Innehållsförteckning för September 19/26, 2022 från The Nation

MERE DAYS BEFORE FEDERAL STUDENT LOAN PAYMENTS WERE SET TO RESUME, President Biden announced his plan for student debt cancellation: up to $10,000 for borrowers with incomes under $125,000 a year and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. Many progressives have rightly criticized the limitations of Biden’s announcement. Rebecca Mosier, a 54-year-old from Oklahoma with $127,000 in student debt, described the plan as “a one percent off coupon,” or akin to when customers at the Sonic Drive-In where she worked would leave a handful of pennies in the tip jar. Biden’s relief also does little to address the racial wealth gap trapped inside of student debt. It still leaves millions of borrowers with six-figure balances and does little to address predatory lending terms that have swollen debts across generations.…

RECENT REPORTS OF TEACHERS LEAVING schools ahead of the new year come as no surprise: They are underpaid, overworked, on the front lines of the pandemic, and dealing with the increasing politicization of their profession. And if they raise concerns, teachers are rebuked, told to continue selflessly performing their work out of a commitment to their students. So while it is impossible to say whether there is an actual teacher shortage, as the United States does not collect timely data on teacher employment, what is certain is that teachers are unhappy: A recent survey from the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the country, shows that an overwhelming 79 percent of teachers are dissatisfied with their working conditions. Moreover, 38 percent indicated that they were…

ADAM SMITH IS NOT WHO YOU THINK HE IS. LONG HAILED as the founder of modern economics and the father of capitalism, the 18th-century Scottish thinker was not only an economist and the author of The Wealth of Nations; he was also a moral philosopher and the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith considered his work in moral philosophy every bit as important as his work in economics (if not more so), and he continually revised The Theory of Moral Sentiments even after he’d completed The Wealth of Nations. In the sixth and final edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1790, Smith even added a peculiar chapter about the psychology of wealth. Writing about the tendency of so many people to admire the rich and…

SINCE AUGUST 5, TEXAS HAS BEEN SENDING BUSloads of migrants—at least 900 people so far—to New York City after they’ve been processed and released by Customs and Border Protection. In New York, they can “receive the abundance of city services and housing that Mayor Eric Adams has boasted about within the sanctuary city,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott told reporters. “I hope he follows through on his promise of welcoming all migrants with open arms so that our overrun and overwhelmed border towns can find relief.” The fact that most asylum seekers have no plans to settle in border towns is immaterial to Abbott’s stunt. For his purposes, all that matters is the appearance of chaos—and that’s exactly what he’s providing. Adams says Abbott’s administration has refused to coordinate with the…

IMAGINE HOW LOIS LANE WOULD FEEL IF SHE FOUND out that a rich industrialist gave Lex Luthor $1.6 billion to start mining Kryptonite. Her comic-book howl is the only thing I can think of that might approximate my own reaction to the news that electronics magnate Barre Seid gave conservative kingpin Leonard Leo $1.6 billion, tax-free, for his new “nonprofit” venture, the Marble Freedom Trust. The most effective villain in America just got a literal fortune to play with. Leo is the longtime leader of the Federalist Society; as such, he is as responsible as any single individual can be for the conservative takeover of the judicial branch. He has nurtured the careers of countless conservative judges and helped develop the theories of law that give more rights to gun…

169% Rise in the average cost of an undergraduate education between 1980 and 2018 $59k Average amount owed by teachers with outstanding student loan debts $100k Minimum amount owed by one in five Black teachers $10k Amount of federal student debt President Biden’s plan forgives for most borrowers $58k Average base salary for full-time public school teachers in 2017-18 2.7k Approximate number of unfilled teaching positions in Nevada 700 Estimated number of teachers’ strikes that took place across the US between 2007 and 2019 2k Number of Philadelphia school district workers who authorized a strike ahead of the 2022-23 school year…

WHEN ONE OF JENNIFER ROURKE’S OPPONENTS IN A CRITICAL Rhode Island state Senate race violently attacked her at a late June abortion rights rally in Providence, she was shocked. “I didn’t see it coming,” Rourke recalls. “When I looked to the left, [Jeann Lugo] was punching me in the face.” Lugo, an off-duty Providence police officer, struck Rourke repeatedly, leaving her with impaired hearing. Chaos ensued. It was dark. People were yelling. State Senator Jeanine Calkin, a friend and fellow activist who was toward the back of the crowd of 1,500, called gubernatorial candidate Matt Brown, who was near the front with Rourke, to ask what was going on. “I know something happened because I saw all this movement, and then I just saw Co-op bodies swarm around Jennifer,” Calkin…

Take immortality, God, but giveme this cold apple cellar. Take the soulsand other toys, but let us live: not-Adam and not-Eve not your son’s—my son’s life.Wet hole in a cellarwith wooden floor—is a Promised Land.But no, we need cement floorsand the smell of cats and mattresses and a bunchof soiled blankets. The city breathes though they poke us with missiles’ needlework.Watch: a mad tailor makes of a city a headless costume withouthands. This is your human being, God, and nota retail display mannequin. The future is a door of mudglass, the color of raw diamond. This door opens insidemy chest every moment.Each breath inis a breath out,sometimes fastersometimes not at all. In a time of warthe future jumps outlike a frog, no, a grasshopper—one second—and there is nothing: no future—just…

Studying Ecology Re “The Tick Apocalypse,” by Jimmy Tobias [Aug. 8/15]: Among recent advances in our understanding of Lyme disease, a 2021 work by Howard Ginsberg and fellow biologists established why the disease is so rare in the southern US, despite the occurrence of the appropriate tick vectors. In brief, these ticks show a strong preference for reptiles rather than mammals, and these reptiles are poor hosts for the Lyme bacterium. Indeed, the research points to the importance of studying animal ecology and supporting land use and management plans that promote reptile populations. As winter temperatures continue to rise with climate change, their numbers may grow in higher latitudes and lower the incidence of the disease. MANUEL LERDAU Department of Environmental Sciences University of Virginia Pipelines to Plowshares Two powerful…

CONSIDER THESE NUMBERS: 38,142 and 16,686. The first is the number of voters who chose self-described progressive candidates in the Democratic primary for New York’s 10th Congressional District in late August. The second is the number who chose Daniel Goldman. Nevertheless, Goldman, a centrist—for the district, anyway; he’d be regarded as a liberal in the rest of the country—walked away the winner. How did he come out ahead when he garnered only 26 percent of the vote in a field of 12 and when more than twice as many progressive votes were cast against him? Because three popular politicians split those votes—leaving the second-place finisher, Working Families Party–endorsed state Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, trailing Goldman by only about 1,300 votes. Some of the blame goes to progressives themselves, who failed to…

DIANNE FEINSTEIN IS 89. STENY HOYER IS 83, NANCY Pelosi and Pat Leahy are 82, and Bernie Sanders is 80. Ben Cardin is 78, Richard Blumenthal is 76, Jeanne Shaheen is 75, Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden are 73; Debbie Stabenow is 72 and Chuck Schumer is 71. And that’s just the Democrats. In total, 46 percent of Senate Democrats and 40 percent of Democrats in the House are 65 or over. (Republicans in Congress are also way up there, but that’s their problem.) Unlike Europe, where leadership is comparatively youthful, America is a gerontocracy: President Biden is 79, and the average age of current Congress members is the highest it’s been in 20 years. That’s not good! Is it ageist to point out what the problems are? I’m a…

THE LAST PATIENT OF THE DAY SAT IN A BLUE RECLINER IN THE REcovery room at Trust Women in Wichita, Kan. It was late afternoon on August 1, one day before Kansans would vote on whether to keep the right to abortion in the Kansas Constitution. April, a patient from Oklahoma City, had spent much of the day lying on a leather couch, watching The Simpsons on her phone, waiting for her cervix to dilate so doctors could complete her abortion. Soon, she’d climb into her friend’s car to start the two-and-a-half-hour drive home. That didn’t seem so bad compared with the experiences of some of the women she’d met that day. One told April she had paid $800 to fly to Kansas with her husband. Another drove nine…

THE IDEA OF AN “AVANT-GARDE” TENDS to inspire complex emotions, oscillating between excitement at its glamour and scorn at its pretensions. The term carries an association of being daring, experimental, unconventional; the main body of practice or opinion that it is in “advance” of is usually figured as a monolith of dull orthodoxy. But the label also easily attracts a lightly ironical coating, in which those so designated are held to be exhibiting an excess of self-consciousness or even self-congratulation, pluming themselves on innovations that others suspect are merely willful or modish. An avant-garde likes to present itself as insurgent and radical, yet the logic of the metaphor suggests that a new group will soon be coming along to replace it. Today’s avant-garde is always liable to congeal into tomorrow’s…

WHEN BLACK PEOPLE SAY “NO” OR ONE OF ITS VARIANTS IN response to some stressful or hazardous situation, we both affirm and negate the circumstances before us. An assertion of agency, “nope” acknowledges the problem while also refusing to further engage. To say “nope” is to stretch a moment of fear, intrigue, or suspicion into a chance for self-assessment and playmaking. Can I survive this? Does the risk outweigh the reward? Do I want to be here? Nope? Time for a different move, usually an exit. Nope, the third feature film from the director and screenwriter Jordan Peele, taps into the sense of apprehension and opportunity that its title evokes. The story follows two siblings from a family of horse trainers, Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) and her older brother Otis…