Innehållsförteckning för October 3/10, 2022 från The Nation

THE US SENATE CONFIRMED AMY CONEY BARRETT TO THE SUPREME COURT EIGHT days before the 2020 presidential election. At the time, the man who appointed her, Donald Trump, said he expected that the court would be called on to decide the election, and he wanted Barrett involved in that decision. Things didn’t work out the way the famously transactional Trump had hoped: The Supreme Court didn’t decide the election, and justices and judges from around the country, even those Trump picked, rejected 61 of the 62 lawsuits he and his allies filed in an effort to overturn the will of the people. Almost two years later, however, Trump has finally found a judge who will do what he expects: rule on his behalf despite all relevant law, logic, and precedent.…

Inflation has come for Europe. In 2021, inflation concerns were largely specific to the United States, but after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy prices skyrocketed on the continent. This winter, unless there is significant government intervention, families will struggle to heat their homes. But inflation goes beyond this: With ongoing supply-chain problems, prices have risen even if you exclude energy and food. As we enter this next dangerous phase of the post-Covid recovery, decisions made much earlier are playing an outsize role. And the United States made two choices that have left the country’s economy in a much better situation than that of Europe. International comparisons of inflation rates are notoriously difficult to make, and even when one manages to compare the numbers, the environments are different. For instance, when…

FEATURING Calvin Trillin, Randall Kennedy, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Eric Foner, Katrina vanden Heuvel, D.D. Guttenplan, Amy Wilentz, and more. Join The Nation, The Nation Fund for Independent Journalism, and Nation interns past and present for a once-in-a-lifetime evening to celebrate Victor Navasky’s 90th birthday, honor his legacy, and help ensure a thriving future for the internship program he started. All proceeds from this special fundraising event will support the Victor S. Navasky Internship Program. Wednesday, October 12, 2022 6:30 to 9:30 PM The New York Society for Ethical Culture 2 West 64th St., New York, NY 10023 To learn more and purchase tickets, please visit TheNationFund.org/night-with-the-nation…

THE REPUBLICAN ASSAULT ON ABORTION AND BROADER campaign against bodily autonomy has led to a rhetorical conflation of two major constituencies affected by both—cis women and trans men—into a singular “people with the capacity for pregnancy.” Most people who are trans understand the fundamental connection between their own struggle for self-determination and women’s lack of it. Likewise, plenty of pro-abortion-rights cis women support trans rights and appreciate the need to build solidarity around a shared humanity. This makes total sense. But there’s been an entirely unnecessary by-product of this rhetorical expansion: the subtraction of the word “women” from the abortion discourse. That’s unfortunate, since it gives fuel to the misplaced fear, recently (and infamously) voiced by New York Times columnist Pamela Paul, that women are being “erased,” while unnecessarily alienating…

WHEN THE FINNISH PRIME MINISTER, SANNA Marin, was recently captured on video dancing at a party with friends, a great deal of ink was spilled evaluating her behavior. She was criticized for conduct unbecoming a prime minister and for an exuberance that some on the far right gleefully—and falsely—claimed must have been excited by illicit drug use. This framing put the onus on Marin to closely monitor herself even in closed rooms, and it does the same for us all. It compels us to perpetually distrust weddings, birthday parties—anywhere there are others who have cell phones. Ascribing the video’s circulation to individual intentionality restricts our imagination to carelessness and “leaks.” One cybersecurity expert “raised the possibility Russia had hacked the phone or social accounts of someone who is part of…

One-State Reality Meron Rapoport’s article on the erasure of the Green Line separating Israel and the occupied territories [“Pushing the Bounds,” Aug. 22/29] is on the right track. The Green Line is based upon nationalist aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians that are no longer valid. Rather than pitting one nationality against the other in a destructive conflict that might never end, there needs to be a convening of those from both sides who are willing to set aside old grievances and the old politics. JEFFREY HOBBS Documenting January 6 It’s difficult to accept Daniel Bessner and Ben Burgis’s criticism of the January 6 Committee hearings in their article “Hearing Loss” [Aug. 22/29]. If our political system is in a state of decay, that is no reason to dismiss the efforts…

BARBARA EHRENREICH DIED ON SEPTEMBER 1, FROM the aftereffects of a severe stroke. She was 81, and we’d been friends for too many years to count. I know it’s a cliché, but I can’t believe she’s gone. She was brave; she was funny; she was brilliant. She was also disciplined and hardworking and prolific. In her career of more than five decades, she wrote or cowrote 20 or so books and hundreds of essays. Who will explain us to ourselves now, and with such sly wit and flair? Few writers have done as much to inspire social movements, and Barbara inspired many of them. Witches, Midwives, & Nurses (1973), Complaints & Disorders (1973), and For Her Own Good (1978), all written with Deirdre English, were crucial texts for the burgeoning…

JOE BIDEN WILL NEVER BE CELEBRATED FOR LINCOLNIAN eloquence, but on occasion he can rise to the gravitas, if not the lapidary grace, of the Great Emancipator. The speech Biden delivered in Philadelphia on the cusp of Labor Day earnestly and soberly warned of the danger of a radicalized faction, whom the president described as “MAGA Republicans,” who reject the fundamental democratic principle of acknowledging election results. “Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election: Either they win or they were cheated,” he said. As if intent on providing evidence to back up Biden’s argument, former president Donald Trump, just a day before Biden spoke, promised pardons and apologies for many of those convicted of storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A…

Back in 1960, A.J. Liebling reminded his fellow citizens that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” As Steve Brodner knows only too well: Although he is considered by many (including me) to be the most brilliant caricaturist working today, the decline of print and the rise of editorial caution have meant fewer outlets for Brodner’s no-holds-barred graphic commentary. When, in the spring of 2020, Brodner felt compelled to chronicle the pandemic that was ravaging New York City and the world, he started publishing an illustrated newsletter, The Greater Quiet. He wasn’t the first to document the devastation brought on by a plague. In the 17th century, Samuel Pepys recorded the effects that the bubonic plague was having on London. In Pepys’s diary we learn…

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HER NEW FERTILITY memoir, Knocking Myself Up, Michelle Tea writes: “The whole story of a birth begins with that decision to say yes, and the roller coaster that loop-de-loops you to the delivery table or at-home birthing pool or what have you—there is so much in it. All of life, every hope and fear, joy and sadness, the understanding of yourself as a mammal, an embodied animal, is in that story.” Tea, the author of 15 books ranging from memoir to young adult fiction, has decided to detail her unorthodox path to motherhood in her latest. It’s quite a story and involves semen from a gay drag queen, eggs from Tea’s nonbinary partner, a makeshift vessel referred to as the “sperm bowl,” a designated friend…

IN A 1971 ISSUE OF EBONY MAGAZINE DEDICATED TO EXPLORING “The South Today,” its publisher, John H. Johnson, wrote: “Long before there was a United States of America, there was a Southland.” For many in his generation who had participated in the civil rights movement, the South was a zone of both oppression and liberation—it was the country they knew even if they lived in the North. For many Black Americans, the South was an ancestral home as well as a place of present warning and future promise. It was where the historic struggles against inequality and discrimination had taken place, but it was also a region that had cast an ominous shadow over the rest of the country. The different Souths that many Black Americans carry with them…

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