Innehållsförteckning för August 8/15, 2022 från The Nation

THE PROCLAMATION “I WILL AID AND ABET ABORTION” APPEARED ACROSS SOCIAL media soon after Donald Trump’s Supreme Court justices did what they were appointed to do: overturn Roe v. Wade. Leaving aside the question of whether it’s a great idea to advertise one’s intent to engage in legally risky behavior, the posts signaled rising anger over the court’s endorsement of forced pregnancy. Notably absent amid that anger was any actionable outrage from President Biden, who had nearly two months after a leaked Supreme Court draft to mobilize against the elimination of legal access to abortion in at least 13, and as many as 26, states. Instead Biden has only just begun “mulling” the option of declaring a public health emergency, after taking two weeks following the decision to issue an…

ON JUNE 24, THE SUPREME COURT, BY A VOTE OF 6-3, revoked the constitutional right to an abortion and left it up to the states to decide whether a pregnant person can be forced to give birth against their will. This Confederate view of states’ rights has long been championed by conservatives and modern-day Republicans. They’ve lauded the court’s decision as “returning” power to the states, and glossed over the fact that the power the states are getting is control over the bodies of women, girls, and pregnant people. And the states eager to strip away reproductive rights have no intention of stopping at their borders. Already, Republican states have moved to propose laws that would restrict the right of women and pregnant people to seek abortions in other states.…

12% Portion of the total calories traded on global markets that comes from Russia and Ukraine 1/3 Portion of wheat traded in global markets that comes from Russia and Ukraine 22M Amount of grain, in metric tons, stuck in Ukrainian storehouses 345M Number of people globally who are “acutely hungry,” up from 276 million before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 12M Number of Ukrainians who have fled their homes since February 24 900K Minimum number of Ukrainians, including approximately 260,000 children, who have been “interrogated, detained, and forcibly deported” to Russia, according to the State Department 343 Number of children killed so far in the Russia-Ukraine war, according to the UN 533 Number of children injured in the war…

Davenport, Iowa NE AFTERNOON IN MID-MARCH, JEREMY KAISER SAT BEHIND HIS corner desk at the Scott County Juvenile Detention Center. Kaiser, the director of the facility, excitedly held up a piece of yellow paper. On it he’d written a list of the people most vocally opposed to the county’s plan to build a new, bigger detention center. “I put a little check mark by them every time they show up” at marches or the county board of supervisors’ meetings, he said. The next meeting, at which the board would vote on the detention center’s budget, was scheduled for the following night. It would determine the fate of the facility for 10-to-17-year-olds awaiting trial or placement in a rehabilitation program. Kaiser, who has a muscular build and closely cropped brown hair,…

A FORMER UBER EXECUTIVE HAS LEAKED MORE THAN 124,000 documents to The Guardian and other news outlets, revealing a long campaign of lying, lawbreaking, and other chicanery that helped make the company a worldwide giant—though one that has yet to turn a real profit. The executive, Marc MacGann, saw the leak as a form of expiation for his previous work. As he told The Washington Post, “I was the one talking to governments, I was the one pushing this with the media, I was the one telling people that they should change the rules because drivers were going to benefit and people were going to get so much economic opportunity. When that turned out not to be the case—we had actually sold people a lie—how can you have a clear…

EVER SINCE SUPREME COURT JUSTICE SAMUEL ALITO’S draft opinion in Dobbs was leaked, some anti-abortion writers have been saying that the “culture of life” means supporting pregnant women and their babies, too. “For many pro-life and whole-life leaders,” says the Anglican priest and New York Times opinion writer Tish Harrison Warren, “this Supreme Court decision would represent a starting line, not a finish line.” She asked a sampling of those leaders what should come next, and to be fair, some of their ideas are what progressive feminists have been demanding for decades: paid parental leave, affordable housing, child care, and other anti-poverty, pro-family measures. That’s all well and good, but I have questions. In the first place, why haven’t these writers been stressing poverty and lack of support for parents…

AS THE SOVIET UNION WAS COLLAPSING in 1991, the emerging Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin attended a literary conference in Munich. At the conference dinner, he raised a toast to Stalin—not as the victor of World War II or the hero of Soviet industrialization, but as “the creator of the repressive mechanism thanks to which I was able to succeed as a writer.” Sorokin has always been the consummate troll, and it would be easy to write this episode off as an attempt to tweak the sensibilities of his Western colleagues. Yet in this case he was quite sincere. The regime he loathed had provided him a framework within which to operate, a system of tropes and signifiers he’d made it his mission to subvert. His reputation as an author—already considerable…

Whole Earth Generation Malcolm Harris, in his review of John Markoff’s Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, glosses over the vital cultural influence of the Whole Earth Catalog during the last decades of the 20th century [“The Zen Playboy,” June 27/July 4]. Inspired by the most iconic photograph yet in history—the shot of Earth from space by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders—Brand in 1968 envisioned a publication that would celebrate this stunning new holistic perspective of our planet home and contain information, resources, and tools that would encourage and empower people to take charge of their own lives. In what reads like a sordid gossip column, Harris’s review dismisses the Whole Earth Catalog as a one-off indulgence prompted by Brand’s love of shopping, while ignoring the profound…

THE WAR IN UKRAINE AND THE WESTERN REACTIONS to it offer a real-time example of how sympathy and hypocrisy sometimes go hand in hand. Of course Ukrainians deserve sympathy—and much more—for their suffering under Russia’s invasion. But as other populations who are undergoing or have undergone bombardment, occupation, or other forms of domination—often by nations in the West or their allies—have remarked, “What about us?” This raises the issue of when one can reasonably ask this question without being accused of “whataboutism”—the practice of deflecting a demand for justice or care with a self-serving claim about one’s own victimization or that of supposedly equally deserving others. As someone who came to the United States as a refugee fleeing the Vietnam War, I’ve asked myself “What about…?” many times. When I…

ATRIP TO THE GROCERY STORE THESE DAYS is a crash course in the toll that climate change is having on supply chains. Grocery prices have risen every month for the past year, driven by everything from the lingering pandemic, to the air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels, to farm labor shortages and corporate price-gouging. Growing seasons regularly devastated by droughts and floods only exacerbate these factors. Fortunately, there is an answer to rising food prices: It lies in the lowly legume. In order to prosper on American farmlands, however, beans are going to need a lot more help from the US government. What the agriculture sector needs right now is a “Bean New Deal”—large-scale investment in legume production, and a snazzy brand campaign to boot. Beans are a staple…

IT SURE SOUNDED, ON THE EVENING OF JUNE 9, LIKE LIZ CHENEY WAS PREPARED to sacrifice the political career she had spent a lifetime constructing in order to restore a measure of sanity to American governance. The Republican representative from Wyoming, who was raised amid the cutthroat politics of the Grand Old Party in the era when names like Reagan and Bush and Cheney still mattered, took a moment before the close of the first public hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol to call out lifelong allies for choosing an authoritarian course that threatens America’s future as a constitutional republic. “I say this to my colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is…

IN 1957, AS THE POSTWAR ECONOMIC BOOM LED TO A “great acceleration” in hydrocarbon energy use, a group of scientists working for a Texas-based petroleum company called Humble Oil (later renamed ExxonMobil) embarked on a study prompted by growing public concern over air pollution and new research on the consequences of burning fossil fuels. What they found was that the “enormous quantity of carbon dioxide” in the atmosphere was linked to the “combustion of fossil fuels.” Sixty-five years later, reality has proved to be even worse than their findings. With the unchecked combustion of fossil fuels releasing enormous quantities of carbon, the world is now on track to reach 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels. At the most recent UN Climate Change Conference, the assembled heads of state produced, yet…

This year will go down in history for the number of anti-trans bills introduced in state legislatures and the successful passage of many of them. Lawmakers this year have proposed more than 300 pieces of legislation banning books, medical treatment, even access to the bathroom. And as extremists crank up the volume on hate, trans people—especially trans women of color—are facing an onslaught of violence. What connects all of this? Imara Jones, the creator of TransLash Media, a multi-platform journalism project, is tracing the dark money and rightwing figures behind what she calls “the anti-trans hate machine.” —Laura Flanders LF: You talk about the anti-trans hate machine being a plot against equality. Can you lay that out for us? IJ: For a long time, people on the right have understood…

NOVEMBER 12–19, 2022 For more than 60 years, The Nation has called for lifting the US embargo on Cuba. The roots of our travel program to the island extend back to that commitment to forge a more sensible, sane, and productive US policy toward Cuba, a critical necessity I witnessed for myself when I traveled there on The Nation’s program this past March. This November, Nation Travels will be returning to Cuba and we invite you, along with The Nation’s leading writer on US-Cuba relations, Peter Kornbluh, to see for yourself the effects the embargo exacts on Cuba. I hope you will join him and other progressive travelers—for mojitos, salsa lessons, and intelligent travel with humane and principled purpose. Katrina vanden Heuvel Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation We will follow strict Covid-19…