Innehållsförteckning för November 28/December 5, 2022 från The Nation

THE SUPREME COURT IS POISED TO TAKE DOWN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND DECLARE the consideration of race in college admissions unconstitutional. On Halloween, the court heard two cases aimed at prohibiting the policy—one against the University of North Carolina and the other against Harvard University. Over a five-hour marathon of oral arguments, the six conservative justices all seemed willing to do away with the most effective policy I can think of in American history for promoting diversity and racial integration. While a wide array of conservative-aligned people and institutions always arrive at the conclusion that affirmative action is “bad,” they generally fail to provide logically or legally coherent reasons for why this policy must die. This was the case during the oral arguments. As the justices asked their questions and telegraphed…

JOSEP BORRELL, THE TOP DIPLOMAT OF THE EUROpean Union, has a brutal candor rare in his profession. On October 13, he addressed an audience of aspiring diplomats with a speech that contrasted Europe, which he described as a “garden,” with much of the rest of the world, which he condemned as a “jungle.” “Yes, Europe is a garden,” Borrell said. “We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity, and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build—the three things together.” He added, “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden.” The purpose of diplomacy, by his account, is to defend the garden from the jungle. Borrell called on European diplomats…

THE CASE AGAINST NUCLEAR POWER and for genuinely renewable energy has never been so conclusive. Critics’ original concern about nuclear power, namely its safety, remains paramount. The two most catastrophic meltdowns, in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Union and in 2011 at the Fukushima site in Japan, had repercussions that still haunt those regions. But these mega-disasters are only the best known. There have been 33 serious incidents at nuclear power stations worldwide since 1952—two in France and six in the US. And then there’s the 80-year-old saga of nuclear waste. Currently, there are more than a quarter-million metric tons of spent fuel rods sitting aboveground, usually in cooling pools at both closed-down and operative nuclear plants. In northern Europe, the Finns claim they’ve solved…

WE GENERALLY DON’T SEE PARIS AS A CITY SCARRED BY war. It is not like London and Berlin, where the drab modern architecture of the urban centers offers silent reminders of past aerial bombardment. It is not like Warsaw and Frankfurt, where the “old towns” are modern re-creations, erected over cleared fields of corpse-filled rubble. Despite revolutions, sieges, World War I shelling, and World War II bombings, Paris still possesses a remarkable architectural unity. The city’s center looks much as it did in the late 19th century. But while the scars are not immediately visible, they are there, and the worst of them are self-inflicted: the product of a single hideous week in May 1871. This was the week that the Paris Commune died. The Commune was one of the…

Godard’s Intentions J. Hoberman’s essay on the passing of Jean-Luc Godard [“In Memoriam,” October 17/24] is a token of my personal history of attachment to the avant-garde, beginning in my teens, when reading Hoberman and watching Godard were an essential part of the discovery. Now we are facing the death of so many key figures of the generation; my own field, postwar art, is filled with loss. So I write in a sentimental vein. My favorite anecdote about Godard concerns Breathless: He thought he was making Scarface, but instead he made Alice in Wonderland. I think it was a fairly careful formulation for the interview circuit, because he said it multiple times. Yet it has always struck me as a key to the idea that, from start to finish, intentions…

LIKE EVERY UNHAPPY FAMILY, EVERY POLITICAL SCANdal is different. But the assassination attempt that targeted Nancy Pelosi and gravely injured her husband, Paul, offers some grim points of reflection for students of recent Republican politics. These lessons stand out in especially high relief when you cast your mind back to the last midterm cycle that brought an October surprise to the GOP faithful: the 2006 scandal involving Florida Representative Mark Foley, who sent a string of sexual e-mails and texts to adolescent boys who were working as pages for the House. Of course, the particulars of the two scandals are distinct. Foley was an elected official and a closeted gay Republican, and the story broke two years after the GOP had demagogued the issue of gay marriage to help…

IN SEPTEMBER, PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN DELIVERED A speech titled “The Battle for the Soul of the Nation,” a dire warning about the threat posed by MAGA Republicans, who cheer political violence and “look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6—brutally attacking law enforcement—not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger at the throat of our democracy, but…as patriots.” The president rightly identified the entire MAGA project as a danger “to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice [and] to the rule of law.” That speech came on the heels of the president’s announcement of his Safer America Plan, a crime-reduction initiative that would provide $13 billion to add 100,000 officers to local and state police forces. He also used the moment to indict MAGA right-wingers…

20% Portion of the world’s incarcerated population that is in the United States 80% Portion of arrests in the US that are for low-level, nonviolent offenses or poverty-related conduct 18 Number of incarcerated people who have died in New York City’s jail system this year 480% Increase in the number of women incarcerated in the US between 1980 and 2020 35% Portion of people in the US prison population who are Black 13% Portion of people in the US population who are Black 95% Portion of US jail population growth since 2000 that was driven by pretrial detention $2B Annual profit of the US bail bond industry…

IN JANUARY 2020, DUTCHESS COMMUNITY COLLEGE IN NEW YORK BANNED A photography professor named Lowell Handler from its property and declared him unqualified to continue teaching there. Handler, the school claimed, had touched students “in a sexual manner” without their consent and peppered his classes with suggestive comments. “Students have a right to an educational environment free of sexual harassment and forced touching,” wrote then-president Pamela Edington. Handler came under scrutiny after a student claimed that, during a conversation, the professor reached across his classroom desk and grazed her pubic area with his fingertips. In the weeks that followed, other students came forward with stories of uninvited contact. One told a campus investigative panel that, after some “near misses” by Handler above her breast, she began wearing heavy clothing in…

it was something about the bounce in my step,in the rippling jiggle of my belly & breasts,something about the periwinkle painted pinkies,the purple pointers, the chipping its own kindof fashioning, something about the bendof the wrist, of the flick, about the way it sharesthe blunt, something about passing, breathsfalsetto’d, about the difficulty of altitudes—& maybe less how & why, more when & where—all of the comings in & out, something about pridewith a sibling fear of my own body, someonechecking the clock, how a sentence shivers,something about my sentient shivering, everythingabout how i’m too sensitive sometimes, toosensual, something suspect & censured,something to do with attunement, with pulsesin the blood, something about water & thickness& viscosity, something more like nectar, yeah,like golden honey, like golden bees & their buzzinggeographies—the gut brain…

Ross Gay is a poet, essayist, professor, and avid gardener and orchardist based in Bloomington, Ind. His latest book, Inciting Joy (Algonquin), is an exploration of joy as a critical emotion that “gets us to love, as a practice of survival.” Gay and I spoke about why so many people resist seeing grief as the inherent twin of joy, and about the uses of gardening to assist the “acutely bereaved.” —Sara Franklin SF: How did you decide to use the word “incite” in the book’s title? It’s a striking word, and one we don’t usually see paired with the word “joy.” RG: I was thinking about the word “provocation,” but “incitement” has more juice to it. I’m talking about the ways that care, or sharing, or these things that are…

IN A HOTEL IN DOWNTOWN SÃO PAULO PACKED with international press, Lula supporters waited with fingers crossed. The early election returns on October 30 showed the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro with a strong lead over the leftist former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. That was to be expected, since the first results came in from Bolsonaro strongholds. But you could feel the mood shift as the vote count reduced the gap. A few minutes before 8 pm, cheers broke out—the lines on the TV’s voter graph had met, and Lula proceeded to edge into the lead. The final tally for the election showed 50.9 percent for Lula to 49.1 percent for Bolsonaro. Lula made his triumphant entry shortly thereafter, as photographers yelled at supporters to get down off the…

EVEN BEFORE RUSSIA INVADED UKRAINE, governments should have been investing in nuclear power. Demand for electricity was still growing, and the climate crisis was still accelerating. Now, with Europe trying to wean itself off Russian gas as quickly as possible, we find ourselves in a situation reminiscent of the 1970s oil crisis, when European countries built nuclear power plants to reduce their dependence on Middle Eastern oil. That period in Europe remains the fastest-ever expansion of clean energy. Today, given the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there’s an even stronger case to be made for nuclear energy. In the United States, where fossil fuels continue to be cheap and abundant, Washington has been spending to prolong the life of nuclear power plants and incentivizing the construction of new,…

IN MARCH OF 2016, A NEWBORN BABY WAS LEFT AT A HOSPITAL IN NEVADA. IN COURT DOCUMENTS, THE child is called “Baby O,” but we will call her “Octavia.” When she was 3 days old, Octavia went to live with a couple named Heather and Nick Libretti in the small city of Sparks, Nev., just outside of Reno. At the time, Heather did PR for a classic cars festival, while Nick worked as a mechanic. The couple, now in their early 40s, had fostered and adopted two boys—and taken in a third—but Heather had always wanted a girl. Octavia had been left at the hospital under Nevada’s Safe Haven law, which allows a parent to give up their child at a hospital, a firehouse, or a police station without fear…