Innehållsförteckning för April 4/11, 2022 från The Nation

THE WAR IN UKRAINE HAS REACHED A DANGEROUS AND PRECARIOUS MOMENT. HAVING FAILED IN their initial attempt to overcome Ukrainian resistance through a conventional ground assault, the Russian invaders are now resorting to indiscriminate shelling and bombing of urban areas, producing an ever-growing toll of civilian casualties. As we go to press, Russian armored columns are attempting to encircle Kyiv and other major cities, cutting off access to food, water, and power in a brutal drive to force their surrender. Adding to the danger, Moscow has declared that further Western arms shipments to the Ukrainian defenders are a “legitimate target” of Russian attack—a threat made all too real when Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian training base near the Polish border on March 13. We stand on the precipice, then, of…

MISSION STATEMENTS ARE ALWAYS TRITE AND OFTEN AS short as a sentence or two. But somewhere around 2015, a new sort of statement began to be generated by the people at Human Resources. The idea of diversity was now augmented by “belonging”: full and constant participation in a common enterprise. If, half a century earlier, authenticity was said to spring from a rooted sense of self, belonging was, instead, a gregarious sense of connection owing to the togetherness of the group. The school or team or corporation was conceived as a home away from home, and perhaps more homelike than home. Google’s HR department exists (according to the flattering summary at impraise.com) to assure employees that “like everything else at Google, happiness levels too are monitored.” In this way, belonging…

I’m a Black high school student who goes to Brooklyn Tech. I’m from Harlem. School is interesting, with lots of different people from what I’m used to. I found a group of guys I think are my friends. We smoke at Fort Greene Park after school. I started selling weed when a white lady said we smelled good and was wondering if any of us could supply her with some. Now I buy a dub uptown to smoke half and sell the other half for a dub at school. I’ve never had my own money, so it’s cool. I’m a Black twentysomething from the Bay in Cali. Being an actor on Broad-way is what motivated me to move to New York City. I’m taking free acting gigs but hopefully I’ll get lucky…

NOW THAT WE KNOW HOW THE UNITED States’ generation-long misadventure in Afghanistan ended, one Army officer’s experience in 2005, recounted in Craig Whitlock’s excellent and depressing The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, takes on an elevated salience. About four years into the conflict, Maj. Charles Abeyawardena, a strategic planner based at the Army’s Center for Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., flew to the war zone to study the ill-fated effort to create a modern Afghan army. The task was already proving to be difficult, but the US government remained hopeful—as it would, officially at least, for another 15 years—that the nascent Afghan security forces would eventually become capable of keeping the country stable on their own, enabling the United States to withdraw with honor. Abeyawardena’s mandate…

Martin Luther King Jr. “The Last Steep Ascent” John Steinbeck  “Dubious Battle in California” Howard Zinn  “Finishing School for Pickets” Toni Morrison  “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear” Naomi Klein  “Capitalism vs. the Climate” Ralph Nader  “The Safe Car You Can’t Buy”  Carlos Fuentes  “Mexico: Land of Jekyll and Hyde” Ralph Ellison  “Tell It Like It Is, Baby” Bill McKibben  “Too Hot to Handle” Tony Kushner  “A Socialism of the Skin” Michelle Alexander  “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote” Langston Hughes  “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” Hannah Arendt “What Is This New Philosophy They Call ‘Existentialism’?” Freda Kirchwey “One World or None” Gore Vidal  “Some Jews & the Gays” Arthur Miller  “Our Bloodless Coup” Laila Lalami  “Against Easy Stories” James Baldwin “A Report From…

“WHAT DID YOU DO DURING THE WAR ON Drugs, Daddy?”—that question terrified many a boomer parent. Especially since, in my case at least, the truthful answer would have been: everything. If you could sniff it, smoke it, snort it, swallow it, or inject it, then I probably did. Having passed between the Scylla of addiction and the Charybdis of HIV/AIDS—losing friends to both—into respectability, I can admit that dumb luck, and white privilege, had a lot to do with my survival. Like Tavian Crosland, who found that dealing weed was his only shot at economic independence (page 36), I also sometimes sold drugs. Because even on a full scholarship and with a work-study job, I needed the money just to pay my bills in college. Thanks to Nelson Rockefeller’s punitive…

ANNAPOLIS POLICE CHIEF ED JACKSON WAS RAISED BY A SINGLE mother in a Baltimore housing project. “Police officers weren’t seen as our friends,” he recalls. He and his five siblings were driven by “never wanting to disappoint” their protective mom, he adds—and this helped keep them in school and off the streets. After Jackson graduated from college, a buddy who had joined the police force suggested that he do the same. He saw a chance to both do some good and pay down his student loans. He never expected to make a career of law enforcement. Nor did he ever expect to become an advocate for the more lenient treatment of drug use. He describes himself as originally being a “traditionalist” who saw the War on Drugs as “noble and…

THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, IN SPACES DARKLY ENCLOSED or dazzlingly open, many in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East consumed psychoactive substances that helped transport them into altered states of consciousness. Guided by skilled specialists, they danced, chanted, and drummed, often remarkably adorned and masked. Or they held perfectly still, in the throes of trance or waking dreams. They saw psychedelic art without and hallucinatory visions within. They journeyed near and far to sanctuaries and ritual settings, where individually and collectively they sought an experience beyond the ordinary—what the Greeks termed ekstasis. Most Western scholars have traditionally greeted the idea of such scenarios in the ancient world with polite skepticism or outright resistance. For them, drugs and ecstatic experience were hardly part of the “proper” foundations of Western civilization, long…

WORKING WOMEN ARE AT A CROSSROADS. WHILE THEY earned 82 percent of what men did in 2018, at the end of that year they made up half the paid workforce. “Women are not just working,” Claudia Goldin states in her new book, Career and Family. “They have meaningful careers that many manage, or intend, to combine with a family in an equitable marriage…. In all of world history, this has never happened before.” Yet despite this temporary triumph, women’s employment suffers from a dearth of policy support and remains vulnerable to economic shock. In fact, the participation of American women in the labor force has actually stalled over the past two decades, thanks largely to a lack of paid family leave and affordable child care. This has proved particularly painful…

ON MARCH 3, SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM WENT ON Hannity on Fox News and called for the assassination of Vladimir Putin. To make clear this was no slip of the tongue, Graham tweeted the same day, “Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military? The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.” It doesn’t require much imagination to conjure up the global holocaust that could ensue from a US senator calling for the murder of a Russian leader who sits on top of a vast nuclear arsenal. Graham’s words earned rebukes even from right-wingers like Fox News’ Laura Ingraham and Senator Ted Cruz. Unfortunately, even if outright calls for assassination were rare, many other powerful…

BORN OF AMERICA’S COLD WAR PARANOIA THAT THE SOVIETS HAD achieved breakthroughs in the development of mind control drugs, Project MK-Ultra was the CIA’s covert counter-operation to locate the ultimate “truth serum” for interrogations, as hearings on the project later described it. Approved in 1953 by then–CIA director Allen Dulles, MK-Ultra primarily involved the secret—and highly illegal—“administration of LSD to unwitting individuals,” according to the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities in its 1975 investigative report. In 1977, roughly 16,000 pages of misfiled documents were unearthed showing that the “25-year, $25-million effort by the [CIA] to learn how to control the human mind,” in The New York Times’ description, not only saw the US government dose thousands of American (and Canadian) citizens with LSD…

IN FEBRUARY 2021, CUSTOMS AUTHORITIES AT THE PORT OF HAMBURG, GERMANY, received a tip from colleagues in the Netherlands about a container ship that had recently arrived from Paraguay on a stopover to Amsterdam. With flights grounded because of the pandemic and maritime supply chains backlogged for months, ports around the world were already dealing with unprecedented logistical challenges. In northern Europe, however, they were also under another kind of pressure. In less than a decade, cocaine seizures in the major Baltic ports had gone from being an occasional problem to a frequent phenomenon. When Hamburg officials inspected the Paraguayan containers, which were reported to hold more than 1,700 tins of construction putty, they stumbled upon 17.6 metric tons of cocaine. (By comparison, all the cocaine intercepted either in or…

EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL’S 2014 NOVEL STATION ELEVEN chronicles the travails of a group of interconnected strangers before and after a fictional pandemic ravages the globe and lays waste to 99 percent of civilization. Mandel doesn’t shy away from the mass death and social collapse implicit in her novel’s apocalyptic premise, but she uses it mainly to examine the potential for culture to survive the demise of society. Even as so much infrastructure, technology, and collective memory disappear, Mandel argues, art can continue to sustain and nourish. The sales for Station Eleven have spiked in the past couple of years, for obvious reasons: It’s easy to recognize the pre-pandemic dread and uncertainty in the chapters chronicling the initial wave of the Georgia Flu, which is as if the 2009 swine…