Innehållsförteckning för December 12/19, 2022 från The Nation

THE 2022 MIDTERMS ARE OVER, AND DEMOCRATS DID BETTER THAN THEY HAD A right to expect. The president’s party almost always loses Congress two years into his first term; this time, it held the Senate and lost the House by, at press time, only six seats (with five races still to be called). Democrats won thrilling victories from Pennsylvania to Michigan to Arizona. Politically, though, they couldn’t defy their own mistakes. In New York, establishment political malpractice led to the loss of four House seats. And Georgia, the star of the 2020 cycle, came up short of the promise we saw back then. The Peach State won the White House for Joe Biden, and in 2021 it elected two Democratic senators, giving the party its crucial majority (with the vote…

THE MORNING AFTER ELECTION DAY, AS MANY AMERICANS waited to learn whether Democrats would retain the power to pass laws that will later be invalidated by conservatives on the Supreme Court, the court heard a critical case aimed at rescinding key rights held by Native Americans. The conservative legal apparatus has launched a frontal attack on the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and with it an attempt to redefine the nature of tribal sovereignty. The case is called Haaland v. Brackeen. At issue are the claims of non-Native plaintiffs who wanted to adopt Native children through the foster care system but claimed they were thwarted by ICWA. The law requires state agencies to make “active efforts” to place Native children who are in the foster care system or up for…

NOT A DAY HAS GONE BY WITHOUT CONTROVERSY since Elon Musk completed his $44 billion takeover of Twitter. History tells us that social media platforms rise and fall. But Twitter is not like other platforms. Twitter has been instrumental in the spread of social justice movements and in the dissemination of news and information many otherwise would not have accessed. Twitter has fostered connections among millions of people, elevating countless previously lesser-known thinkers, organizers, advocates, artists, and journalists, and made way for solidarity across geographic and imagined borders. Twitter is what allows us to respond and push back against what we disapprove of in real time, whether it is seeking retribution against a white woman who lied about a Black man birding in a park or bullying Paramount Pictures…

WHEN MATTHEW NORTHRUP WAS A CHILD in the 1980s, his dad would drive him around the area near their home in Fond du Lac—a neighborhood in Duluth, Minn., named for the Northrups’ tribe, the Fond du Lac Band of Superior Chippewa—pointing out sites that their people considered historically important. On one such drive, he motioned toward a grassy hill just past Highway 23 along the St. Louis River, which flows into the southern tip of Lake Superior. “Son, all of your ancestors are buried up there,” he said. In the summer of 2017, Northrup found himself on that hillside, sifting through mounds of dirt with a mesh screen. “There were bones everywhere. I’m still bothered by that,” Northrup said of the remains that were scattered across the site, where the…

EVERYONE’S FAMILY HISTORY IS COMPLICATED. NEARLY everyone has an estranged sibling, a drunken uncle, a contentious aunt, or a well-kept secret trauma. With DNA testing and genealogy websites, everyone is almost guaranteed to find a cousin, a half-sibling, or even a parent previously unknown to them. During American slavery, the bloodlines of slaveholding families were particularly fraught. Without technology, “Mama’s baby and Papa’s maybe,” as the saying goes, could be kept hidden. When an enslaved child had red hair, freckles, and the same dimple or gait as their biological father, everyone noticed, but they never discussed these relationships. Behind the family portraits, genetics told everything. The irony among slaveholders and their enslaved descendants was that light skin meant little. Slavery did not discriminate: The children of white masters could be…

WHEN MIA MOTTLEY, THE PRIME MINISTER OF BARBADOS, spoke at the opening ceremony of last year’s UN climate negotiations, or COP26, she made global headlines with her fiery criticism of rich nations. “The world stands at a fork in the road,” she told the audience, “one no less significant than when the United Nations was first created in 1945. Will we act in the interest of our people, who are depending on us, or will we allow the path of greed and selfishness to sow the seeds of our common destruction?” This year, at COP27 in Egypt, Mottley followed up her viral speech with a proposal that she believes would help ensure social, economic, and environmental justice. She put forward the Bridgetown Agenda, which is named after Barbados’s capital…

SO IT TURNS OUT WOMEN DO CARE ABOUT THEIR RIGHT to control their own bodies. Who’d have guessed? In the run-up to the midterms, we heard a lot about how abortion had “peaked too soon”—a friend even suggested that the Supreme Court deliberately released the Dobbs decision in June precisely to give voters enough time to forget about it. Um, no. Too many people thought women couldn’t keep the loss of their reproductive freedom in their pretty little heads for more than a month or so when milk prices are so high. Democrats were criticized by everyone from David Brooks to Bernie Sanders for—finally!—making abortion their banner issue. If only the party had done so for the past 30 years! I won’t lie: I was worried, too. Doomscrolling will do…

$44b Amount Elon Musk paid for Twitter 3.7k Approximate number of jobs Musk planned to axe after taking over as CEO, or about half of Twitter’s staff 1.2k Number of Twitter employees who resigned after Musk issued an ultimatum: commit to an “extremely hardcore” work culture or leave 137k Estimated number of tech employees laid off in 2022 90% Portion of Twitter’s revenue, totaling $2.18 billion in the first half of 2022, that comes from advertising sales 10.2% Portion of US GDP contributed by the digital economy $32b Value of the cryptocurrency firm FTX before it collapsed $1b Approximate amount of client funds missing at FTX…

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY THAT WILL TAKE NARROW CONTROL OF THE House of Representatives in January 2023 has gone through a dramatic transformation in the two years since Donald Trump and his allies attempted a violent coup to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The party that was once torn over how to respond to Trump’s assault on democratic norms is no more. It was replaced in 2022 by one that did not merely tolerate Trump’s election denialism but embraced it by nominating January 6 insurrectionists and apologists for congressional and statewide posts—a strategy so noxious that it cost Republicans key US Senate contests and the “red wave” GOP strategists were counting on. But postelection pundits who imagine that the party will do an about-face and suddenly adopt a…

IN 1992, THE MOOD IN THE UNITED STATES SHOULD have been triumphal. The country appeared on the verge of reigning supreme: The Soviet Union had fallen, and the rusting tyrannies across the Eastern Bloc were turning to democracy. The US military had recently pummeled petty dictators in Panama and Iraq, exorcising the ghosts of Vietnam. And although China had avoided the fate of the USSR by brutally crushing dissent in Tiananmen Square, the country was embracing the American way—or at least its markets—and emerging as an eager trading partner. But going into the election year, the United States was surly, restless, preoccupied with grim fantasies of decline and collapse, and fearful of being overtaken by old foes and new rivals. A brutal recession, the result of a bubble in real…

WHEN THE DEMOCRATS DEFIED RECENT POLITICAL history by facing down a long-predicted “red wave” in the 2022 midterms, a battery of instatakes sought to establish single-bullet theories for the surprising outcome. The balloting was a referendum on Donald Trump, we were told—or on the Dobbs decision, or on the GOP’s multifront assault on democracy. Of course, it was all these things and more, as one would expect to be the case for more than 600 contests for national and statewide office in a sprawling, divided country. But it’s worth lingering a bit on an issue that many polls and pundits expected to favor Republicans: the specter of inflation, widely taken to be a surefire driver of public dissatisfaction with the state of the economy. The actual returns registered little of…

IN THE FALL OF 2017, I SAT IN A WINDOWLESS BACK ROOM in O’Neill’s bar in the Maspeth neighborhood of Queens and watched the Retired Detectives of New York (RDNY) honor two of their own. The first was Louis Scarcella, whose record of high-profile arrests in Brooklyn in the 1990s had just crumbled under evidence that he’d coerced people into giving false confessions. The second was John Russo, who’d only recently become tabloid famous: He’d identified a Black man as a suspect in the murder of Karina Vetrano, a 30-year-old white woman who was killed in the summer of 2016 while jogging near her family’s home in Queens. I was covering the event for New York magazine. Russo’s police work was a “true iteration of that cinematic ‘detective’s intuition’ that…

UNLIKE HIS MUCH MORE FAMOUS COLLEAGUE Albert Einstein, John von Neumann is not a household name these days, but his discoveries shape the possibilities of life for every creature on this planet. As a teenager, von Neumann provided mathematics with new foundations. He later helped teach the world how to build and detonate nuclear bombs. His invention of game theory furnished the conceptual tools with which superpowers today decide whether to wage war, economists model the behavior of markets, and biologists predict the evolution viruses. The pioneering programmable computer that von Neumann and his employer, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J., completed in 1951 established “von Neumann architecture” as the standard for computer design well into the 21st century, making first IBM and then many other corporations…