Innehållsförteckning för February 6/13, 2023 från The Nation

IF YOU RELY ON THE CORPORATE MEDIA, THE 15 BALLOTS IT TOOK TO ELECT Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House might seem like a triumph for the Democratic Party, whose “quiet competence and unity,” NBC declared, “is a stark contrast not just to GOP fecklessness” but also to the usual media storyline of “Dems in disarray.” For once, Bloomberg noted approvingly, Democrats flexed their “unity muscles.” Isn’t it pretty to think so? But while it’s true that Democrats stuck together to deliver 15 unanimous tallies for their candidate, minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, what have they got to show for it? In exchange for his supposed public humiliation, Kevin McCarthy—a politician of no discernible principles beyond personal advancement—now sits second in line to the presidency. (Note to Biden: No more…

THERE ARE FEW EXAMPLES OF MEN WHO’VE SUCCESS-fully returned to public life after being accused of sexual harassment, and by “successfully” I don’t mean lying low for a few months and then hosting a podcast about cancel culture. Aziz Ansari remains nearly the only one to have ever thoughtfully addressed the nature of his so-called misconduct. And for one shining moment, Louis C.K. set the standard by apologizing in detail for years of jerking off in front of female comics and damaging their careers, although his remorse soon curdled into self-pity. So it’s perhaps no surprise that Scott Stringer, the former New York City comptroller and onetime mayoral candidate, is now suing one of the two women who reported being harassed by him decades earlier for defamation. Stringer’s 12-page filing…

NOT TOO LONG AGO, MY FRIEND AND I SNUCK ONTO a beach reserved for the residents of a moshav 10 minutes south of Haifa. The idea that we were infiltrating (at least in someone’s view) a Jewish settlement to sunbathe didn’t burden me. I don’t believe a beach can be “private property.” Besides, after a year in pandemic-stricken New York, there was nothing on my mind but the Mediterranean. The day was turning orange and a little less humid, offering up one of those rare drives when you ignore your phone to pay attention to the passing topography, stunning and sometimes foreign. I wanted to spray-paint a footnote on the trunk of every invasive tree, citing the destroyed villages those trees were planted to conceal. Instead, the Egyptian music blasting…

“I WAS COUGHING HYSTERICALLY,” DENNIS OYA TOLD ME BY phone from Coyote Ridge Correctional Center in eastern Washington State. “My chest kept ripping. I fractured my ribs—ribs four, five, and six—from cough compression.” In the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, Washington’s largest tuberculosis outbreak in decades includes at least 25 cases of active disease connected to the state’s sprawling prison system. More than 250 other prisoners were also infected and have latent TB, which can escalate to active disease at any time. Oya, 42, considers himself patient zero. “The TB outbreak started because of me,” he said. Oya noticed a suspicious cough in late 2019, when he was at Clallam Bay Corrections Center, near the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula. “Every time I called home, you could hear me…

FROM THE ANGRY MOB’S CHANTS OF A STOLEN ELEC-tion to the physical desecration of the edifices of democracy to a shaken national political class trying to make sense of how things descended into mayhem, seeming parallels abound between the violent attack on Brazil’s presidential palace, Supreme Court, and Congress by supporters of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro, on January 8 and the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. But appearances can be deceiving. Unlike January 6—which delayed the peaceful transfer of power in the United States for the first time in the country’s history—nothing of substance was interrupted in Brazil. The rioting in Brasília unfolded after the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva had taken place, on January 1. The rioters stormed empty public buildings…

POLITICAL FORTUNES ARE ALWAYS WAXING AND WANING, but few roller-coaster rides have been as dizzying as the rapid ascent and precipitous fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, who went in a matter of weeks from being a billionaire savior clasped to the bosom of the Democratic Party establishment to a bankrupt pariah facing criminal charges. On August 4, 2022, Politico swooned over SBF (as he is commonly known) as the Democratic Party’s newest “megadonor.” Only 30 years old, he had already amassed vast personal wealth—estimated in the neighborhood of $26 billion—as a cofounder of the Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Starting in 2020, with donations totaling more than $5 million to Joe Biden’s election run, SBF was quickly anointed a donor-class princeling. His stature rose even higher in the 2022 election cycle, when…

ALICEA MOORE IS SITTING AT A CONFERENCE TABLE IN THE headquarters of the Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department, near Downtown LA. It’s Memorial Day weekend, and she had recently received her fourth payment from the city’s new BIG:LEAP program via the Angelenos Card, a prepaid Mastercard emblazoned with a decal of the LA skyline that she keeps in her wallet. In late 2021, a friend had sent her information about the program, which promised to supplement the incomes of thousands of low-income families for a year. Feeling that she had nothing to lose, Alicea had filled out the online application forms and then forgotten all about it. A few weeks later she received an e-mail and then a phone call inviting her to come in for an interview.…

I WAS IN BARBADOS, VISITING RELATIVES, when Princess Diana died. That afternoon I met an Englishwoman on a walk. “I feel so awful just being out enjoying myself,” she told me. “I’m sure if you died, she’d have no problem going on with her holiday,” I replied. The woman was appalled and offended. I was genuinely baffled. It was the first and last conversation I had with a stranger on the topic. In both my personal and professional life, I don’t do royals. There is more to this than a simple lack of interest; mine is a far more proactive ambivalence. I will go out of my way to avoid any and all talk about the British monarchy. Conversations about the royal family don’t upset me for the same reason…

AFTER SEEING WHITE NOISE, NOAH BAUMBACH’S ADAPTATION of Don DeLillo’s acclaimed 1985 novel, at the New York Film Festival, I discussed the movie with a couple of friends as we walked back to the subway. They had mixed to negative reactions, for a bevy of reasons, but they shared one thing: They felt that the film’s thematic concerns—consumerism as an American religion, the media’s power to shape human behavior, the collapse of high and low culture—were fundamentally dated and quaint. The story of college professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), and their brood of children and stepchildren confronting an “airborne toxic event”—a noxious cloud from a chemical spill that threatens the fictional town of Blacksmith—comports broadly with the tropes of a disaster film, but the fixation…

New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex has regularly made headlines for its outrageously inhumane conditions, brutal violence, many overdoses, and record number of deaths. Since 2015, a federal monitor has been assigned to oversee the jail, but the chaos, violence, and deaths have continued unabated. The year 2022 was the jail’s deadliest, with 19 deaths; the year before, another 16 died. In their new book, Rikers: An Oral History, Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau examine the jail’s descent into an ongoing state of crisis. They interviewed more than 130 people, including those who have been incarcerated at Rikers, those who have been employed there, and those who are working to reform the jail, to give a 360-degree view of a system plagued by decades of institutional inertia. —Victoria Law…

ON JANUARY 5, AMID THE CHAOTIC SCRUM THAT enveloped the bid to elect a new speaker of the House, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who had helped lead the hard-right insurgency against Kevin McCarthy’s candidacy, put Donald Trump’s name up for the position. That’s right: The night before the second anniversary of the violent insurrection at the US Capitol, the GOP majority considered installing the coup-plotting former president as its designated leader. In other words, we are still very much living in the shadow of January 6. The recently released report from the House’s select committee on the insurrection seeks to dispel that shadow, patiently laying out how the delusive Trump-authored lies about the theft of the 2020 presidential election touched off a lethal assault on the Capitol Building and,…

ON MARCH 17, 2020, AS COVID-19 WAS SPREADING FEAR AND spurring lockdowns across the United States, the scientific journal Nature Medicine published a paper titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Written by five renowned academic scientists, it played an important early role in shaping the debate about a fiercely controversial topic: the origin of the virus that has killed millions of people since it emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Did it spill from animals to humans in nature, on a farm, in a market? Or did it leak from a lab like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading center of coronavirus research in China? Drawing on “comparative analysis of genomic data,” the paper’s authors wrote that “our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct…

ORACULAR: THE WOMAN IN THE ARMCHAIR SPEAKS The beings after the Anthropocenewill be formed of inorganic matterthey will be not unfeelingthey will study usthe way we study the natural worldthey will have libraries and zoosstocked with usthose following themwill be made of cloud SOME DAYS Some days I feelI am turning to plasticWe all arebecoming inorganicthe next stagefor us sapiensfor us experimental subjects EVENING IN PLAGUE TIME We hand ourselves over to the mediaThe media hands us over to profit​we are not what we werewe will not be what we arewe are possessedwe do not even cry outat the news…

The Pink Tide and Democracy Re “The Women’s Vote,” by Katha Pollitt [Dec. 12/19, 2022]: When Democrats held both houses of Congress and the presidency, they did nothing to codify the provisions of Roe into law. Our reproductive choices, our concerns for our families and for others’ families, for child care, for a living wage, for legal protections against those who commit domestic violence or sexual assault—all those issues seem secondary to Democrats. They appear to be spineless about the Republicans, who at least know what they want, even if it’s abhorrent. Democrats may want the women’s vote, but they haven’t demonstrated that they really listen to or care about women. CAROLYN WALLACE It’s high time that we consider disregarding polls. They all predicted big Republican gains in the House…