Innehållsförteckning för April 18/25, 2022 från The Nation

THE WAR IN UKRAINE IS IN ITS FIFTH WEEK, WITH CASUALTIES ON BOTH SIDES continuing to mount. Unexpectedly stiff resistance by the Ukrainians has so far prevented Russian forces from seizing Kyiv and other key cities. One danger of the current stalemate—that Russia’s frustration will lead to escalation—can be seen in the relentless bombardment of Mariupol. But Russia’s failures on the battlefield also create real opportunities for peace, possibly involving some form of regional autonomy for the Donbas along with neutrality for the whole of Ukraine. That, ultimately, is a matter for the Ukrainian people to decide—which is what made President Biden’s ad-lib in Poland that Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” such an egregious misstep. Instead of posturing about regime change, the United States—and Europe—should be working to provide…

THROUGHOUT THE 21ST CENTURY, DEMOCRATS HAVE identified as the party of science, and that has served them well. Against the threat posed by Republicans who deny climate change, thwart stem cell research, and ridicule infectious disease protocols for public spaces, Democrats have argued that Americans need to respect scientific data and the health and safety standards that protect us all. Yet as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to vex the United States, with the death toll moving toward 1 million, Democrats lack a coherent strategy for projecting their seriousness about tackling a lingering health care challenge—which is one variant away from again becoming a crisis—and for holding to account those who failed to take it seriously in the first place. That’s a dangerous approach in a midterm election year where the…

WORKING ON CAPITOL HILL CAN BE GRUELING. MANY of the staffers for some of the most powerful people in the world make poverty wages—barely enough to survive in one of the most expensive cities in the country. Some junior congressional staffers rely on food stamps or have to take on second jobs and gig work to get by. They deal with abusive bosses, brutal hours, and demoralizing work environments, and they lack legal protections to organize and collectively bargain. In February, a group of staffers announced the launch of the Congressional Workers Union, an effort to “unionize the personal offices and committees” of Congress members that they’d been quietly organizing for over a year. “While not all offices and committees face the same working conditions, we strongly believe that to…

There is smoke in the airwhen I go pick them. I go despite panic, also becauseinside I’ll make chutney. For an hour or so, I unlatch them.It is late fall. They will not ripen. Firm pale green skins,fine-coated in ash. Our fire season goes all autumn now,though today’s fire is not yet near to us.But the green tomatoes: I love their pale lobes. Tonight, god-willing,we will fry some with cornmeal & fish. Inside the air purifier whirs:I will boil them with molasses & raisin. Jar them for friends & the winter.Disaster, we say, meaning bad star. These are good green stars,this is also their season. Mask on, I bend & bend to the vine:I bend & salvage what I can.…

BOTH WITHIN AND OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES, IT HAS become increasingly obvious that the need for wealth redistribution—“the issue that blocks the horizon,” as Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth—is the central issue for any future era of progressive change. Wealth inequality has accelerated throughout the world over the past four decades in what many perceive as the triumph of neoliberalism: Individuals and nations are rewarded or punished according to their ability to accumulate wealth and participate in the financialization of all aspects of their existence. When it comes to Puerto Rico, the questions of wealth inequality are central to both the everyday life and the colonial reality of the island, as Rocío Zambrana argues in her new book, Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico. The…

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…

WOMEN HAD A GOOD PANDEMIC THE LAST TIME AROUND — something actually came of it!—compared with this one, which is total shit. Just over a century ago, the 1918 flu pandemic may have vanquished a decent chunk of the global population, but after witnessing mass death, plus the loss of their children from other preventable diseases like diphtheria and meningitis, women decided to actually do something about it. When (white) American women got the vote two years later, they used their newfound political power to immediately pressure local and federal governments into action, resulting in the largest expansion of public health spending in US history up until that point. It was wildly successful, fueling later large-scale door-to-door household hygiene campaigns and driving an 18 percent decline in childhood infectious diseases,…

70°F Number of degrees warmer than average that locations in East Antarctica were in mid-March 460 Number of square miles of a previously stable ice shelf in East Antarctica that collapsed in March 3.5t Number of tons of Greenland’s ice sheet that melted between 2011 and 2020 70% Portion of Arctic infrastructure at high risk of damage from thawing permafrost by 2050 120 Estimated number of gigatons of carbon that will leak into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost by 2100 200 Minimum number of rural Alaska Native communities experiencing worsened water scarcity as a result of climate change 0.13 Number of inches of sea level rise each year caused by climate change…

I’m thrilled to be joining The Nation—a publication I’ve long admired (and have written for numerous times)—as president. For more than 150 years, The Nation has been on the right side of history: opposing every form of exploitation, standing against militarism, and articulating a vision of American progress that benefits the many, not the few. This is a legacy that we’ll all need to draw from in the difficult years ahead. As national politics seems to be shifting from commonsense discussions about life in a grossly unfair economy to a culture war that will benefit only the right, the political establishment offers even fewer answers than usual—making it absolutely essential that The Nation’s voice be heard.…

It’s hard to believe, but Congress just passed meaningful legislation: In February, lawmakers approved the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. Emerging from the Me Too movement and stories of women being forced into private arbitration instead of getting their day in court when they brought sexual harassment claims against their employers, the law will ban businesses from including such provisions in employment contracts. The law promises not only to offer the individual victims of workplace sexual harassment and assault more relief by allowing them to bring their claims in court, where they have a better chance of prevailing, but also to shed more light on the epidemic of sexual harassment by making it harder for companies to push these claims out of sight. However, forced…

WHEN I FIRST MOVED TO THE US from London, I asked an American journalist what kind of reception I might expect as a Black Briton. “Well, when they hear an English accent, Americans usually add about 20 points to your IQ,” he said. “But when they see a Black face, they usually don’t.” Recalling that the authors of the book The Bell Curve had claimed that Black people have an IQ 15 points lower than whites, I figured that, at the very least, I would still come out at least five points ahead. There were moments during my 12 years as the US correspondent for The Guardian when I needed all the help I could get. It could be a particular challenge when reporting from Republican events. Englishness, the American…

TO THE SURPRISE AND CONSTERNATION of scholars, history has recently emerged as a battlefield in the ongoing culture wars. Generally, historians welcome public debate about the past. But new state laws banning from classrooms any discussion of the history of racism have been accompanied by so much demagoguery and misinformation on the part of legislators, school board officials, and agitated parents that one is tempted to believe it would be more edifying to ignore history altogether for the time being. In these debates, the American Revolution plays an outsize role. The 1619 Project, which began life as a special issue of The New York Times Magazine consisting of scholarly essays about the roots and persistence of racial inequality, has become a focal point for patriotic outrage. The project posits that…

Strewn across the floors their toys and things, a video cassette the dadhad written “We used to have more of these” on,the kitchen in a state of high party, boxed cakes half eaten, cannoliand rows and rows of drinks were pastries brimming with creamalong the broken ramparts of the countertops, we noticed blue carpetbut hardwood elsewhere, no choice had been rightthe house abandoned in haste if in triumph or terror, justabandoned, a family photo on the wall when the twins were babiesdad diminutive and round, pale as batter, mom had great bones and a vanityhe subsidized while the babies grew through that disorder into usand as we toured the house accepting slowly even this we can’t affordI’d love to steal the plants but how to get them homethe towering ficus…

Sequim for the Win Thank you for putting Sequim, Wash., on your cover [“High Noon in Clallam County,” by Sasha Abramsky, Feb. 21/28]. For a small town, this is unusual. Even though I’ve spent most of my life just 17 miles away in Port Angeles, there was much I didn’t know about our “younger brother.” But I do know about my hometown. We have a big drug problem and a lot of white racism and religious bigotry, and the Democratic Party does nothing about it. If Democrats lose in 2022 and 2024, it will be because of their neglect of small towns. BILL BOKAMPER PORT ANGELES, WASH. We are writing to thank you for Sasha Abramsky’s hardhitting article on our success in ousting the QAnonconnected “Gang of Four” from the…