Innehållsförteckning för September 5/12, 2022 från The Nation

REPUBLICANS RECOGNIZE THAT THE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE OF THE 2022 MIDTERM elections is whether the United States will continue as a constitutional republic or warp into an authoritarian state where the rule of law and the will of the people are casually disregarded. The question is whether Democrats understand that this is what the election is about, and whether they will fight as hard to defend democratic norms as Republicans are fighting to dismantle them. The GOP is answering the existential question of the era by signaling that it is prepared to abandon the basic premises of the American experiment in order to move toward an authoritarian governance founded on the cult of defeated former president Donald Trump. To that end, Republicans have refashioned their party as the blunt instrument of…

THERE IS A PUZZLE ABOUT AMERICAN HEGEMONY that should interest us more than it does. We are a conquering empire (even if our latest conquest always seems to end in retreat), but we can’t agree on the content of the product we send abroad. Is it constitutional democracy? Or is it “openness” minus “whiteness” plus “diversity”? We are confident to the point of delusion, and at the same time, we are bewildered. Robert Frost has a poem called “How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation.” That is pretty much how we look at things. The US has been king since we installed the Bretton Woods financial system in 1944 and oversaw the founding of the United Nations in 1945. As…

100% Portion of areas on Earth where the rainwater is unsafe to drink because of contamination from forever chemicals 7% Minimum portion of community water systems in the United States that report at least one health-based violation in a given year 83% Portion of tap water samples from six regions on five continents that tested positive for microscopic plastic fibers in a 2017 study $744B Amount needed for basic maintenance of drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater systems in the United States over the next 20 years 4 Number of once-in-a-millennium rainstorms the US has experienced this summer 42% Portion of the US currently experiencing drought $4B Amount of funding the Inflation Reduction Act allocates to drought relief for Western states…

IN HER 10 YEARS AS A NURSE, SARA PIKAART HAD never ignored a call light. But in the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, Pikaart simply had no way to respond to all the patients’ appeals for help. At Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital in Gallup, N.M., there were too many patients and too few nurses. The town of 21,000 was locked down, and just outside its borders, the Navajo Nation was reporting infection rates higher than those in New York City. There was no comparable hospital for 120 miles, yet RMCH’s CEO had just laid off 17 nurses. Pikaart was terrified: “I just had this feeling all day, like I was going to walk into a patient’s room and find them dead.” Pikaart was a labor…

I love to see you sat therepregnant with promise& nobody’s business: be bodacious if you feel like itbe camouflaged, if not. some might say you should be louder, bolder, tall.uppercase & camera-ready. but little b, you’re weary, aren’t you, of being counted in the wrong kinds of ways.besides, haven’t you been capital forever? haven’t you been asterisked for far too long? no longer,or not since, or not enough, some might think & let them think it, but as for me, little bI’ll be blunt now: I like the way you lay lowthe way you stay low& keep shooting.…

DR: What made you decide to report on the climate crisis through the lens of community and a sense of rootedness in a time of “unprecedented upheaval”? MO: When I started covering climate change more than a decade ago, the conversation was much more in the realm of data or policy. It was understood as something happening far away—melting ice caps. Then, in 2010, I started spending a lot of time talking with environmental justice groups. They were thinking about climate change in a way that was much more local and palpable, looking at disasters like Hurricane Katrina and having conversations like “What will this mean for us?” and “How do we build resilience in our own communities?” They were doing a lot of really interesting, creative, very tangible things,…

FIRST, SOME PRESSING QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: Is the new climate bill as big a deal as they say? Yes. Is it big enough to save us? No, not by itself. Does it throw environmental justice under the bus? Yes, as usual, but Senator Joe Manchin might be in for a surprise. Will Republicans keep getting a pass on climate? We’ll see between now and the November midterms. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is the biggest positive step the US government has ever taken on climate change. “It makes clean energy cheap; that’s the bottom line,” said Jesse Jenkins, an engineering professor at Princeton who conducted independent modeling on the bill. It also gives the US, historically the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, much-needed credibility to urge other countries…

JEFFREY LAMAR WILLIAMS, ONE OF THE MOST CRITICALLY revered and commercially successful figures in contemporary poetry, has been held in solitary confinement in a Georgia jail since his arrest on May 9. Williams emerged from Atlanta’s thriving poetry scene in 2011 with I Came From Nothing, a genre-reshaping collection filled with imagery from his childhood in Jonesboro South, the notorious housing projects where a young Williams watched his older brother die of gunshot wounds. That collection and the prolific output that followed would launch a slew of imitators and protégés, many of them childhood friends who were members of Williams’s Young Stoner Life star-making poetry collective. But in an 88-page, 56-count indictment, Georgia prosecutors allege that YSL is not a poetry collective but a front for a “criminal street gang”…

WHILE THE REST OF THE COUNTRY WAS REELING FROM THE Supreme Court’s decision in June to take away the right to abortion, Justice Sonia Maria Sotomayor was working. As her conservative colleagues planned victory tours and dinners at Morton’s, Sotomayor crafted dissents. She and her team of clerks worked to the last moment of the court’s term, laying out a case against the conservatives’ manipulation of laws and perversion of justice. And she did this despite the fact that the cases on which she was laboring may never even make it to the Supreme Court of the United States. The cases in question were among a series that her colleagues had decided not to hear. The Supreme Court gets to choose its own cases, sifting through between 7,000 and 8,000…

DURING THE 1994-95 ACADEMIC YEAR, I had a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, located on the edge of the Stanford University campus, to make progress on a book I was writing. A few of the center’s other fellows came, like me, from the humanities, but most were social or life scientists and legal scholars. Of special interest that year—generating not only intense discussion and intellectual fascination but also study groups aimed at aiding research projects—were the ideas of rational choice theory and game theory. These are interconnected approaches to analyzing individual and collective decision-making based on models, devised chiefly between the 1940s and the 1960s and drawn from the world of market-based economics. I found the openness to and, in some cases, excitement about…

THIS SUMMER, I MADE THE DIFFICULT DECISION TO take a leave of absence from teaching. For the first time in 11 years, I won’t be meeting new students this September. This isn’t the choice I wanted to make, but one I felt forced into as an immunocompromised transplant recipient and new parent facing a year of Covid-19 waves without mitigations or accommodations. And I’m not alone in making a decision to step away from the classroom: The underfunding of schools, an ever-expanding standardized testing regimen, anti–“critical race theory” zealotry, and an utter lack of care for teachers’ and students’ health during Covid have fueled teacher resignations across the country. As we head into the new year, the National Education Association estimates that US schools are short almost 300,000 teachers and…

Biden JOAN WALSH JOE BIDEN, AS I’VE STATED MANY TIMES before, was not my first choice for the Democratic nomination in 2020. He wasn’t even in my top three. But right now, he’s my only choice for 2024. Because barring an unexpected tragedy befalling the president, I don’t intend to waste a minute thinking about the next race until after the November midterms. And maybe not for a while after that. It’s easier to take this position, as I write in mid-August, than it would have been in mid-July. But it’s not just the Democrats’ recent surprise wins on gun safety, technology investments, veterans’ health care, and the big, if imperfect, Inflation Reduction Act, which funds groundbreaking climate initiatives, mandates Medicare drug price negotiations, and hikes corporate taxes. It’s not…

IN THE CIRCUS OF SHITTY JOBS THAT TECH COMPANIES have created in a few short decades—from Uber drivers to Mechanical “Turkers”—the content moderators are the most damned: They’re the sin-eaters, the scapegoats in the wild. They suffer so that we, the rest of humanity, may go about our days, scrolling our feeds, shielded from the vast magnitude of human depravity in this world, at least as it is documented and shared in social media images. You know the stories by now. A group of people, poorly compensated, are arranged in a call center environment as contract workers for a platform you’ve definitely heard of, in a nondescript office somewhere, likely in the Philippines or the American Southwest. At their desks, on a screen, they watch footage of people being raped…

Housing Follies Re “Does Building Luxury Condos Create More Affordable Housing?,” by Brian Hanlon, Tara Raghuveer, Ned Resnikoff, and John Washington [July 25/Aug. 1]: Los Angeles is a perfect example of the folly of trying to solve a worsening housing crisis through the construction of market-rate housing. Most of the new housing is expensive and depends on zoning waivers for building permits. It also pulls up the price of nearby housing, pushing even more people out. The final result is that those neighborhoods with the most new market-rate housing also have large and growing homeless encampments—today’s Hoovervilles. Faced with the consequences of their failed supply-side housing policies and strong pushback from local residents upset at the encampments, officials have turned to the police to push the homeless to other streets.…