Innehållsförteckning för July 25/August 1, 2022 från The Nation

IN 1992, FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANS WHO WISHED TO SEE THEOCRATIC LAW IMposed on the rest of the country were stabbed in the back by a conservative Supreme Court. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the court ruled, 5-4, to affirm the right to abortion before fetal viability as recognized in Roe v. Wade. The court placed significant new restrictions on reproductive rights, but it didn’t overturn Roe. All five justices who voted to affirm Roe were appointed by Republican presidents. Indeed, the 1992 court comprised eight justices appointed by Republicans. Only Byron White was appointed by a Democrat, and he joined the dissent against Casey and Roe. Now, 30 years after Casey, the fundamentalists have the court they want. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court…

BAD ART IS DOING VERY NICELY THESE DAYS, AND the reason is that people want a message. An early symptom was the galloping first-personism of movie reviewers: “I feel…” was a hard-to-beat gambit, since who can refute a feeling? A more impartial claim was suggested by the successor locution “It feels like…”—where the “it” meant that the feeling in question ought to move anyone. The broad-church piety was harder to challenge than a mere first person. Meanwhile, negative judgments were on the way to becoming prohibited so long as the work wore its good intentions on its sleeve. This is not a question of sincerity. Oscar Wilde said, “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,” and in The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon recoiled from the display of affection by…

5 Number of US Supreme Court justices who voted against the constitutional right to abortion 26 Number of states expected to ban abortions in the coming weeks and months 5 Number of states that currently ban all abortions 4 Number of states that ban abortions after six weeks (i.e., almost all abortions) 1 Number of abortion clinics per every 94,000 women of reproductive age prior to the Dobbs decision 26% Portion of clinics expected to close 8% Increase in the number of abortions between 2017 and 2020 90+ Number of funds that directly support people seeking abortions in the United States…

TRACY MCCARTER DID EVERYTHING THAT SOCIETY TELLS DOMESTIC violence survivors to do. She separated from her husband, Jim Murray, and moved on with her life. She continued working full-time as a nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia University, and was looking forward to celebrating her graduation with her four grown children. In the seven months since she had separated from her husband, she had rented her own apartment in Manhattan and was in the process of buying one in Queens, far enough away from Murray, whose alcoholism had been spiraling out of control, to minimize his intrusions. Although she still loved her husband, McCarter was preparing to enter a new chapter in her life—one in which she would welcome her first grandchild into the…

IN THE EARLY MONTHS OF 1938, THE DANISH WRITER Tove Ditlevsen, then 20 years old, moved from her parents’ small Copenhagen apartment into a room of her own. Her mother called her “heartless” for moving, and for taking her nannying wages with her; her father, a frequently out-of-work socialist, added to the guilt trip, reminding her that she already had a bedroom in which to “write all the poems you want.” Ditlevsen left anyway. In her new home, for which she paid 40 kroner a month, she could entertain her friends, come home late, and, most important, nurture the dream of writing a book. That said, the unheated room was “ice-cold,” and the miserly landlady, Mrs. Suhr, was an ardent member of the Danish Nazi Party, prone to addressing a…

IN THE SUPREME COURT’S DOBBS V. JACKSON WOMEN’S Health Organization ruling, the conservative justices rejected the idea that it is a fundamental human right for women to have agency over their own bodies and ruled that state lawmakers can exert control over part of what is in fact a spectrum of reproductive health care. It’s a spectrum because all reproductive health experiences are connected, and the accessibility and safety of abortion care is essential to ensuring that pregnancy, childbirth, and miscarriage can be safe too. There aren’t some people who have children and others who have abortions; we’re the same people at different points in our lives. I’ve had an abortion, a miscarriage, and a full-term pregnancy that concluded in a C-section and the birth of my son. None of…

LESS THAN THREE HOURS AFTER THE SUPREME COURT overturned Roe v. Wade, Elyssa Klann sat down at her kitchen table, two laptops open in front of her. Klann is a psychologist who has volunteered for the All-Options Talkline for seven years, supporting callers who are making decisions about their pregnancies and connecting them to resources when they ask for them. Klann struggled to comprehend the map of abortion access as it shifted in real time on her laptop screen. Callers in states hostile to abortion rights wanted to know if they could still go to their appointments. Klann wasn’t sure. She checked the guide at abortionfinder.org. “I could tell they were updating states as I was watching,” she said. Klann knew that 13 states have trigger laws designed to ban…

EARLIER THIS MONTH, THE RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDIST Christopher Rufo gave his social media followers a tutorial in the dark art of fearmongering—specifically, how to lie in order to stoke anti-LGBTQ hatred. Republican legislators have already spent the past four years filing some 670 anti-LGBTQ bills, with more than 300 proposed in 2022 alone, a significant portion of which target vulnerable transgender children and young adults. In recent weeks, right-wingers have amped up their smears against drag queens who volunteer their time reading books to kids in schools and libraries, claiming those story hours create “a sexualized environment.” Rufo, doing his part, posted a Twitter thread advising conservatives to dispense with the term “drag queen” in favor of the phrase “trans stripper,” because the latter conjures “a more lurid set of connotations…

IN 2002, JOHN JUDIS AND RUY TEIXEIRA published The Emerging Democratic Majority. In it, they argued that natural demographic trends would make the long-term dominance of the Democratic Party almost inevitable, a prediction that proved immensely comforting to American liberals. Judis and Teixeira assumed that the Democrats could maintain their enormous majorities among minority voters. That, along with other evidently irreversible trends, like the expansion of higher education, the mass entry of women into the workforce, and the spread of secular, tolerant cultural norms, could be understood as pushing politics in a Democratic direction. Judis and Teixeira’s title was a play on that of Kevin Phillips’s 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. Phillips, then a junior aide in Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, perceived that the superpowered Democratic coalition that Franklin…

We all want to be joined in holymetonymy. You are a part of me, we wantGod to say, that stands for the whole of me.Instead of immanent, just say man.Instead of wishbone, just say wish. Sound out the word, and we are all God’sonomatopoeia. Gaga comes from God mad:Coo, coo at the one you love, madman,across the carousel of the cosmos,these painted horses circling the sun. We are all first drafts, shy in publicand rhythmically iffy. We are allorphan lines yearning to becomecouplets, willing to rhyme slantif that means we don’t have to be alone. We are all written to be readaloud by the light of a bay window,out of earshot of the guns and slogans.Every amnion is an epithalamion,every kenning is a wedding. The king of heaven wears a…

ONE YEAR AGO, ON JULY 11, A SMALL PROTEST BY CUban dissidents in a poor suburb of Havana sparked nationwide anti-government demonstrations. In dozens of cities and towns, thousands marched to protest shortages of food and medicine, electricity blackouts, and a surge in Covid-19 infections. Most of the demonstrations were peaceful, but in some neighborhoods, protesters battled with police, overturned cars, and looted stores. The unprecedented protests were a symptom of deep economic and political discontent. They shocked Cuba’s leaders, emboldened the opposition, and rekindled Washington’s perennial pipe dream of regime change. Twelve months later, Cubans are still struggling with a sputtering economy, which is triggering a surge in irregular migration. When the protests erupted, President Miguel Díaz-Canel denounced them as counterrevolutionary and called loyalists into the streets to defend…

Yes BRIAN HANLON AND NED RESNIKOFF IN GOOD LEFTIST FASHION, WE’LL first answer the question by challenging its premise. New market-rate homes are rarely “luxury condos.” Only 5 percent of multifamily homes are condos, about the lowest rate in 50 years. The issue at hand concerns housing that does not receive subsidies to cover rent for low-income households. In California, nearly 90 percent of multifamily rental units are market-rate, and about 90 percent of low-income households live in market-rate homes. As for “luxury”—don’t believe what the landlords tell you. The scarcity of available apartments is what drives high housing costs, not stainless-steel appliances or a small fitness room. And that scarcity is real; contrary to what you may have heard, American cities don’t have a vast supply of apartment towers…

THE LABOR OF MAGAZINE-MAKING HAS NEVER BEEN LESS glamorous, less stable, or less profitable. Prestige, as the union organizers at Condé Nast have said, doesn’t pay the bills. With the churn of digital publishing pushing magazines into the financial and cultural doldrums, the luster of the legacy media job has only gotten duller. Yet there is still a magic in print magazines that does not seem to exist in newspapers or book publishing. Be it a weekly, a biweekly, or a monthly, a magazine can give us a snapshot of cultural mores, a printed record of the present, and a forecast of the future. “The more fragmented we become as a culture,” Tina Brown once observed, “the more the media holds us together.” There are, of course, many different kinds…

The Center Must Not Hold I agree with Robert L. Borosage’s “WTF” moment regarding DCCC and DSCC endorsements [“Which Side Are They On?,” June 13/20.] I live next to Henry Cuellar’s congressional district. It was infuriating when Nancy Pelosi came down here and endorsed the anti-choice Cuellar over the progressive Jessica Cisneros in the primary. It was heartbreaking when Cisneros then lost by fewer than 300 votes. And now, since the June 24 Roe decision, my inbox has been pelted with pleas from none other than Nancy Pelosi asking me to help fund races to “build the BIGGEST Democratic Majorities in history, and make Republicans rue the day they ever came after our county’s women.” Seriously, WTF. MOLLY SMITH SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, TEX. Both Sides At this moment in our…