of their bank and, by extension, rapacious American capitalism. In 2016,…