Innehållsförteckning för December 26, 2022/January 2, 2023 från The Nation

SPRING OF 1990 FOUND ME NOT YET 3 YEARS OLD, BUT ALREADY CLEAR about who I was—in some ways. I refused dresses, wanted my hair cut short, liked to run around with no shirt on, and requested to be called Jason. My parents embraced these choices and, crucially, did not shame me for them. Some 30-plus years later, I am still basically Jason: I get a skin fade every two weeks, I haven’t worn a dress since I was 13, and now that I’ve had top surgery, I take my shirt off every chance I get. The same spring that I was running around my parents’ backyard in Brooklyn with no shirt on, a 34-year-old philosopher at Johns Hopkins University published a book that would transform the conversation around gender…

YOU ONLY HAD TO LOOK AT THE TITLES TO SEE that something was up: “Atmosphere,” “Morning Factory,” “Brighter Days.” There was a new dawn in America, and the rising sun was house. Like any unearthly force, house music takes many forms, unified by the steady pulse of the bass drum: four mighty beats played again and again, triggered by a machine standing in for human limbs. For skeptics, this can be a barrier to entry; there are those who encounter this music and can only hear the bass. I pity them. For those who know, feeling the beat is not being battered, it’s being baptized. Surrounding that endless rhythm is an endless palette of possibilities, which tell the stories of house music’s many points of origin: in Chicago, levitating pianos…

SOMETIME PRIOR TO MY EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, MY great-grandfather, the poet, writer, and anthologist William Stanley Braithwaite, bought me my first comic book. For reasons that I have long since forgotten, we walked to a pharmacy on the corner of Edgecombe Avenue and St. Nicholas Place in Harlem. While there, I was looking over the comic books and chose The Illustrated Story of the Coast Guard as the one that I wanted. My great-grandfather asked no questions and purchased it for me. I still have it somewhere in my house. Thus began my love affair with comic books, an affair that lasted into my early teens, when it rather abruptly stopped. It no longer seemed “cool” to read and own comic books—and I had a range of them, from war comics…

BRANDEE BARKER WAS HAVING A GREAT TIME IN THE BACK OF AN Uber as her driver entertained her. It was November 2016, and the former Facebook executive and Lean In flack had just arrived in Ohio to canvass for Hillary Clinton. “Welcome. You’ve got mail,” the driver said with spirited enunciation and a smooth, familiar cadence. “No way! Do it again!” Barker cried from the back seat. She captured this exchange and posted it to Twitter, where the video—tagged “#GOTVforHRC”—was widely shared, receiving over 1 million views. The Uber driver turned out to be none other than Elwood Edwards, the voice actor behind the second-best-remembered sound of America Online in the 1990s (after the crackling modem squeal that announced a user’s passage from the log-in screen). In recent years, Edwards…

ON AUGUST 7, NATIONAL REVIEW PUBLISHED AN ARTICLE LAMBASTING the US Department of Agriculture’s decision, announced in May, to broaden the prohibition of discrimination in federally funded nutrition programs, including the National School Lunch Program, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The writer’s argument centered on a Christian school in Tampa, Fla., that, he wrote, was being “forced by the government to choose between adherence to the laws of man and those of God.” There is disagreement over what the broader prohibition actually means, with the department insisting it is aimed only at ensuring that LGBTQ+ students and others are not denied access to these nutrition programs, either explicitly or through intimidation. But many conservatives say the change opens up schools and other institutions to lawsuits for not having…

I CAME OF AGE IN THE ’90S, AND MY FIRST STEADY job in journalism was as editor of a small left-wing magazine that subsisted on atrophying subscriptions and crashing arts grants and was, in those years, perpetually on the verge of publishing its last issue. The publication, called This Magazine, was founded in the 1960s, when left ideas were a roaring cultural fire. But by the mid-’90s, the fire was down to its embers, and it felt as if all we could do was blow to keep it from turning to dust. At one of my first story meetings, I suggested we stage a public funeral procession for the left, just to mourn the passing of so many of its core ideas. Instead, we screamed ourselves hoarse insisting that Francis…

WE FIRST MEET LYDIA TÁR WAITING IN THE WINGS OF AN auditorium, called to the stage and lavished with a listing of her accolades: She is a lauded composer, a trained concert pianist, one of only 15 people to score an EGOT, and the holder of a PhD in musicology from the University of Vienna, where she specialized in the Indigenous music of eastern Peru’s Ucayali Valley. These laurels are recited by Adam Gopnik, who is introducing Tár for a talk at the New Yorker Festival, occasioned by the upcoming publication of Tár’s memoir and her live recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic, where she has been chief conductor for seven years. Her onstage musings are dense with esoterica, and stilted affectations mark her speech, as if…

Can a predominantly white state legislature overturn the votes of a predominantly Black city? Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney, was elected in 2017 on a reform agenda and has faced a GOP backlash ever since. On the last day of business before the 2022 midterms, Martina White, a Republican state representative, filed articles for Krasner’s impeachment. If the initiative wins a majority vote in Pennsylvania’s Republican-dominated House, Krasner will stand trial in the state Senate. Charles D. Ellison, the executive producer and host of Reality Check on WURD, and Sara Lomax-Reese, a cofounder of URL Media, joined me for this conversation with Krasner.  —Laura Flanders LF: Homicide rates are higher than they’ve been in decades in Philadelphia. Do you dispute that, and how do you think about that? LK: We…

IN EARLY APRIL 1994, WHEN THE GENOCIDE BEGAN IN RWANDA, the meetings started in Washington. “They couldn’t say we were not going to do anything, because that’s bad policy,” recalled Prudence Bushnell, then the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs. “So we were tasked to meet every single day in secured video conferencing, lest we be seen as doing nothing.” The United States, still smarting from the casualties in a peacekeeping operation in Somalia depicted in Black Hawk Down, had no intention of spilling more American blood on African soil. But Bushnell latched onto an idea, circulating among activists at the time, that she believed could stop the violence: jamming Rwanda’s airwaves. It was meant to be a meaningful half-measure at a time when the most powerful officials…

REMEMBER “BEING IN YOUR BODY”? In the 1960s and ’70s, a crop of counterculturalists argued that corporeal awareness was crucial not only to self-actualization but also to social transformation. Flocking to an expanding network of retreats, New Age bookstores, and organic food stands, they embraced “embodied practices”—as they began to be called—as a means of liberation from the inauthentic, technocratic, and spiritually bankrupt modern world. The yoga mat was considered one such experimental and even revolutionary space, thanks, in part, to how yoga married non-Western spirituality with physical work that could be positively transcendent. Within a decade, yoga was beginning to converge with a mainstream fitness culture focused on physical beauty and individualistic self-improvement that some of its more radical acolytes rejected outright. Whether through “Hatha for Stretching” courses at…

THE SHOPPING MALL HAS A GREAT MANY antecedents: the opulent markets of Victorian London, the arcades of Paris, and the department stores in the United States that could swallow an entire city block. But the mall as we know it has only one daddy: the architect Victor Gruen. A Viennese socialist, Gruen had established a tidy practice designing residential projects and shops before the Nazis seized Austria in 1938. Gruen’s forte was making the quotidian a bit lovelier: A typical tweak of retail spaces might have involved relieving the tight, cloying atmosphere of a tiny perfumery by placing mirrors on the ceiling. After fleeing to the United States, Gruen dipped his toe in wage drudgery before deciding to unpack his drafting desk and return to his bread-and-butter work of transforming…