Innehållsförteckning för June 13/20, 2022 från The Nation

OUR BUFFALO COMMUNITY IS GRIEVING RIGHT NOW. WE’RE GRIEVING FOR PEARL Young, a grandmother who volunteered every Saturday at her church’s food pantry. We’re grieving for Miss Kat Massey, a dear friend of mine who would write a $10 check every month to the community land trust I ran. We’re grieving for Londin Thomas, an 8-year-old Black girl who hid in a milk cooler while a mass shooter opened fire on a supermarket full of shoppers in East Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three others. Londin survived, but she will live with the trauma of that day for the rest of her life. The shooter’s victims were mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunties—pillars of our community who were looked up to and loved. Many elected officials and leaders have offered their…

The Nation is delighted to announce that Jeet Heer is rejoining the masthead as a national affairs correspondent and bringing his weekly podcast, The Time of Monsters, in-house. In addition to continuing his monthly Nation column, “Morbid Symptoms,” he will file twice-weekly dispatches on TheNation.com. The titles of Heer’s column and podcast are a nod to the philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s famous remark “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” In this political and cultural moment, Heer believes that we too are living in an “interregnum,” an interval of opportunity for the forces of good or evil to prevail, where the future is very much unknown. His essays and episodes…

LET’S START WITH THE OBVIOUS: I’M in favor of jurisdiction stripping, weather stripping, or stripping while dancing on a pole if that’s what it takes to stop the Supreme Court from turning the clock back to 1859. I’m in favor of using any and all nonviolent means available to stop the court’s current embrace of bigotry and misogyny. If jurisdiction stripping reminds the court that it is a coequal branch of government and not a judicial clergy, superior to the elected branches, then I’m all for it. The legal theory behind what has come to be known as jurisdiction stripping is sound. The Supreme Court gave itself the power to declare unconstitutional both laws passed by Congress and orders signed by the president in the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison.…

IN OCTOBER OF 2021, KRISTYN SMITH CHECKED HERSELF OUT OF THE HOSPITAL in Charleston, W.Va., where she had been denied an abortion. Bleeding and in pain, Smith drove for six hours with her fiancé to Washington, D.C., to have the procedure performed there. On the day of her first appointment at the Dupont Clinic, she was 27 weeks pregnant. “They were the sweetest, most compassionate people that I had ever met,” she said of the clinic staff, who made her feel safe and supported. The seven weeks leading up to her arrival there, however, had been a “nightmare.” Less than two months after her abortion, Smith contacted me after finding my podcast, ACCESS. She sent an e-mail with the subject line “Abortion at 27 weeks” that detailed her story of…

HUBERT HARRISON REPRESENTS ONE OF THE CLEAREST EXAMPLES of the difficulties of being a Black intellectual and activist in the 20th century. Upon his death in 1927, Harrison was recognized in many magazines and journals for the prominent role he’d played in this country’s socialist and Black radical politics. As someone who’d organized a number of advocacy groups, as well as edited Negro World for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Harrison was arguably at his best writing, but he was also a powerful speaker and agitator. Three decades after his death, he was still revered within the Black left. In the summer of 1963, in the midst of the decolonization movement in Africa and civil rights upheavals in the United States, an essay from a Harlem-themed issue of…

Skeleton, some wonder if you are really practicalkeening as you do through this cityensconced in flesh, a tailored suit for boneslost plush in skin. Is it a good life withinexiled in the singular anatomical body?(Thanatophobia, mine.) Ok, breathe. There’soodles of oxygen for now—let’s live a little, we’re here!Natter on, nitwit. I’ve had about enough of you. Sorry not sorry, said death. He wasn’t fucking around, theklepto. Meanwhile, the internets wouldn’t shut up about perfection,elegance, the feminine ideal, that old regime. It was hard not to puff up whilelactating. It took heft to host the parasite. Pregnancy brought a swampyedema. Bye-bye ankles. Nice knowing you, feet. Intermittent fasting?Time to give it a rest. We’ll shrink eventual to the ultimate bone,obits keening farewell, flesh! So wax zaftig, carb while you can, willynilly…

Frances Kissling, 78, the president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy in Washington, D.C., is a bioethicist who has spent most of her professional life thinking about and working on issues of women’s rights and reproductive health. In the early 1970s, she was the director of two of the first legal abortion clinics in the United States. Later, she headed up the National Abortion Federation and, in 1982, became the president of Catholics for a Free Choice, now known as Catholics for Choice. I caught up with Kissling, who is currently writing her memoirs, via telephone shortly after Politico published the leaked version of US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in a forthcoming decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.  —Claudia Dreifus CD: What was your…

AMERICA HAS BEEN INVOLVED IN A CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE for some time. Most of our recent political controversies have ended in denunciations and upheavals that seem off the charts by the standard of all previous American experience outside war. Consider the right-wing birther movement, which questioned the authenticity of President Obama’s citizenship, and the left-liberal Russiagate scandal, which accused President Trump of being a Russian agent. The loudest voices leveling these charges came from people with no interest in evidence. Rather, the accusations served their purpose within the factions that constitute the “base” of the major parties. Barack Obama, a few years into his presidency, got into the habit of saying (in a tight spot when Americans seemed to support a bad cause): “It’s not who we are as a…

693 Number of mass shootings in the United States in 2021 212 Number of mass shootings so far in 2022 14% Rise in gun deaths in 2020 as compared with 2019 45,222 Number of people who died from gun-related injuries in the US in 2020 53% Percentage of US adults who say gun laws should be more stringent 2020 The first year in over two decades in which the federal government awarded grants for gun-violence research $25M Minimum amount approved by Congress for 2022 for firearms-related criminal background checks $32.3M Amount the NRA spent in 2020 on elections, lobbying, and “outside spending” (typically political ads for or against candidates)…

THERE ARE STAGGERING NUMBERS OF WOMEN helping to drive the anti-abortion fight. Currently at the center of the action is Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch. She petitioned the Supreme Court to review Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which, according to the recently leaked court opinion, will result in Roe v. Wade being overturned. Fitch uses her own story of raising three children as a divorced, single working mother to justify her anti-abortion position: that overturning Roe will “empower” women, giving them a chance to “redirect their lives.” Fitch disregards the fact that the majority of women who seek abortions are already mothers and that working parents in the United States are disadvantaged by the lack of government-mandated parental leave and subsidized child care. As a result, motherhood is more…

WITH THE LEAK OF A DRAFT OPINION in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization formally overruling Roe v. Wade, progressives’ worst fears about an ever more reactionary Supreme Court appear set to come true. After decades of chipping away at abortion rights, the court’s conservatives—now a rock-solid majority—seem ready to complete that ideological project openly and even triumphantly. In itself, such a decision would be catastrophic, especially for those who don’t have the resources or the personal freedom to travel vast distances to receive basic health care. The draft opinion’s unapologetic tone also presages similarly harmful outcomes on issues ranging from contraception to same-sex marriage to immigration to climate change. Indeed, some of these outcomes are already here. With this parade of horribles about to be realized, progressives are returning…

To the NAACP: “Tell them to kiss my butt.” “What I think we ought to do is bring the guillotine back. We could have public executions.” “Reading newspapers in the state of Maine is like paying somebody to tell you lies.” “Let me tell you something: Black people come up the highway and they kill Mainers.” “You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy… people of color or people of Hispanic origin.” “You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo—the IRS.” “If you want a good education, go to private schools. If you can’t afford it, tough luck.” Portland, Me. ON A CLOUDY SPRING MORNING, MAINE’S EX-GOVERNOR, 73-YEAR-old Paul LePage, journeyed to the heart of his state’s largest, most diverse, and most progressive city to…

DURING THE FIRST COVID LOCKDOWN, I, like so many other people, took to wandering my neighborhood alone, observing details that I might otherwise have glossed over. Perfectly black irises in an otherwise colorful garden; street graffiti declaring “Black Lives Matter”; a root shoving up from beneath the sidewalk; the house down the street with seven-foot-long wooden dinosaur skeletons in the front yard; handmade posters stapled to telephone poles demanding that the state “Cancel Rent.” I took pictures of my shoes next to cracks in the sidewalk, fallen flowers, and, later, autumn leaves—and I took lots of pictures of myself, of course. I sent them to friends by text and WhatsApp or posted them to Instagram, where we all filled our grids with strangely empty cityscapes and wilderness. Did we record…

THE THIRD SEASON OF HBO’S MY BRILLIANT FRIEND OPENS where the second left off, in a bookshop in Milan. It’s 1968, and Elena “Lenù” Greco (Margherita Mazzucco) has just finished an event for her debut novel. The first face we see, emerging from behind a gold metal-work spiral on the door, is that of Nino Sarratore (Francesco Serpico). Lenù has loved him since she was a girl, and now, after many twists and turns, including Nino’s tortured affair with her best friend, Lila (Gaia Gerace), he finally seems ready. He holds the gilded door open for Lenù, and he holds her gaze in the crowd. These two working-class kids from Naples have made it in the cultured North; with their matching glasses, they’re practically made for each other. Too bad…

US Imperialism and Anti-Asian Violence I had to take breaks in reading Panthea Lee’s brilliant article, which was relentless in its detailing of the mentality that is promoted by “a girl for the price of a burger”—and what allows it to persist [“Sex, Death, and Empire: The Roots of Violence Against Asian Women,” May 2/9]. Bravo, or, as is said where I come from, shabash. BINDU DESAI Panthea Lee’s powerful article provides important global and historical context to the widespread violence against Asian communities and Asian women in particular. It should be taught in our schools for the important life lessons it offers to young men and women alike, and it should be shared with our elected officials for the truths that could benefit the military and policing operations they…