Innehållsförteckning för March 21/28, 2022 från The Nation

WAR IS A TRAGEDY, A CRIME, AND A DEFEAT. THE NATION CONDEMNS THE DECISION of Russian President Vladimir Putin to abandon the path of diplomacy by brutally attacking and invading Ukraine, a blatant violation of international law. We urge Russia to agree to an immediate cease-fire and all parties to seek a diplomatic solution to avert the risk of an unthinkable direct conflict between the world’s two largest nuclear powers—a peril made worse by Putin’s move to place Russia’s nuclear forces on alert. The Nation has consistently called for a diplomatic resolution to the crisis in Ukraine that respects international law and international borders. While Putin’s actions are indefensible, responsibility for this conflict is widely shared. This magazine has warned repeatedly that extending NATO to Russia’s borders would inevitably produce…

IS ABORTION MURDER? ITS OPPONENTS CLAIM IT is—that’s why they call themselves “pro-life” and abortion providers “babykillers.” That’s why people have bombed and burned down abortion clinics and murdered doctors and staffers—it’s all to “save babies.” But do abortion opponents really believe that an embryo is the equivalent of a baby, a child, a grown-up? A great deal of ingenuity has been expended by anti-abortion intellectuals like Robert P. George and Ramesh Ponnuru to explain why, even though embryos and fetuses are children, abortion should not be punished as severely as homicide. It’s always seemed odd that anti-abortion leaders insist they would never punish women who end their pregnancy, only doctors and staffers, although by their own logic a woman who seeks an abortion is as guilty as someone who…

$2.86B Estimated cost of the delays at the US–Canada border due to protests by anti-vax trucker convoys 70 Number of bicyclists who recently participated in a car-and-bike convoy to protest Covid restrictions in Berlin 500 Number of cars and camper vans that arrived in Brussels on February 14 to protest Covid restrictions in Europe 15 Length of loop, in minutes, of Barry Manilow’s greatest hits played loudly by New Zealand authorities to dislodge demonstrators camped out in Wellington to protest the country’s Covid policies 2K Number of people who gathered in Canberra, Australia, to protest Covid-19 vaccine mandates, according to police estimates 5.2M Number of children globally who have lost a parent or caregiver to the Covid-19 pandemic…

SHE ALMOST DIDN’T NOTICE THEM ANYMORE, ALL THE WHITE MEN staring out from portraits on the walls of Yale University’s halls. No darker faces. No female faces. But when Pamela Price entered Yale as a proud Black nationalist with an Angela Davis–style afro in the freshman class of 1974, culture shock hit hard. It wasn’t just the class differences, though those were huge. Low, moat-like walls surrounded the stone residence colleges and many other Yale buildings, sending a subliminal message to “keep out.” Somehow the school made Black students feel like foreigners, which alienated her. Black students got the message that they were at Yale only because of affirmative action, as though invisible asterisks were affixed to their records. Price could feel people assume that she was inferior because she…

The story is missing, so I fill it in—it’s what a thinking person does to cope.Without the details, only Death can win. And so, the panic invariably set in,the fires on lower floors extinguishing hope.The story is missing, so I fill it in. Standing on a desk, he chose the lesser sin.The floor, too hot to stand on, began to slope.Without the details, only Death can win. The shattered glass, the beams then caving in,could anyone sane maintain a shred of hope?The story is missing, so I fill it in. I need to know the way his mind gave inas smoke engulfed the room. Who could cope?Without the details, only Death can win. And out the window, like the smoke’s fin,he flew. He plunged to something green like hope.Without the…

Holding to Account For the past 30 years, over nearly 30 books and thousands of articles, I have written about colonialism and imperialism. Some of these articles have appeared in The Nation, at the invitation of your editors. A brief conversation with one of your reporters on some of the themes that I have worked on for decades produced in him conjectures and fantasies about what he thinks I believe rather than what I am on the record as having written [“What Should the Left Do About China?,” January 24/31]. In two sentences, David Klion considers my views, and in both sentences speculates rather than elucidates. “This is more or less” what I said, he claims, rather than share my actual words. “In his telling,” Klion writes, “what is happening…

HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES IN the United States are under attack, it seems, from multiple directions. In recent weeks, numerous HBCUs have reported bomb threats against them. Such threats have hit institutions like Howard University in Washington, D.C., Spelman College in Atlanta, and Alcorn State in Claireborne County, Miss. It augurs poorly for the current state of race relations, as these schools have long served the Black American community. At the same time, a recent report from Forbes indicates the extent to which land-grant HBCUs—a significant number of these institutions—have been woefully underfunded by state governments since 1987. In both cases, we see a continuing attack not just on HBCUs but on the very idea of semi-independent Black institutions in the United States. All of this comes at an…

JOE BIDEN WON THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY THANKS TO Black voters in diverse states who repeatedly turned to him over the other contenders for the nomination. He won the presidency thanks in part to the over-whelming support he received from Black voters. Then his party was handed control of the Senate thanks to the unprecedented registration and turnout of Black voters in Georgia. Biden has paid back the faith the Black community put in him with one of the most diverse administrations in American history. He has put forward the most diverse slate of federal judicial nominees and has nominated the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. The Biden era has been a reminder of what a pluralistic, diverse government looks like. For some of Biden’s Black supporters, that will…

NORMAN MAILER WAS PROUD OF HIS ESSAY “THE WHITE NEGRO: SUPERFICIAL Reflections on the Hipster.” Published in Dissent in 1957, it was reprinted in Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailer’s anthology of selections from his fiction and nonfiction. It’s easy today to forget the immediate context: Mailer’s protest against the threat of mass destruction during the early part of the Cold War. It was absurd, the argument went, to behave as though life were normal or society rational when human beings faced daily the possibility of total extinction. Americans had to cultivate values that went beyond the concerns of middle-class comfort. “What the liberal cannot bear to admit is the hatred beneath the skin of a society so unjust that the amount of collective violence buried in the people cannot be…

IN MARCH 2018, NEARLY FOUR YEARS AFTER ELLIOT RODGER MURdered six young people and wounded 14 others in Isla Vista, Calif., before killing himself, Amia Srinivasan published an essay on the horrible episode in the London Review of Books called “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” In it, the Oxford philosopher described how so-called incels—involuntary celibates—spoke about the event. Everyone, they insisted, has a right to sex, and the women who denied it to Rodger were ultimately responsible for his homicidal spree. Nearly everyone else pointed out that no one has a right to sex and that people should not be required to sleep with someone they don’t personally desire; Rodger’s actions were his responsibility alone. Srinivasan agreed with the second camp, but she was surprised by how…

WHY DO WE EVEN HAVE ART MUSEUMS? THIS WAS A question that Alexander Dorner began asking in the 1920s. He can’t have been the first to pose such a question, but as director of the Provincial Museum in Hanover, Germany, he was in a position to do something about it. In 1927, he commissioned Russian artist El Lissitzky to upend the conventional style of displaying art at the time by installing an “abstract cabinet”—a modular space that was flexibly responsive to the art on display but that also challenged the art with its own striped patterns and color. Dorner and Lissitzky’s experimental structure was provocative enough in the 1920s. But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, such ideas became heresy: The abstract cabinet was dismantled, and Dorner was…

Yes MICHAEL KAZIN THERE ARE TWO GOOD REASONS WHY every American progressive should be a patriot. One is emotional, the other practical—and they reinforce one another. I love my country. I love our passionate and endlessly inventive culture of music, sports, literature, and film, which has thrilled and influenced people all over the world. I cherish our civic ideals of social equality, individual freedom, and populist democracy—as well as the unending struggle to put their laudable, if often contradictory, claims into practice. But you need not share my emotion to recognize a political reality: One cannot engage effectively in the democratic process without being part of a community of feeling. And for most Americans, their nation, with all its flaws, is a community they are willing to defend. Iconic figures…

“TO PRESIDENT MOON JAE IN AND THE US CONGRESS: TRUE PEACE Can Only Come from True Freedom,” flashed the three-story-high digital advertisement in Times Square. “Hold the North Korean Regime Accountable & Free the North Korean People.” Rolling across the screen, the text continued, “H.R. 3446 and H.R. 826 Benefit North Korea and China. If Passed, the Bill Will Ultimately Dismantle the UN Command and Remove US Troops from S. Korea,” before ending next to the photo of a mushroom cloud. Connecting the two House bills to such apocalyptic imagery last September was decidedly hyperbolic. HR 3446, the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act, merely calls for the US secretary of state to “pursue serious, urgent diplomatic engagement with North Korea and South Korea in pursuit of a binding peace…

IN THE NEARLY TWO YEARS SINCE THE MURDER OF George Floyd, our country has seen a renaissance of writing and organizing around the abolition of police and prisons. Alongside protests in the streets and participatory budgeting campaigns to divest funds from local police departments, the popular reception of books like Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us reveals that more people are willing to grapple with what abolition entails. But there has also been a backlash, and not just from the right: Democrats have closed ranks in opposition to police abolition. They instead call for a battery of police reforms—such as racial bias training and banning choke holds—that have, at least thus far, failed to eliminate police violence. Investing in police departments appears, in fact, to be a…

When asked Why here?Mao said We didn’t pick it Here is a slab of IfHere is a set of appropriate roles; armed in cinema Armed against No one was here I see you, us. SomedayOur arthropod utterance Intention alone is not dialecticalor petroleum or vaccine patents Is it too late for analysis? What filled me with the limbs of little girls, plumesof suicide, what fed my grandparents rotting vegetablesrationed in the camp of illegal flowers Unrepentant, sunlight can layeggs like a spider mother, a season before death Love has ruined my lifeLove made useful by class—remnants of murdered trees, imaginary debts Translated into adhesive, anemone venomgreen slippers at the portal of beetles I have come to terms with failureas a contrabass in the spine,implacable echo of goddamn I still love…