Innehållsförteckning för November 14/21, 2022 från The Nation

WITH TWO WEEKS TO GO UNTIL THE MIDTERMS AS WE GO TO PRESS, THE GOP IS gaining traction in many Senate races and taking a small lead in the overall congressional polls. As The New York Times recently reported, “Republicans enter the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress with a narrow but distinct advantage as the economy and inflation have surged as the dominant concerns, giving the party momentum to take back power from Democrats in next month’s midterm elections, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.” It’s tempting to dismiss this one survey, as some Democrats have done. But we also have aggregates of polling data, such as those provided by FiveThirtyEight. These show a consistent story of dwindling Democratic opportunities in the Senate and…

IT HAS BECOME INCREASINGLY COMMON TO READ about people getting fired, punished, or otherwise “canceled”—often with good reason—for something they said on Twitter. Some of these casualties become free speech warriors or the subjects of searching profiles on the blurry line between our imagined “right” to be who we are on the Internet and our ability to still retain a job. And then there’s the recent case of Erick Adame, a popular weatherman on NY1 who lost his job after being anonymously harassed with images someone stole of him performing sex acts on a private, noncommercial website. We’re faced with fast-evolving standards of appropriate conduct. But we’re also dealing with the dissolution of boundaries between who we are and what we say or do depending on where we are. This…

50% Portion of all new vehicles sold in 2030 that will be required to have zero emissions, according to President Biden’s new target 336 Estimated number of additional graphite, lithium, nickel, and cobalt mines that will be needed to supply the new electric vehicles, taking the recycling of raw materials into account 1% Portion of the world’s lithium that is mined in the US 150 Age of the federal law that governs the mining of “hardrock” minerals (such as gold, silver, lithium, and nickel) on public lands 35 Maximum distance, in miles, of the majority of energy-transition metal reserves from Native lands 17% Portion of the money the US government spends to “protect” Native lands that goes to projects led by Indigenous peoples…

Little Rock, Ark. IT’S A SCORCHING JULY DAY DURING THE PANDEMIC’S FIRST SUMMER. IN THE month since the murder of George Floyd, residents have gathered frequently in front of the Arkansas State Capitol, marching to protest the police killings of Black people across the country. But today there’s something more confrontational on the horizon. About 20 anti-police-violence activists are preparing to “hold the line”—with homemade protest signs as their shields—as a group of Blue Lives Matter supporters barrel toward them. Brittany Dawn Jeffrey is among the demonstrators. Over the course of the summer, the 30-year-old activist has become a recognizable figure throughout the state, known for her relentless organizing and social media presence. In a video captured by a reporter, six large men can be seen striding directly toward Jeffrey…

WRITING IN 1923, THE PROMINENT AMERICAN JUDGE AND legal philosopher Learned Hand stated that “under our criminal procedure the accused has every advantage. While the prosecution is held rigidly to the charge, [the defendant] need not disclose the barest outline of his defense. He is immune from question or comment on his silence; he cannot be convicted when there is the least fair doubt in the minds of any one of the twelve [jurors]…. Our dangers do not lie in too little tenderness to the accused. Our procedure has been always haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted. It is an unreal dream.” As a factual matter, Hand’s argument was completely wrong, for as we now know—thanks chiefly to DNA testing—hundreds of innocent people have been wrongly convicted…

The Real Labor Revival Re John Nichols’s interview with Vice President Kamala Harris [“Q&A,” Oct. 3/10]: Kamala Harris may be part of the most pro-labor Democratic administration since at least the 1960s, but this is barely a beginning. The expulsion during the McCarthy era of leftist unions from the Congress of Industrial Organizations removed many of the most activist, energetic, and committed leaders from the American labor movement. Under George Meany, the AFL-CIO became a passive arm of the Democratic Party, supporting the Vietnam War; even supposedly liberal unions such as the United Auto Workers refused to back protests against the war. To this day, the AFL-CIO barely utters a word against national Democratic policies, whatever they are. Why hasn’t it organized massive demonstrations in support of the PRO Act…

DELEGATES FROM NEARLY 200 NATIONS, AS WELL AS hundreds of activists and representatives from nongovernmental organizations that focus on climate change and the environment, are convening in November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for the UN climate negotiations, known as the Conference of the Parties (COP). At this year’s version, COP27, nations will once again work together to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which requires each country to submit a detailed plan to reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. The UN gathers these binding commitments, known as Nationally Determined Contributions, to establish what the collective impact will be. In accordance with the Paris treaty, nations agreed to submit their NDCs by 2020 and then report back every five years. The…

UKRAINE IS A COUNTRY WE ARE JUST GETTING TO KNOW. What is more important is to hate Russia: an emotion in which Americans have been well trained. Media workers and the experts they interview, one notices, can’t help stumbling occasionally: “the Soviet Union—I mean, Russia.” A history of contempt takes us back to an entity at once exotic and primitive, suspended in time and space. This Russia hovers between barbarism and modernity, between Asia and Europe, an uncertain profile that has long troubled the Western mind. But the task has now been simplified: Hate Putin, hate “Putin’s Russia,” hate Russia—before, during, and after the fact, and in excess of the facts. And the Russian people? We will come back to them. The Western moral calculus that ramps up war fever…

IN THE MOST TRIVIAL SENSE, BOOKS about being undocumented are about immigration. Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s Undocumented, Julissa Arce’s My (Undocumented) American Dream, Jose Antonio Vargas’s Dear America, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans, and Qian Julie Wang’s Beautiful Country are all about how US immigration policies can sever family ties and categorically exclude populations deemed “undesirable.” These narratives are also about much more: They are about family, childhood, trauma, gender, loss, and joy. They are about the ways in which migrants are far more than the sum of what the United States puts them through. They are agents in their own right, who define and shape their histories. In his new memoir, Solito, the poet Javier Zamora tells a story that US readers will be familiar with from news reports:…

and then God is not like the sound the kindlingmakes as it meets the matchhead, not like the buoyin the bay invisible at night, not like the gravitycalling to the pear on the bough above the field,nor the beam from which the boy you knewroped a knot around his neck to yoke this lifeto the next if there is a next and if not then to—nothingness. God is not like nothingness. If God transcends all, then God transcends language.If God transcends language, we cannot deploylanguage to particularize God. If we cannot articulatewhat God is, we can only announce what God is not.This is how I approach the divine; I studythe corona that circles the eclipse, which I’ve been toldnot to look at, still there’s some elegance in the bright blur…

Reporter Becca Andrews’s book about the erosion of abortion rights was supposed to come out in January 2023, the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. But in May, Andrews got a call from her editor: A draft of a Supreme Court opinion had been leaked showing that Roe was about to be overturned, and Andrews needed to get the book done ASAP. The result is a book that reads like the final days of legal abortion captured in amber. In the pages of No Choice, a patient awaits her abortion at a clinic in Tuscaloosa, Ala.; clinic defenders talk back to anti-abortion protesters outside the last clinic in Mississippi; a Tennessee abortion provider considers whether he will one day have to move to continue his life’s work. In all those…

IN “SHORTCOMINGS OF MEN,” THE SATIRIST BIBI Khanoom Astarabadi proposes that men stop trying to educate women and instead invest in edifying themselves, an urgent task because “yours truly does not believe that she is able to edify men.” Dated 1895, the pamphlet represents one of the earliest criticisms of mansplaining in Iran. Around that time, Iranian women protested en masse against a government tobacco concession that would have profoundly hurt farmers and merchants. Women mobilized for other progressive causes and significantly helped in advancing the Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the century. But when it came to drafting the Constitution, their demands were completely dismissed by the country’s leaders. In response, women decided to organize for their own rights and agreed that they should prioritize education, marking the…

In June, more than 3,300 people in Britain embarked on an exciting experiment: Their employers had signed up to pilot a four-day workweek in what is currently the world’s biggest trial of this shorter working schedule. Seventy-three British companies have reduced their employees’ working hours by 20 percent for six months while still giving them their full pay. Similar pilot programs are also underway in Australia, Iceland, Japan, and Spain. Some companies in the United States have taken the same step. One study found that more than 8 million US workers switched to a four-day schedule between 1973 and 2018. So far, the evidence that’s rolling in points in a clear direction: A shorter week allows workers to better take care of themselves without sacrificing productivity. Halfway through the six-month…

IN AN UNASSUMING, OFF-WHITE, TWO-STORY HOUSE IN SAN Francisco’s Mission District, built in the Italianate style that predominates in the neighborhood, you’ll find the Institute of Illegal Images, aka the Blotter Barn. It houses an extensive personal collection of LSD art, called “blotter paper,” lovingly curated by Mark McCloud, a wizened, affable remnant of the city’s counterculture. McCloud came to California from Argentina as an adolescent, attended one of Ken Kesey’s early Acid Test “happenings” in the 1960s, puttered around the globe, and eventually put down stakes in the Mission in the mid-’70s, opening a home gallery that serves as an unbound history of the War on Drugs. Each perforated, dyed tab of paper tells a story. One pulpy print pays tribute to the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, the “Father…

For the stillbirth and the live ones. Formy books, degrees, and all the other ways I have betrayed you. For unlinkingour arms a dozen times the year before your surgery, unconvinced you neededthat relief until the afternoon I walked up from the subway station and thatbefore you saw me, I then watched you on the street, alone without even a rail,lurching and winding. The calls, of course, that I did not return, the care Iwould not acknowledge out of cowardice and a hope to never need you or to needanyone. For every question I refused to answer, or did not answer generously.For remembering the orange juice you put in the guacamole and the sproutswashed in hot water. That this list, like your prescription deliveries and the groupchats, will end before…