Innehållsförteckning för May 30/06, 2022 från The Nation

IN THE WAKE OF JUSTICE SAMUEL ALITO’S LEAKED DRAFT DECISION OVERTURNING  Roe v. Wade, it’s tempting to blame the pro-choice movement. Blaming ourselves: Isn’t that what we progressives, especially women, love to do? Somehow, it’s our fault—for being too white/middle-class/respectable, too beholden to the Democratic Party in return for too few crumbs. Always throwing money at unwinnable races, allowing abortion to be stigmatized (“safe, legal, and rare”), maintaining bloated organizations that lumber and creak and resist change. It’s all true—I’ve written that piece many times. But today I’m not so sure any of that would have mattered. The truth is, Donald Trump came to power despite losing the popular vote by almost 3 million, enabling Mitch McConnell to ruthlessly engineer the current right-wing Catholic anti-abortion Supreme Court majority, and here…

AFTER YEARS OF DOMINATING AMERICAN CAPITALISM by grinding workers into the dust, Amazon is on a hot losing streak, and it’s absolutely invigorating to watch. If the Amazon Labor Union had only organized workers in a blowout vote on Staten Island, it would’ve been enough. And if Amazon had only spent $4.3 million fighting them just to fail, it would’ve been enough. But, dayenu! A judge also just threw out the company’s motion to dismiss a case of race-and gender-based discrimination filed by a corporate worker, too! Except it’s not actually enough. Until a few weeks ago, the last time I bought anything on Amazon was in 2017. Then my vet told me that I had to get special diagnostic strips to monitor the sugar content of my cat’s urine…

61% Portion of adults in the United States who say abortion should be legal in most or all cases 1,327 Number of state-level abortion restrictions enacted since the Roe v. Wade decision 546 Number of abortion restrictions introduced in state legislatures in 2022 18% Rise in pregnancyrelated deaths in 2020 17.4 Number of pregnancyrelated deaths per 100,000 live births in the United States 0.41 Number of deaths per 100,000 legal induced abortions 22 Number of states with “trigger laws” restricting abortion after Roe is overturned 96.7% Success rate of medication abortions using a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol…

RACHEL CARSON WAS A PASSIONATE AND POETIC WRITER, but she was not a particularly subtle one. When she set out to write a book, it did not end until the mountains had crumpled into the sea, all organisms dead or alive had vanished therein, and the form of life itself on Earth had been radically altered. Before Carson wrote her most influential book, Silent Spring, she wrote three thrilling books on the ocean’s creative power over all of life’s forms, each of them ending just this way. Carson’s first book, Under the Sea-Wind (1941), about the migratory patterns of fish and birds along North America’s Atlantic coast, concludes: “For once more the mountains would be worn away by the endless erosion of water and carried in silt to the sea,…

AS SOON AS I FOUND OUT I WAS PREGNANT, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to get an abortion. But, almost instinctively, all of the worst-case scenarios that I could think of popped into my head. It was March 2020, and the pandemic was raging. What if I had to travel out of the state for the abortion? What if I couldn’t get it in time and had to carry the pregnancy to term? I was 19 and a student at Ohio State University. I was adjusting to my new role as a member of University Student Government and fresh out of a relationship with the partner who had impregnated me, and who had absolutely no desire to have children. Sitting on the toilet with…

LONG AGO, IN ANOTHER AMERICA, YOU HAD TO TURN TO the underground press if you wanted to conjure up images of wholesome Disney cartoon characters fornicating. In 2022, Republican lawmakers now provide that service. In 1967, The Realist, a gleefully subversive journal founded by Paul Krassner, published Wally Wood’s “The Disneyland Memorial Orgy,” a two-page spread that showed Mickey Mouse and the gang, impeccably rendered, engaged in all manner of X-rated activity. Krassner and Wood were countercultural anarchists, but by some strange alchemy, what they presented as satire is now a part of Republican rhetoric. On his podcast, Verdict With Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas added his voice to the chorus of Republican lawmakers who have suddenly started to accuse Disney of pushing sexual propaganda on kids. In…

ONE AFTERNOON LAST SEPTEMBER, 20 ACTIVISTS LOGGED ON to Zoom to learn how to support people who manage their own abortions with pills. Some wore clerical collars; some wore T-shirts. Elaina Ramsey, her black hair piled on her head and a cross visible on the wall behind her, welcomed them with a call for faith communities to fight the stigma around abortion. Then she and a colleague, Kelley Fox, outlined the steps involved in inducing a medication abortion while an orange cat licked its paw in the background of Fox’s screen. Later, in breakout rooms, participants fumbled through a role play, taking turns acting the part of a pastor counseling a desperate woman who is working two jobs and can’t get to the nearest clinic three hours away. Most of…

THE PLANET’S LARGEST YET most overlooked machine, astounding, complex, and neglected as it is, doesn’t usually present as a particularly captivating subject, let alone as a site of revolutionary change. When the US electrical grid does manage to make its way into the headlines, it’s usually with respect to its vulnerability. In May of 2020, Donald Trump caused a stir when he signed an executive order to wean utilities off ordering bulk power systems from “adversaries,” fearing that the equipment would be compromised by “backdoor” mechanisms. More immediate threats, however, have tended to be domestic and decidedly low-tech. A common cause of wildfires and blackouts is trees and other vegetation interfering with aboveground power lines. In 2013, snipers fired at a substation from a highway in Metcalf, Calif., forcing Pacific…

THERE IS PERHAPS NO BETTER SETTING FOR A WORKPLACE novel than outer space. With the exception of time taken for the necessary evils of sleep, nourishment, and hygiene, astronauts are always on the clock. In notable works of sci-fi—Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity—our heroes are marooned on their ships, surveilled either by faceless colleagues in mission control or by an all-seeing operating system. Glimpses of their humanity appear only fleetingly, through flashbacks of children on Earth or a beloved object from home floating in space. As representatives of their country, their planet, and their species, they have an almost military commitment to decorum. This image of a highly efficient and restrained workplace, functioning even under the most distressing conditions, is not just genuinely fictional; it is also a manager’s…

WE NOW LIVE IN A COUNTRY WHERE THE government cannot force you to wear a mask on a plane during a pandemic but can force you to carry a pregnancy to term against your will. It is a country where the government won’t ban certain kinds of assault rifles but will ban certain kinds of medical care. We live in this country because five justices in thrall to a fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy have taken control of the Supreme Court—and because the majority of Americans who reject that orthodoxy have too often ceded the moral ground to the monsters who claim to have legitimate, enforceable interests over women’s bodies. Women’s rights organizations and advocates have been in the trenches, fighting this fundamentalist sect, at literal physical risk to their lives, for…

Republicans are trying to terrify the public with stories of rising crime, sending Democrats scrambling to prove that they’re tough on the issue. In President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, he promised to do something about people killed by guns. The solution, he said, is not to defund the police—a rallying cry from the racial justice protests of summer 2020 calling to move resources from police departments to other social investments. “The answer is to fund the police,” he declared. While headlines have blared stats about rising crime, not all crimes have increased, nor are they at historically high levels. Most property crimes continue to decline, and the rise in violent crimes was largely driven by a spike in homicides. Even so, the murder rate is still 40…

TIM NORDIN CHECKED HIS E-MAIL SHORTLY BEFORE THE APRIL 5 LOCAL election in his northwestern Wisconsin community and found a death threat. The sender, identified only as “Kill All Marxist Teachers,” attacked the president of the Eau Claire school board for “promoting the horrific, radical transgender agenda,” adding, “It’s now time to declare war on you pedos. I am going to kill you and your entire family.” Nordin made sure his family was safe, called the cops, and alerted fellow school board members. Then, after checking with his wife to make sure she agreed that it was worth it to continue campaigning for a new term on the board, he sent a message to the voters. “This is Eau Claire’s election,” declared Nordin, a 43-year-old former high school science teacher.…

IN 2005, BRITAIN’S THEN–LABOUR PRIME minister, Gordon Brown, chose the backdrop of Tanzania to make a dramatic statement about his nation’s unmatched record of imperial conquest and rule. “The time is long gone,” he said, “when Britain needs to apologize for its colonial history.” The choice of locale for such a proclamation was, to be charitable, curious. A braver stage would have been Kenya, to pick an African nation that had experienced horrific violence during its independence struggle from British colonial rule, or India or Malaya, where extreme and brutal measures to sustain imperial control had been carried out on an even greater scale. But here we were, nonetheless. Brown’s speech reflected the slow and creaky rotation of the wheel not so much of history but of historiography. Mirroring 19th-century…