Innehållsförteckning för October 31/November 7, 2022 från The Nation

WE LIVE IN DANGEROUS TIMES. KYIV’S SUCCESSES ON THE BATTLEFIELD ARE heartening, but they are pushing Vladimir Putin into a corner. “In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people,” Putin warned, “we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.” He clearly meant nuclear weapons. If Russian forces are further routed, Putin conceivably could use a tactical nuclear weapon—a so-called battlefield nuke. There is, however, no such thing as a battlefield nuclear weapon. The United States has around 200 tactical nukes, with an explosive equivalency ranging from 0.3 to 170 kilotons of TNT. The Russians probably have around 2,000 such “small” nukes. (By comparison, the Hiroshima bomb produced an explosion…

JOE BIDEN HAS APPOINTED THE MOST DIVERSE SLATE of judges and justices to the federal bench in US history; no other president has even come close. In addition to gender and racial diversity (over 25 percent of the Black women serving on the federal judiciary were nominated by him), Biden has emphasized diversity of experience and backgrounds. So far, almost 30 percent of his nominees have served as public defenders. Biden has also tapped a lot of new judges for the judiciary, relatively speaking. As of this writing, he and Senate majority leader Charles Schumer have confirmed 84 judicial appointments, outstripping the 69 Donald Trump had made by this point in his presidency. Since Biden refuses to expand the courts to blunt the influence of Trump appointees, filling all the…

A MID GREAT FANFARE IN LATE SEPTEMBER, THE REPUBLICAN Party, under the direction of House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, debuted its pitch to seal a new majority in the next Congress beneath a rubric redolent of the overtures of a bad boyfriend: “A Commitment to America.” Modeled on the landmark 1994 Contract With America pulled together by Newt Gingrich (speaking of bad romantic partners), the 2022 GOP program is mostly a grab bag of harum-scarum cultural resentments papering over a singularly anemic policy wish list. The document dresses up the GOP’s drive to reverse drug-price negotiations under Medicare with a tirade about “top-down, one-size-fits-all” D.C. machinations to produce “rationed care.” The Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling instituting coerced motherhood for pregnant American women only rates an indirect-at-best injunction to “protect…

THREE MONTHS INTO RUSSIA’S INVASION OF UKRAINE, US SECRETARY OF State Antony Blinken gave a speech claiming that “the foundations of the international order are under serious and sustained challenge.” Yet Blinken passed over the invasion quickly: “Russian President Vladimir Putin poses a clear and present threat…[but] China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” The US foreign policy establishment increasingly casts China and Russia as the same in essential respects—authoritarian states aiming to undermine liberal values and American power (two very different issues that are usually conflated in Washington). Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink, for example, contrasted a US vision for the world “that privileges freedom and openness” with the…

WHEN SOME OF THE PEOPLE BLACKLISTED DURING THE McCarthy era left the United States to find work in the United Kingdom, they might have thought they had left their troubles behind them. But they were wrong. The FBI passed its files on to MI5, the British Security Service, which seems to have accepted the bureau’s judgments without question. The theater and movie director Joseph Losey was a case in point. Openly a man of the left, he was fingered in Hollywood after the war as a possible Soviet agent. “I was offered a film called I Married a Communist, which I turned down categorically,” Losey reported. “I later learned that it was a touchstone for establishing who was a ‘red’: you offered I Married a Communist to anybody you thought…

IT’S NOW VERY CLEAR THAT THE FEDERAL RESERVE IS currently engaged in a concerted program to increase unemployment from its current low rate of 3.7 percent—and to strip US workers of the small gains in bargaining power they’ve achieved in the aftermath of the Covid-19 economic lockdown. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell acknowledged this clearly, if demurely, in a major speech last month, in which he predicted that there would “very likely be some softening of labor market conditions” resulting from current Fed policy. The Fed is advancing this program to bring down the high inflation rate that has emerged in the past year. According to the most recent August figures, average prices for consumers (measured by the Consumer Price Index) rose by 8.3 percent relative to a year ago.…

MY PARENTS LET ME READ WHATEVER I WANTED. THIS included weird and scary comic books, which in the 1950s were seen as subversive and disgusting and ruinous to children. In 1954, when I was reading Tales From the Crypt, Senator Estes Kefauver convened a special committee to investigate their dangers. Star witness Dr. Fredric Wertheim, a prominent psychiatrist, held comic books responsible for juvenile delinquency, a huge concern at the time. He declared that in comparison, when it came to brainwashing children, “Hitler was a beginner.” (Wertheim was a political progressive, by the way, as was Kefauver.) Later, though, when I graduated to grown-up books, there was one author my father banned: Guy de Maupassant. I don’t know whether he was my dad’s idea of a too-sexy writer—French, you know—but…

6.5K Number of people covered by President Biden’s pardon for federal convictions involving simple marijuana possession 28M Number of cannabis-related arrests since 1965 94% Portion of those arrested on marijuana charges in New York City in 2020 who were people of color 37 Number of states that have legalized cannabis for medical purposes 19 Number of states that have legalized marijuana for recreational use $25B Sales of legal cannabis in the United States in 2021 428K Number of full-time jobs in the cannabis industry 10K Number of cannabis workers represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union…

I PICKED MY LIFE COACH BECAUSE OF HIS PICTURE. HE WAS FIT, HAD KIND EYES and a winning smile—an aspirational stand-in for the gay man I wished I was. At 33 years old, I had never been in a relationship, and I wanted to change that. For years, I’d been in psychotherapy—recovering from sexual violence and working through my fear of physical intimacy—but I had hit a wall. I didn’t want more analysis of my avoidant attachment styles or the reasons I take pleasure in withholding. I wanted results. I thought life coaching would be different. I booked a Zoom consultation. “[Something] I could really help you with is the relationship part. I’m in a nineyear relationship. I had a relationship for five years before that,” the coach, who we’ll…

THE ANXIETY AROUND THE STATE OF CINEMA THAT OLIVIER Assayas captured in his 1996 international breakthrough, Irma Vep, has proved remarkably enduring. The French auteur uses the setting, a troubled production of a remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 Les Vampires, to explore the ways film is adapting to an epoch of encroaching globalization and ever-changing tastes. The movie’s aging, unstable director, René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud, the most prominent actor of the French New Wave), strives to update a classic for a self-aware era with Maggie Cheung (playing a version of herself), an international star best known for her action films, in the role of Irma Vep—arguably the ur–femme fatale, originally brought to life by the silent film star Musidora. On this postmodern canvas, Assayas places a New Wave icon in…

IN THE LOBBY OF HARVARD LAW SCHOOL, THE ALMA mater of the man who wrote the decision in Roe v. Wade and of four current justices of the Supreme Court, a group of students set up folding tables with laptops and hand-lettered signs reading “Abortion is healthcare.” The action was one of more than 60 taking place on college and high school campuses on October 6 as part of a National Day of Student Action for Reproductive Justice. From West Virginia and Florida to California and New York, students walked out of class, rallied, or otherwise demonstrated in support of abortion access and gender-affirming care. Coordinated by the Graduate Student Action Network and Young Democratic Socialists of America, the protests directed demands at individual institutions: from student health insurance in…

ADOPTION HAS TAKEN A FRONT-ROW SEAT in US political discourse since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Remarks from Supreme Court justices position adoption as a viable alternative to abortion. Even some progressives sing the praises of adoption in cases where abortion is not accessible or desired. However, framing the tragedy of losing reproductive freedoms as a problem easily solved by the relinquishment of a child obfuscates the reality of adoption as an institution that is steeped in systemic injustice. Moreover, such a framing underscores the way adopted people—the ones purportedly “saved” by adoption—are overlooked. Finally, the overarching social narrative that views adoption as an alternative to abortion completely misses the point that adoption is not a reproductive choice at all. It’s a parenting choice—and one that should be a…

MICHELLE FITZGERALD, WHO GOES BY “SHELLY,” DATES HER CONNECTION to Roncalli, a Catholic high school in Indianapolis, to when she was 5 years old and attending a kindergarten that feeds into the school. She enrolled at Roncalli as a freshman, as her siblings did later—she’s the oldest of five—as well as her cousins, nieces, and nephews. The family had a saying: “Don’t date anybody at Roncalli, because you’re probably related to them,” she told me. After college, Fitzgerald got a master’s degree in school counseling and decided to do her internship at Roncalli, which turned into a full-time job in 2004. “It was my dream job at my dream location,” she said. After three years as a college guidance counselor, she was promoted to director of guidance. She consistently…

HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE A MIGRAINE? I’VE had them multiple times a month for over 20 years, and I’ve never succeeded. There’s no metaphor that works; it’s not “like your head’s on fire” or “like your head might explode.” None of the usual descriptors for pain will do for a migraine. It’s not exactly “throbbing” or “pounding” or “pulsating,” which are the words my migraine tracking app suggests. How do you convey what it’s like when breathing is painful, not in your lungs but because it involves a tiny movement of your head, so you lie in bed taking shallow, sharp sips of air until the lack of oxygen makes that hurt too? How can you explain that the pain in your head somehow is your nausea, like when you’re…

Principled Jurisprudence Re “Justice for the People,” by Elie Mystal [Sept. 5/12]: This is an excellent detailing of what Sonia Sotomayor is doing on the Supreme Court. Acting not out of ideology as much as duty, she represents the near future of what needs to be done across the federal branches. Thank you, as well, for reiterating at length the horrors of the shadow docket. Unless it is reined in, the right will use it to try anything. It won’t stop unless more of the public knows about it. WALTER PEWEN Sotomayor, it is true, has proved the best of the justices since the time of Bill Clinton, all of whom have, without exception, been pro-business, typically voting 8-1 or 9-0 on corporation versus consumer issues. But she is not…