Innehållsförteckning för August 22/29, 2022 från The Nation

IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT DEMOCRATS ARE UP AGAINST IT THIS FALL. THE PRESIDENT’S party generally does worse in midterm elections. Inflation is at a 40-year high. The mainstream media trumpet that crime is up. And the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda has been torpedoed by united Republican obstruction—and, until the recently brokered spending deal, by the Democratic Senator Joe Manchin III. But a more long-term difficulty was revealed in a recent New York Times–Siena College poll: Though they enjoy a 20-point advantage over Republicans among white, college-educated voters, Democrats have a working-class problem—and the climate deal, while welcome, isn’t going to fix it. Currently trailing the GOP by 12 points, Democrats are becoming the party of upscale urban and suburban voters, while Republicans are beginning to consolidate a…

UNLESS YOU ARE A PUBLISHER—OR HAPPEN TO BE reading this in prison—you may be unfamiliar with the “Exclusion Notice” that prison authorities use to justify the withholding of magazines and other printed matter from incarcerated subscribers. Over the past several months we at The Nation have received a number of these notices from the Office of Publication Review (OPR) at the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry. The explanations the OPR provides for banning a given issue are—true to its Orwellian name—invariably vague and lack any specific citations of the allegedly offending material. Our April 5/12, 2021, issue, for example, was suppressed because it allegedly falls under the categories of “Promotes Superiority of One Group Over Another, Racism, Degradation” and “Acts of Violence.” Since they gave no further details,…

In 1973, when the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that an unwanted pregnancy “may force upon the woman a distressful life and future.” Later, in 1992’s Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the court found that the right to abortion is necessary for “women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation.” Now that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has made it legal for states to ban or restrict abortions, what comes next is certain: More people who need an abortion will be unable to obtain one, which will plunge many of them into financial turmoil and curtail their ability to pursue their dreams. The Turnaway Study, conducted…

Is it the eight titanium pinsaround my knees or the fact that for three months the incisions were left open? I grew to know that plush of inside—the velvets, the iodine to prevent infection, the smooth of body castlike another girl who was exactly my shape, but calmer than I would ever be. She lay still, barely shifting, like a vase holding a flower, which was me with my hot dangers, myitchy despairs. In the myth, the girl who is Spring only gets herpower when she chooses the mask of bone. I did not want the world to be this way. For weeks, I stared at the dull view out the windowof alleys in moonlight, a few sunken garages, a dirty-white cat. I stared until these thingsbecame beautiful again. Something…

Gay Liberation I’m a little older than Benjamin Moser, but my experience was not all that different from his in “How I Stopped Being Gay” [July 11/18]. I agree that it’s wonderful to have acceptance, but we, indeed, paid a price for it. In spite of our oppression, we had the freedom to create ourselves—and we had to create ourselves because there was no preordained, respectable way to be a gay man. I don’t wish for young LGBT people to experience the fear, loneliness, and danger that we did, but it makes me sad that they, much like straight people, will go from their high school Gay/Straight Alliance, to dating nice young men in college, to finding the “right guy” to legally marry and adopt children with, and never have…

STEVE BANNON CALLED IT ON JANUARY 5, 2021, when he announced that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” Bannon knew what was coming on the eve of President Donald Trump’s violent coup attempt. And he knows what’s coming now as he promotes a “populist revolt” that he predicts will see an army of partisans flooding polling places this November to usher in a new era of right-wing extremism. What Trump’s coconspirator is talking about is very different from the normal politics of a midterm election year. Bannon is plotting a “precinct strategy” takeover of the electoral infrastructure of the nation—by inserting MAGA supporters in key election oversight positions and by creating chaos where necessary—to ensure Republicans get control of Congress and statehouses in 2022 and of the White…

THE JEWISH POSITION ON ABORTION IS SIMPLE: IT’S permitted. However ignorant the ancient rabbis may have been about the female reproductive system, they managed to land on the revolutionary concept that women are people too—a finding that eludes the 21st-century United States Supreme Court. But could the court’s radical transformation into a theocracy, all but annihilating the distinction between church and state, bite them in the ass when it comes to a Jewish First Amendment case for abortion? Halacha, the collective legal texts that guide Jewish life, justify abortion well beyond contemporary notions like “safe, legal, and rare” or “to save the life of the mother.” The earliest reference to the ethics of terminating a pregnancy is a short passage in Exodus, which reads like a civil tort, stating that…

12.3% Rise in rents from one year ago 36% Share of Americans who rent, according to 2019 census data 1,527 Number of residential evictions executed by New York City marshals so far this year 44% Estimated portion of available rentals in Manhattan that were vacated by tenants who were priced out of their apartments $37.72 Hourly wage required to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent in New York state 47% Portion of legal aid and civil rights attorneys reporting rising eviction cases in HUD-assisted housing, according to a nationwide survey by the National Housing Law Project 2M Number of households in the US that receive federal vouchers, allowing them to afford decent, stable housing…

THE TOWN OF TOWAMENCIN, PENN., IS NOT KNOWN FOR BEING A HOTBED of activism. Sitting 30 miles northwest of Philadelphia, it is a mostly middle-class, white commuter community of 18,000 that has long skewed Republican. But this past April, as the township’s governing board of supervisors prepared to sell Towamencin’s wastewater facility to a private water company, hundreds of residents packed town hall meetings in an effort to stop the sale, the culmination of a year-long campaign by a newly formed group called Neighbors Opposing Privatization Efforts (NOPE). Big water companies like American Water, Aqua America, and, in the case of Towamencin, the Florida-based NextEra have been buying up water and wastewater systems in Pennsylvania, after legislation passed there that allows municipalities to sell public utilities more easily. But in…

Viruses do not discriminate. As Covid-19 has made abundantly clear, no one is safe from infection, not even Queen Elizabeth II or Kim Kardashian. But as the journalist Steven Thrasher discusses in his new book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, the universal nature of viruses does not mean that all humans will contract them equally. Rather, viruses interact with entrenched power structures in a way that results in highly skewed rates of exposure, transmission, serious illness, disability, and death. The Nation spoke with Thrasher about how pandemics magnify inequality, the lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS crisis, and what we should do to confront the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. —Charlotte Rosen CR: What is the “viral underclass”? ST: The term helps explain why marginalized groups of…

WE LIVE IN HISTORIC TIMES. THE HEARINGS OF THE January 6 committee are Watergate 2.0. Maybe they’ll have an even bigger impact than Watergate 1.0. At any rate, democracy is at death’s door, and if we want to ensure the future of our republic, we need to hold former president Donald Trump responsible for his deplorable behavior. And it doesn’t hurt that the hearings are must-see TV. So goes the story line that has permeated much of the mainstream and progressive media. But this narrative obscures more than it reveals. Its popularity indicates that there’s something rotten at the heart of contemporary liberalism. We don’t deny that January 6 was a grotesque moment in US history. The actions of the rioters who stampeded the Capitol, whipped up by the nonsensical…

IN HIS SALAD DAYS, DURING THE HIGH COLD WAR OF THE 1950s and ’60s, L. Brent Bozell Jr. was a notorious right-wing polemicist whose ideas influenced everyone from Joseph McCarthy to Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan. Yet he always bristled at the misfortune of living his entire adult life in the shadow of a celebrity relative. “It’s a hindrance to be William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law, because people are under the assumption that I share his views,” Bozell told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1971. “I do not. He is the right-wing establishment. I consider myself outside the establishment.” Buckley and Bozell, relatives by marriage whose once-tight friendship eventually splintered over political arguments, remain a fascinating study in contrasts. Their divergent paths illuminate the conflicting factions of the right. After a period…

ON THE FACE OF IT, THERE ARE FEW PRESSING REASONS for Americans to take any interest in what is happening in Israel-Palestine/Palestine-Israel. From the climate catastrophe to the war in Ukraine, from the energy crisis to the crisis of democracy—Americans have plenty of reasons to be preoccupied. This somewhat understandable American apathy was apparent in Joe Biden’s visit to our region in July. The US president, much like his predecessors, felt no need to pressure Israel on its military occupation; to force it back into negotiations with the Palestinian leadership; to visit the Masafer Yatta region of the occupied West Bank, where over 1,000 Palestinians are facing imminent ethnic cleansing; or even to hold Israel to account for the killing of the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Yet…

OTTESSA MOSHFEGH’S LATEST BOOK, LAPVONA, is a masterful and excruciating novel about a village of idiots. How do we know that they’re idiots? Because the narrator says so, constantly, mercilessly, and in every possible way. Even before the narration begins, their idiocy is made clear in an epigraph borrowed from a Demi Lovato song: “I feel stupid when I pray.” But Lovato has one up on Lapvona’s characters. At least the singer has enough self-awareness to recognize stupid behavior. The characters largely do not, and the narrator’s steady ridicule of them continues to the final, murderous scene, which would be a devastating tragedy of Shakespearean proportions if it weren’t first and foremost an act of drastic stupidity. As a result, Lapvona is more puppet show than Shakesperean tragedy—there is hilarity,…

apologies. i was part of the joyindustrial complex, told them their bodies weremiracles & they ate it, sold someday,made money off soon & now. i snuck an ode into the elegy,forced the dead to smile & juke.implied America, said destroy but offered nary step nor tool.i paid taxes knowing where the funds go.in April, my offering to my mother’s slow murder. by Maymy sister filled with the bullets i bought. June & my father’s lifelocked in a box i built. my brother’s end plotted as i spend.idk why i told you it would be ok. not. won’t. when they aren’tkilling you they’re killing someone else. sometimes their handsat the ends of your wrist. you (you & me) are agent & enemy.there i was, writing anthems in a nation whose victory…