Innehållsförteckning för October 17/24, 2022 från The Nation

ON CBS’S 60 MINUTES IN LATE SEPTEMBER, PRESIDENT BIDEN ANNOUNCED: “the pandemic is over.” With more than 400 deaths each day all summer, Covid is still among the leading causes of death in America. The United States still leads the G7 industrialized nations in per capita Covid mortality and excess deaths, and with life expectancy in the US declining due to the disease, these basic health metrics do not support the president’s contention. Things may not be as bad as they were in 2020 or in the darkest days of the Omicron surge, but the current status quo bakes a staggering amount of death and suffering into a surrender to the virus. Let’s be clear: President Biden capitulated to the pandemic long ago. The high-water mark of his tenure was…

IT WAS UTTERLY UNSURPRISING THAT THE MOMENT Buckingham Palace announced that Queen Elizabeth’s doctors were “concerned for Her Majesty’s health,” a gross amount of invective would be flung at Meghan Markle. Now that the queen has died, grief seems to be overshadowed in certain corners by the joy taken in blaming Markle for the passing of a 96-year-old woman whose health had been in decline over the past year. The Windsors’ brand has always been unmiscegenated whiteness as a proxy for imperial glory, and for royalists and racists both British and American, Markle’s entry into the family was a blemish on, even an invasion of, that monarchical legacy. So it was no surprise that #GoHomeMeghanMarkle trended, that a cluster of white women refused to shake Markle’s hand as she greeted…

WRITING AND THINKING ABOUT MAS-culinity has made me skeptical that the concept has any stable definition. Defenses of masculinity typically focus on various good qualities that are assumed to be men’s special business: courage, strength, an interest in math, a willingness to do dangerous jobs, a love of tinkering. These traits are ubiquitous in women. If we call these attributes “masculine,” this implies that there is something either freakish or meritorious about a woman exemplifying them. But when I see that my wife has been brave, I don’t think, “What a masculine gal I’ve married!” Similarly, when my brother-in-law (6-foot-2, swole) shows how nurturing he can be to his sons, I don’t think, “Wow, he’s feminine too.” I simply find, in both cases, that masculinity and femininity are vast and…

I HAD ONLY ONE JOB TO DO—WRITE THE OBITUARY. HIS WIFE, FREDDIA, ARRANGED THE church service in Boston, and my sister, Makani, took care of everything else. She flew from Jackson, Miss., to Albuquerque to identify the body, arrange his cremation, pay bills, close accounts, pack up his things, clean out his apartment, and inform friends and family that our father had transitioned. None of our father’s other three children went to New Mexico to help out, myself included. Writing his obituary was to be my contribution. Donald Sheralton Kelley officially died on February 29, 2020, although two or three days passed before someone found his body. He was 82 years old and alone. We had been estranged for over two decades. He called me occasionally, usually on my birthday,…

ON MAY 24, 1861, THE FATE OF THE CIVIL WAR WAS UNclear. The Confederacy was formed in large part to defend slavery, but the Union was not yet committed to ending the chattel regime. That did not deter three enslaved people—Frank Baker, James Townsend, and Shepard Mallory—from doing their part to change the meaning of the conflict. Leased out to construct Confederate defenses in Virginia, they fled at night, rowing a boat four miles north along the Chesapeake coast to Fort Monroe, the Union’s only base in Virginia at the time. Under the Fugitive Slave Law, the Union should have returned the three men to their enslavers. The commanding officer of the fort, Benjamin Butler, thought differently: Secession had invalidated any Union responsibility to Confederate property, he insisted, and the…

“NO ONE WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE” WAS THE SURPRISE refrain of late 2021, posted on the doors of businesses forced to close for lack of staff and delightedly memed by a burgeoning anti-work crowd online. Reddit’s r/antiwork subgroup, the clearinghouse for cathartic quitting stories and texts to horrible bosses, became so popular it warranted a report from the Financial Times. If the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic were marked by astonishing unemployment rates as businesses closed down and fired or furloughed staff, so many people quit their jobs in 2021 that the phenomenon acquired its own nickname: the Great Resignation. Baristas, the quintessential service workers, have won unionization campaigns at Starbucks franchises across the country; in April 2022, warehouse workers on Staten Island finally struck a blow against the…

FIFTY YEARS APART, WATERGATE AND THE JANUARY 6 investigation stand as bookends for an imperial era—and for a political generation. As the January 6 committee winds up its investigation and the Justice Department delves deeper into the myriad Trump postelection plots, a look back at Watergate and its aftermath provides a sobering reflection on the challenges facing the committee and the country. Richard Nixon trampled on laws to ensure his re-election in 1972. He and his aides then conspired to cover up what his attorney general, John Mitchell, termed the “White House horrors,” leading to numerous convictions and to Nixon’s forced resignation. Donald Trump trampled on laws and summoned a mob to Washington in the effort to overturn his election defeat. He was impeached by the House and acquitted by…

The Nation has named Chris Lehmann as its DC bureau chief, covering politics and political economy from the nation’s capital. With decades of experience, the former editor of The New Republic and The Baffler joins the magazine at a pivotal juncture, as an assault on US democracy is being waged openly from the streets to the Supreme Court, the midterm elections are fast approaching, and the question of 2024 looms large. Moving beyond incremental horse-race coverage, Lehmann will treat national politics as a forum of ideas—as he puts it, “about how to resist the nation’s slide into white nationalist oligarchy and about how to make our sclerotic, antidemocratic federal institutions responsive to the people’s real demands for representation and justice.” He adds, “And the work of The Nation is, now…

WHEN WISCONSIN’S UNITED AUTO WORKERS UNIONS ENDORSED Mandela Barnes for the US Senate earlier this year, they did not make the announcement in Milwaukee or Madison or Green Bay. Instead, Barnes accepted the endorsement in Oshkosh, a historic manufacturing town on the shores of Lake Winnebago in the state’s industrial Fox River Valley. Barnes wanted to do the event in the city of 67,000 because its plight speaks to the issues that are at the heart of his campaign against Ron Johnson, the state’s constantly embattled Republican senator. “This is another community that Ron Johnson has left behind. It’s another group of people that Ron Johnson has taken for granted,” Barnes declared to nods of approval from the UAW members who had gathered for the announcement. Although Wisconsin’s senior senator…

BY THE 1950S, WHEN ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER’S YIDDISH fiction was beginning to win acclaim in English translation, the future of the Yiddish language looked bleak. Its homeland in Eastern Europe had been destroyed in the Holocaust, and the largest remaining Jewish populations were now being raised to speak different languages: English in the United States, Russian in the Soviet Union, and Hebrew in Israel. The readers Singer had addressed for decades in The Forward, New York’s leading Yiddish daily paper, represented a significant share of the world’s surviving Yiddish speakers. Few of them were younger than him, and their numbers were shrinking. Singer and his Yiddish readers shared the uncanny experience of being the last bearers of a disappearing culture. For Jewish and non-Jewish readers who encountered him in translation,…

A FEW DAYS AGO I RENEWED MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH Fritz Lang’s science-fiction thriller Metropolis. The Transit Films DVD edition I watched runs 124 minutes—a fifth of its original length is missing—but the movie retains much of the strange and appalling power it must have held for its audiences in 1927 in Weimar Germany. The city of the title has an upper level, “the Club of the Sons,” enhanced by a recreational annex, the Eternal Gardens, where aristocratic youths cavort and improve themselves in hygienic sports and dalliances. On the middle level are the tremendous and demanding machines to whose workings the people on the lower level apply themselves 10 hours a day. The exhausted laborers leave the factory in shifts, through a tunnel leading to elevators that carry 40 persons…

THE MASCULINE PERSON IS NOT SOME-one going around wearing shoes they cannot walk in for more than a block. The classic masculine pursuits—hunting, fixing a car, throwing a ball—cannot really be performed in heels. The philosopher William James said the masculine virtues have historically derived from going to war or going to work; the Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield says it’s all about confidence in risky situations. Wrong and wrong. The quintessential masculine virtue is simply an unwillingness to put on immobilizing footwear. When you see a masculine person in a physically restricting accessory—straitjacket, legirons—you can be fairly confident it’s not voluntary. From these observable social facts, we derive the insight that a masculine consciousness favors liberty over bondage. Now, the pathways toward human emancipation have never been straightforward. No one…

THE SUPREME COURT WILL RETURN TO WORK ON THE first Monday of October, after a three-month summer break, with all the determination of a Renaissance-era explorer looking for new lands to conquer. Last term, the court’s conservative supermajority showed it was willing to ignore precedent (overturning Roe v. Wade), reality (issuing rulings that will lead to more gun violence and climate pollution), and facts (making up evidence in the praying-football-coach case) to arrive at its preferred judicial outcomes. In the process of revoking abortion rights, Justice Samuel Alito dismissed the rights of people the white men who wrote the Constitution didn’t bother to include. This term, the court’s conservatives will continue to apply their racist, misogynist logic to other groups yearning to progress beyond what white men allowed in the…

IN 2015, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW POSED THE QUESTION “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO the Novel of Ideas?” to the writers Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser. On the question of “whether philosophical novels have gone the way of the dodo bird,” Mishra answered in the affirmative and—not a writer who shies away from generalizations—charged that the culprit was the MFA program. “America’s postwar creative-writing industry,” Mishra claimed, has “hindered literature from its customary reckoning with the acute problems of the modern epoch” and “boosted instead a cult of private experience.” Yet in his new novel, Run and Hide, Mishra sounds a bit down on the idea of, well, ideas. He begins his story on a college campus, a place that, theoretically, should be teeming with the stuff (in fact, he…

MESSIANISM IS THE COLLECTIVELY HELD BELIEF THAT AN individual with supernatural powers will redeem our world from human misery. It is a religious phenomenon directed toward the future, but it has its origins in the material present, in the economic, social, and cultural crises of a particular historical moment. The conviction that the end of time has arrived—or soon will—comes from the hope that this messiah will help the world reverse course. Ours is a profoundly troubled time, and one with a few false messiahs as well. When Olga Tokarczuk set out to write her mammoth novel The Books of Jacob in 2014, these messiahs were perhaps less rooted in the kinds of nationalist movements we have become accustomed to across the world in the past decade and more so…