Innehållsförteckning för May 16/23, 2022 från The Nation

ON NBC’S MEET THE PRESS IN EARLY APRIL, HILLARY CLINTON EXPRESSED FRUSTRATION with polls showing that Americans are turning against President Biden and the Democrats as the midterm elections approach. “I’m not quite sure what the disconnect is between the accomplishments of the administration and this Congress and the understanding of what’s been done and the impact it will have on the American public,” griped the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, adding: “Democrats in office and out need to be doing a better job of making the case.” Former president Barack Obama echoed that message two days later. After an April 5 visit to the White House, he responded to a reporter’s question about how Democrats should approach the midterms by declaring, “We got a story to tell, just got…

THE COUNTRY AWAITS THE SUPREME COURT’S DECISION in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organiza tion, the case that challenges Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. In Texas, residents still live under the restrictions of Senate Bill 8, a law that bans most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected. The Supreme Court ruled, in December, that abortion providers can challenge SB 8 but that enforcement of the law can continue as providers pursue their case. This decision further fueled speculation that the court is on its way to overturning Roe v. Wade, which established that abortion is protected under the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. Now, with Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s elevation to the court, reproductive justice organizers are wondering how the bench’s shifting composition will impact the movement…

AFTER DECADES OF CRITICALLY DOCUMENTING nuclear power’s outsize costs, I finally admitted to myself that the carbon-reduction benefits from continuing to run US nuclear plants are substantial, and in some respects irreplaceable. I made the case for keeping them open in an April article on TheNation.com. Closing New York’s Indian Point reactors last year was a climate blunder, I wrote. Not just because fracked gas is now filling the breach, but because the need to replace the lost carbon-free power means that new wind and solar farms won’t drive emissions down further. California, facing the same equation, should shelve its plan to shutter the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in 2024, I said. “Total bullshit,” a lifelong anti-nuker wrote me. “You should be ashamed.” More representative of the comments,…

IN THE EARLY HOURS OF JULY 26, 2021, ABOUT 200 NURSES began to assemble outside of Community First Medical Center in Chicago. Inside, the hallways were lined with patients. But all day, in 90-degree heat, the nurses stayed outside, on strike. They set up tents and handed each other water. Patients and other community members came by to give them food. When the hospital wouldn’t let the nurses inside to use the bathrooms, nearby businesses opened their doors. “The whole neighborhood was behind us,” said Kathy Haff, a registered nurse who’s worked at the hospital for 30 years. The pandemic had exacerbated the already very poor conditions at Community First. After an investment bank bought the hospital in 2014, the management started to cut back on staff and slash benefits,…

IF EXTRATERRESTRIALS WERE TO READ American poetry, would they be able to deduce from it that society existed? I suspect they wouldn’t. Not unlike autofiction, the typical lyric poem transcribes the consciousness of a sensitive observer taking in a world in which they don’t exactly belong. This onlooker is often a narcissist who writes with a mirror and a microscope. Their writing is overstuffed with the self: the poet as mopey observer, the poet as damaged comedian, the poet as traumatized humble-braggart. But this abundance of self-regard leaves little room for other people. If other humans stepped into the poem, they’d overpopulate its one-person biosphere of verse, and those who do pop up—say a lover, a mother, someone deceased—usually hover in misty form, a Jedi force ghost. While it would…

We opened a bottle of wine, summonedmountains overlooking ancient cities,& cities, those pits of unease,& we left your mother’s illnessalone—your mother, who insistsyou don’t return to her. We cut the cheese & washed the grapes,& our friend repeated the story of her father’sfuneral, how she weptto the man with the diseased eyewho wanted to confiscate her cameraoutside the church, how she pretendedshe was shooting, not the street, but Christ & his mother—how many times have we believed in God to avoida small death? How many times have we sat in the pewsto elude our mothers’ fears? How many timeshave we bent our bodies without love? We didn’t speak of your mother,who doesn’t want you to go back,lest the embassy deem you unfitfor immigration. How could passport seekers returnto sick mothers…

Angela Garbes’s new book, Essential Labor: Mother-ing as Social Change (Harper Wave), weaves together scholarly research and astute political insights with the particularities of her own experience as a Filipina American woman, mother, and daughter to examine the history, the pandemic-wrought present, and the possible future of care work in the United States. I spoke with Garbes about her explorations of labor and care and what our bodies tell us about trauma, healing, and pleasure. SF: In this book on mothering, you talk about daughtering, too. You highlight this tension of figuring out how to be the bridge between different generations and how to grow into our own selves. Is that how you would describe the book? AG: Absolutely, though I don’t expect that to be the dominant narrative that…

EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK IN AMERICA, CRIME IS OUT of control. Whether it’s Elon Musk—the world’s richest man—cutting regulatory corners in public, professional son-in-law Jared Kushner getting a $2 billion payoff from the Saudis, hackers draining hundreds of millions of dollars out of a crypto game, or the meatpacking industry’s price gouging, the economy’s winners color outside the lines with increasing chutzpah. There’s a lot of evidence that the country is in the middle of an alarming white-collar crime wave, but unlike street crime, the phenomenon doesn’t show up much in our political discourse. It’s time to change that. Although, for the most part, our elected officials aren’t treating white-collar malfeasance as an urgent concern, the public seems to be experiencing it as one. The excitement around cryptocurrencies has spurred the…

RUSSIA INVADED UKRAINE IN VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL law, and now we stand on a precipice. Advocates of war are saying that World War III has already begun, and the US should therefore plunge in. How can they say that? People may finally hurl themselves into an abyss from the sheer terror of falling. I learned something about this mood from a retired Foreign Service veteran. On October 27, 1962, he was sitting in the next room, listening on an intercom with second-echelon State officials while President Kennedy and his advisers discussed the appropriate response to Russian missiles in Cuba. As we now know, Kennedy barely held off an almost unanimous recommendation to bomb. What my informant vividly recalled was the mood of decision. They all recognized that a nuclear…

$39K Price of one Bitcoin at press time 2,188 Estimated energy use, in kilowatt hours, of a single Bitcoin transaction 900 Average monthly energy use, in kilowatt hours, of a single US home 0.65% Portion of total global electricity use attributable to Bitcoin mining (more than the energy use of all of Argentina) $6.5M Amount spent on cryptocurrency ads during Super Bowl LVI $4M Sale price of the most expensive NFT meme, the Shiba Inu “doge” $14B Value of cryptocurrency received by illicit addresses in 2021 $1.8T Market capitalization of all cryptocurrency $1.59T Market capitalization of Google…

THERE IS A GENTLY COMIC MOMENT IN JOHN LE CARRÉ’S The Spy Who Came in From the Cold in which the novel’s jaded, cynical protagonist, a British intelligence agent named Alec Leamas, quizzes Liz Gold, the young librarian who is about to become his lover, about her beliefs. He asks her if she is religious, and Gold replies that she doesn’t believe in God. “Then what do you believe in?” Leamas presses. “History,” she answers. “Oh, Liz…oh no,” Leamas exclaims. “You’re not a bloody Communist?” She nods, blushing. many respects from an orthodox Marxism, In the 1960s, communists were not the only ones who believed in History with a capital H. If The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was one British publishing sensation of 1963, another was E.P.…

IN 1905, THE DANCERS OF THE IMPERIAL BALLET IN St. Petersburg went on strike. Their demands: higher wages, a five-day workweek, training in how to apply theatrical makeup, the right to wear their own pointe shoes. They elected a small delegation, which included star pupils Anna Pavlova and Vaslav Nijinsky, to represent them in negotiations. This modest political action at the Mariinsky Theater proved that the spirit of the Revolution of 1905 had seeped into nearly every crevice of Russian society. That year, a crushing defeat in the Russo-Japanese War left Czar Nicholas II vulnerable to the calls for change—calls that were now growing louder and more militant across the country. Russia had become awash in peasant uprisings, labor strikes, and military defections. These revolutionary impulses would soon be quelled—at…

Electoral redistricting for the next decade is now nearly complete, and news reports suggest that the new congressional map might be as close to “balanced” as it’s been in decades. Yet we can hardly call this result fair. All but two states disenfranchise voting-age people who have been convicted of felonies; the burden falls disproportionately on Black and brown communities, especially in the South. The illusion of balance in congressional redistricting obscures this fundamental unfairness in the composition of the electorate. Percentage of Voting-Age Population Disenfranchised for Felonies…

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, I WAS ONE OF THE BOYS. WE ran, jumped, and huddled together, while the girls did their thing somewhere else. It definitely involved Barbies. Yuck. We, the guys, built forts, wrestled, even devised a complex plan to build tunnels under our neighborhood where we would… well, we weren’t sure what we’d do with them. But it was going to be fantastic. I had a nom de guerre: Kurt. Kurt showed up every morning ready for fun with the boys, flipped through my dad’s Car and Driver magazines, and wrote to Valvoline, Sinclair, and STP asking if they’d send me stickers. Incredibly, they did. Every day I’d run to the mailbox looking for mail addressed to Kurt Franke, and envelopes filled with automotive-related stickers arrived.…

THE NUMBERS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES. Two months after the Russian invasion, more than 5 million Ukrainians have fled their nation: 2.8 million to Poland, 757,000 to Romania, 426,000 to Moldova, 471,000 to Hungary, 342,000 to Slovakia. Many have made their way to the other nations in the European Union, which have offered them “visa-free entry.” Others are planning to fly to Canada, which has authorized what it calls a “special, accelerated temporary residence pathway for Ukrainians seeking safe haven.” Under this program, an unlimited number of refugees will be allowed to stay, work, and study in Canada for up to three years. And the United States? On March 24, 2022, President Joe Biden announced that the US would “welcome up to 100,000 Ukrainians and others fleeing Russia’s aggression through the…

IVIVIDLY RECALL THE DAY IN NOVEMBER 1989 WHEN THE BERLIN WALL, the preeminent symbol of the Cold War, was breached. I was then an Army officer serving in West Germany. In the blink of an eye, the world order that I had come to accept as permanent simply vanished. A new order was emerging. Notables gifted with (or claiming to possess) great political insight and savvy vied with one another in identifying its contours. History had ended. A unipolar order had emerged, with a sole superpower presiding as the “indispensable nation,” the Vietnam War—heretofore a defining event for Americans of my generation—consigned to a footnote in the chronicle of American triumph. No viable alternative to liberal democratic capitalism existed. Replenished and revitalized, the American Century appeared certain to continue indefinitely.…

War in Ukraine Re “Putin’s Invasion,” by Katrina vanden Heuvel [March 21/28]: At multiple decision points, the United States had the opportunity to stop this march toward war. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, besides the original sin of NATO expansion, despite being warned at the time of the possible consequences, the US began working toward regime change in Ukraine, once again sticking its nose in the affairs of another country. Then, in the Euromaidan uprising in 2013-14, Victoria Nuland, the US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, openly supported the ouster of a democratically elected president—a coup—making it clear that the State Department’s ultimate goal was to bring Ukraine into NATO. Since then, the Ukraine government has shown that it has no intent to follow…